Super Mario Supersaturates Market

Super Mario has hundreds of millions of brothers.

Nintendo of America Inc. said Monday that the company and its Japanese parent, Nintendo Co. Ltd., have sold their 1 billionth video game.

Of those, 40 percent are Super Mario Brothers games that began as one of the 8-bit titles offered by the company, then evolved through succeeding generations of technology.

Globally, more than 2,000 separate games have been developed for play on the Nintendo system.

The games have sold at the rate of three per second over 12 years to reach the 1 billion threshold. If distributed evenly, every teenager in the world would have one.

As it is, 44 percent of the game cartridges have been purchased in Japan, 42 percent in North America and 14 percent in the rest of the world.

“Their permanence of interactive gaming s a global form of entertainment is now beyond question,” said Howard Lincoln, chairman of Redmond-based Nintendo of America.

Hiroshi Yamauchi, owner of Nintendo, also owns the largest share of the Seattle Mariners.

Nintendo Co. Ltd. is based in Kyoto, Japan.

Super Mario Brothers is the company’s all-time sales leader. All Mario titles together have sold about 120 million copies.

The fastest selling game of all time was last fall’s Donkey Kong Country for the Super NES system, which sold more than 2 million units in just five weeks in the United States alone.