Super Mario Galaxyis officially one week old today and has sold a total of 500,000 copies in the US, making Galaxy the “strongest” one week debut game for the Wii and strongest first week selling Mario game ever, even beating out Metroid Prime 3 of 400k sales for it’s first week.

This figure is doubled that of Japan’s which initial weak 1st day launch has managed to sell 250k on its first week. Still no word on Europe’s figures until the end of the week. These sales figure combined is still starkingly smaller than Microsoft Halo 3’s figures which sold 1.7 million before it was even launched.

So what does this say about Nintendo’s Italian mascot of the past 3 decades? Nothing really. It just means that not every Wii owner is going to run out and buy Super Mario Galaxy the way every 360 owner did with Halo 3. And Nintendo’s habit of releasing games at different dates around the world also throws off any serious sales tallying and hype. Nonetheless, Galaxy is still successful anyway you look at it.

Source