Nintendo says it has sold more than 500,000 GameCube video game consoles in the week after the console's US launch, outpacing sales of Microsoft's competing Xbox.
Nintendo said in a statement that almost all of the first batch of consoles that had been shipped to US retailers had sold out, but the first replacement orders of about 125,000 units had begun to arrive at US stores.
The Japanese game maker said it shipped a total of 740,000 of the $199 GameCube consoles to North America for the unit's November 18th launch, with about 80 per cent of that total going to US retailers.
Microsoft has not released figures on sales of the Xbox, but analysts have estimated the company had about 300,000 units available for the November 15th launch of that next-generation console, with most of those selling out in a few days.