Enlarge / Both of these miniature NES systems share something in common: they’re no longer being made.
Last we heard, the NES Classic Edition had sold 1.5 million units through the end of December, not nearly enough to meet apparently healthy demand during the holiday season and beyond. Now that the company has officially discontinued the plug-and-play box, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime tells Time magazine they sold 2.3 million systems overall in just under six months.
For context, the Nintendo Switch sold more than that in less than a month, though direct comparison between a $ 60 nostalgia box and a newly introduced $ 300 hybrid console can be a bit difficult. In any case, long lines for the final shipments and high secondhand markups for existing systems suggest a lot of unfulfilled demand for the system still exists in the market.
The robust success of the NES Classic Edition really does seem to have caught Nintendo by surprise. “We had originally planned for this to be a product for last holiday,” Fils-Aime told Time. “We just didn’t anticipate how incredible the response would be. Once we saw that response, we added shipments and extended the product for as long as we could to meet more of that consumer demand.”
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