Nintendo sells 1.5M systems over Thanksgiving

The House of Mario has 1.5 million more reasons to give thanks, as Nintendo today announced that it enjoyed a bountiful Thanksgiving week of hardware sales at US retailers.

During the week of Nov. 21 through Nov. 27, shoppers in the United States picked up 900,000 DS units (spanning the entire DS family) and 600,000 Wii consoles, according to internal Nintendo sales estimates.

Nintendo said the sales surge during the last week was a product of the limited-edition Mario Anniversary bundles that went on sale on November 7, as well as the new $150 orange and green DSi bundles that debuted on Black Friday. The day-after-Thanksgiving shopping phenomenon marks the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season.

Earlier this month Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, speaking at a presentation in New York, touted Nintendo's hardware sales performance. Citing NPD data, Fils-Aime had the DS and Wii in first and second place as far as the US installed base goes, with 43.1 million and 30.4 million systems sold, respectively. The next-best-selling hardware was the Xbox 360 (21.9 million), followed by the PSP (17.7 million) and PlayStation 3 (13.5 million).