Mario Baseball Keeps the GameCube Afloat in September

October 26, 2005 | By: James Brightman

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Whether Mario is playing golf, tennis, dancing or just plain old stomping on goombas, fans never seem to get tired of the Italian plumber. In September Mario showed that he knows how to hit a home run as well. Mario Superstar Baseball was the No.3 top seller for the month and the game helped boost sales of the GameCube platform too.

Video game industry pundits seem fond of declaring the death of Nintendo's home consoles before their time has actually come to pass. It's certainly true that over the last 18 months or so Microsoft has widened the American hardware sales gap between the Xbox and the GameCube to a healthy 2 million+ consoles, but with Mario Superstar Baseball coming in as September's third best selling SKU (and boosting hardware sales with it), the message has clearly been sent that Nintendo won't be a pushover in the console space this holiday season, even without Zelda.

A relative lack of third party support all but ensures that the GCN and its software will end up in third place after the dust has settled this holiday season, but Mario Baseball proves that the system is still alive and kicking, and capable of producing hits.

The game sold 164,000 copies according to NPD, besting many September notables including Rainbow Six 3: Lockdown, Burnout Revenge (both SKUs combined), and NASCAR 06's combined sales. The rest of the GCN line-up might not have fared well comparatively (Madden GCN was outsold by its PS2 counterpart 10:1 and its Xbox counterpart 5:1, among other telling statistics), but it shows that gamers are still responding to the Mario sports line in a big way.

Perhaps more important than Mario Baseball's strong debut is the fact that it actually managed to be a quite successful system seller as well. 49,000 units of GameCube hardware were sold in July, followed by 53,000 in August. During both months the GCN was outsold by the Xbox by a greater than 2:1 margin, with consumers apparently unphased by the 360's looming launch. Yet in September GCN hardware sales more than doubled, with 108,000 sold, or only slightly worse than Xbox hardware.

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Mario Baseball seems the only likely explanation for the spike, as it was the only major release for the system (Pokemon XD was released at the very tail-end of the month).

Like most of Nintendo's Mario sports titles, despite heavy use of the "Nintendo universe" and Nintendo handling publishing duties, development of Mario Baseball was actually farmed out to a third party. In this case, Namco did the honors.

"Nintendo's always worked with some development team, like Camelot or Namco, in putting together a sports legacy that stays true to the theme of each individual sport while also adding some personal touches that make it something all its own," GameDAILY Senior Editor Robert Workman commented.

With Nintendo now splitting their development duties between three separate platforms, the company has increasingly "loaned" their franchises to third parties. Sega developed F-Zero GX, Kuju Battilion Wars, Namco Starfox Assault, Mario Baseball and others, Capcom Zelda: The Minish Cap, etc. The saying has long been that gamers buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games and nothing more, but with the company increasingly looking outside of its own walls for these franchise efforts, consumers get more of what they want, but third parties are able to reap the rewards along with the big N.

While games like MVP Baseball or Virtua Tennis owe a significant portion of their sales to those who are passionate about the sport, it's difficult to believe the same holds true for Mario Baseball or Mario Tennis. The Mario sports title are "sports games" in the loosest sense of the word, instead generally opting to use the sport in question as a backdrop for zany and hectic multiplayer/mini-game gameplay. Most games in the Mario sports line have more in common with Mario Party than Madden.

"Mario Superstar Baseball has the mini-games that diversify and entertain on a level of their own. Mario Golf has the rings that you can hit the ball through for an added challenge, as well as the role-playing mode offered by the Game Boy Advance game. And then you have Mario Power Tennis, with its shifting, themed courses and its numerous challenges. Between all these, I feel that Nintendo has gotten down the pattern of trying to appeal to all audiences, not just sim fans or arcade fans. There seems to be something here for everyone, from age 5 to 50, maybe past that," Workman said.

The formula has been proven time and time again to be a winning one, and one that attracts Nintendo's existing core, as well as drawing new gamers into the Nintendo collective.