Should be pretty big. Even DK64 on N64 was a million seller, the SNES DKC games did 7m in Japan in total.

k, dk, it's up to you to save the wii

Can you please stop being pessimistic!

'Donkey Kong is gonna kill them all'

I though DK64 barely reached the 800k mark, which would still be pretty good, but does it really matter that some DK games did well 15 years ago?

If it ends up selling well it will be becuase Nintendo marketed it well and Retro Studios neutral take on it (not to western), not because the DKC games were once popular. It didn't help SFIV atleast.

seconded

The last Mario Bros. game on a console (besides Yoshi's Island) did well 20 years ago and the new one, NSMB Wii is still on pace to sell 25m copies or whatever. Why would you expect a disconnect with DKC over a shorter period?  Returns should be bigger than DKC in the West since the Wii base is double (65m) the SNES base (32m) and comparable to DKC in Japan given the Wii base (10.8m) is only 20% smaller than SNES (12.9m) was when DKC released.

The more recent DK games did far from stellar, we could argue which one's are spin-offs and which not and that they didn't make use of the DKC formula, but even the GBA remakes remakes did bomb in Japan and it's obvious that the Japanese don't feel as attached to the big ape as what they do to Mario. I never see the character rank in popularity polls and the games aren't exactly considered classics there.

But I repeat, I still think it can become big in Japan if Nintendo knows how to market it (and with there big mainstream games they ussually nail it), it's just that having some hit's in the mid-90s doesn't guarantee succes to me.

I expect no more than 500k from Japan to be honest........

Like I've been saying forever now, it won't be that huge. I certainly don't expect it to reach 1 million in Japan.