Even if it does sell consoles, how will we ever know... it will all be mixed up with the price cut and holiday season... No matter how you look at it, there are going to be a lot of wii consoles sold between now and the first of the year.

.1:3 siht llestuo ot gniog ylbaborp si 2 yxalaG

.os kniht t'nod I ,oN

hmmm, I don't see how that's an answer to anything.

Thank you all for your inputs, seems to be across the board that it will drive sales of the console. Maybe this would make a nice poll on the home page?

I played this game about an hour and a half after it was announced.  Not a DS port in any way, and the differences are so obvious I can only assume you're joking or insane.

The DS game didn't have Yoshi, or the Koopa Kids, or the propellor hat, or the penguin costume with ice fireballs, or 4 player co-op, or motion controls, or competitive scoring at the end of each stage.

Why would you think it's a port?  It's not even like they just added all this new stuff to the original.  It is a completely new game from the ground up.  I played 4 stages, and not a one of them was in any way similar to any level in the DS game.

I can only think of 3 other 4 player co-op 2-D platformers that have ever been made. This game will be huge, and will outsell Galaxy 1 and 2 combined easily.

I know several people who stopped playing games because they got too complicated when they went 3-D and needed analog sticks and camera controls and several buttons. But they're not into handheld gaming. A 4 player co-op 2-D platformer is just what they need. It can convert the folks who didn't like Wii Sports.

@OP, yes this game will boost hardware.  All these Nintendo smash hits are evergreen titles, and they just keep stacking on top of each other.  It used to be that Christmas was all about Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wii Fit, Mario Kart Wii, Mario Galaxy, and Brawl.  Now it's all about the next generation: Wii Sports Resort and Motion+, Wii Fit+, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Mario and Sonic 2 (with balance board), and New SMB Wii, with a price cut.  It will be impossible to tell all these ridiculous spikes apart, but lord knows we'll try.  And Wii has the most exclusives, and the best versions of Tiger Woods and Shaun White, and the best selling Beatles game.  And if you want cheerleading games, well, there's really nowhere else to turn.  Nintendo's got you by the balls.

This Christmas will be huge, but I think New SMB Wii will be the best selling game this Christmas.

To those saying "wouldn't Mario fans already own Wii":

How many Mario fans do you think there are? Wii hasn't even sold as much as NES yet, and Mario was the main driver of NES sales, while Wii-brand games are the main driver of Wii sales. Since NES, there's been a whole other generation which grew up on Mario Kart and 3D Mario and Mario Party, which sold so well on Wii.

In total, we're talking about a franchise which has sold 370 million games, and half of that total comes from 2D platformers. I won't try to do some phony maths with that, but let's just say I think there are millions upon millions of 2D Mario fans who haven't bought a Wii.

That's bold considering MW2 is coming out. I definitely think NSMB will sell more, but I'm not so sure about over the holidays.

If you combine the PS3 and 360 sales of Modern Warfare 1, it just barely surpasses the sales of Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins, on Game Boy, from 1992.  When 11 million people are willing to pay for a 2-D Mario platformer with 4 shades of cream spinach color, no multiplayer, no Yoshi, no motion controls, and no Koopa Kids, I find it hard to believe any FPS will be able to outsell New SMB Wii.

2-D Mario platformers are the reason there is an American video game market, so they are the reason we have tons of American FPS games.  Before id Software made Doom, you know what they made?  2-D Mario platformers.  They ported SMB3 to the PC, and asked Nintendo to let them release it.  Nintendo was flattered and said it was a great port, but that they didn't want to make PC games at the time.  So id changed it up into their first Commander Keen game, and the rest is history.

That leaves the question unanswered, though. The NES is an '85 machine, so we're talking of people who are for the majority 30-35 years old.

He/she has a high chance of having a family with children old enough to be gamers in turn.

So of all those 2D Mario fans you're only looking for those who never bought a Wii for their children in 3 years, Mario Kart and other games notwithstanding, but will finally do so because a 2D Mario comes out. Or those without children that will do so for themselves and friends, and never did buy a Wii before.

My gut perception is that those are contrieved enough profiles that the boost could not be as big as some fans imagine. But maybe my perspective is skewed by the fact that being european, a former computer guy and slightly older than that bracket I never experienced the Mario-craze that so often is reminisced.

Just to get history straight:

Texture-mapped 3d environments were pioneered in Ultima Underworld by Origin, using technology for scaling that had been used in Wing Commander -  before Wolfenstein 3d and years before Doom. 

You'll find quotes of Carmak himself stating that he started developing the Wolfenstein engine after seeing a tech demo of Ultima Underworld ('91): in Ultima Underworld you could shoot missiles and cast spells in first person, so the simplified FPS was an inevitable subgenre which time had come, and Nintendo had nothing to do with that. Had not Id popularized it, someone else would.

You know, sometimes the history of videogames doesn't circle around Nintendo, like in this case.