Nintendo of America said today that GameCube was a huge success for Christmas 2003. We spoke today with the company to get all the latest data. According to information gathered from retailers and Nintendo’s projections based on November sales, the company says 1.1 million GameCube systems were sold in the U.S. in December alone, compared to about 900,000 for Microsoft’s Xbox console. This figure represents a 70% increase over the GameCube’s sales in Dec. 2002. Nintendo does not currently have weekly or daily figures for December, so the company cannot confirm or deny Microsoft's claim that the Xbox outsold GameCube in the last two weeks of the year. However, NOA does acknowledge that GameCubes were in short supply over that period and that the two systems were likely in closer competition than when GameCube was readily available in November and early December.

Combined with the 750,000 systems sold in November, including about half a million just during Thanksgiving week, the installed base for GameCube has now reached 6.8 million in the U.S. Sales of the console for calendar year 2003 were 35% higher than for 2002, making GameCube the only major console to increase in popularity from year to year. NOA estimates that Xbox sales decreased by 4% and PS2 sales by 26% in 2003.

Nintendo also says that Mario Kart: Double Dash has reached the one million mark in only seven weeks on the shelves, making it the GameCube’s fastest-selling title yet. This number represents only U.S. sales; the game has also sold over half a million copies in Japan, and we do not yet have the numbers for Europe.

Official sales figures for December are expected from the NPD tracking group in the next few days. We’ll follow up with that information as well, but Nintendo is confident in its estimates.