It will not surprise you in the least to learn that the Japanese Wii launch has gone, er, rather well. Put another way Japanese gamers have gone nutzoid crazy apespit for Nintendo’s dapper console, causing it to sell-out just a few short hours after stores eventually dared to open their doors.

The signs of sales success appeared early with queues exceeding 1000 surprisingly orderly punters forming outside several larger stores. There’s nothing too out of the ordinary in that, of course, excepting for the fact that all this happened a full day before the actual launch!

When the doors were finally flung open business was brisk to say the very least. The massive ‘Yodobashi Camera’ store began trading at 7.00 am, 2 ½ hours earlier than normal, and was forced to hang a ‘sold-out’ sign on its battered doors just sixty minutes later. It was a similar story elsewhere across Japan and it now seems that Nintendo has sold every one of the 400,000 units allocated at launch. Blimey!

So with a Japanese sell-out and Nintendo of America reporting sales of 600,000 that’s a million Wii’s shifted in a little over a week. Or should that be ‘weep’? For other console manufacturers have not been having it quite so good – the Playstation 3 has sold about a third of this amount since it launched three weeks ago. Maybe that '3' suffix will come to have more significance than Sony had ever bargained for!

Wii production is in overdrive at the moment and it looks as if Nintendo is well on its way to achieving its goal of four million units worldwide by Christmas. Sadly this does not mean that three million Wiis are designated for the UK launch. Indeed there’s still no news regarding how many we’ll be fighting over on the 8th, but more on that soon, we hope. In the meantime enjoy these pictures of the Japanese launch. And don’t feel too sorry for the desperate gamers who have plainly had to camp out overnight in order to secure their consoles – that’ll be you in a few days...