Nintendo reports high Pokémon, GBA SP sales

Will the Pokémon madness ever end? Nintendo certainly doesn't hope so. The company announced today that the latest entries in the series, Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon LeafGreen, have sold a combined 1 million units in the three weeks since their September 7 release. The two titles are top-to-bottom remakes of the original monster-trading adventures for the black-and-white Game Boy, which took the world by storm in the late '90s. Each is packed with the Game Boy Advance Wireless Adapter at a suggested retail price of $39.99--5 to 10 dollars higher than the average GBA title.

In today's release, Nintendo also reported that sales of the Game Boy Advance SP hardware are up 70 percent following its price drop to $79.99 on September 2. Industry followers believe that the price reduction from the system's previous price point of $99.99 was in part to differentiate the hardware from the upcoming $149.99 Nintendo DS system, which launches on November 21 of this year and will offer backward compatibility with GBA cartridges.