Nintendo fan love is real enough to make the NES Classic’s sales wild

Nintendo seems to have perfected the art of monetizing its classic library, to the point that NES Classic sales are through the roof.

How many different ways do you own a copy of Super Mario Bros. or the original The Legend of Zelda? Most recently, Nintendo added another way with the NES Classic — and it’s paying off to the tune of the Classic flat-out beating every modern console in June.

Part of this might be driven by worries about not being able to find one again. Sites have a tendency to crash when Nintendo releases another wave of its mini consoles (either the NES or the SNES). To see one on a store shelf is not quite as ridiculously difficult as it used to be, but yours truly and Brandon Crespo over at FanSided (with some added work by me here at Culturess) documented the struggle basically from the word go.

As The Verge and Uproxx allude to in their reports, there’s also a factor of long, deep-seated affection for these games. Even those not alive in the ’80s might very well have fond memories of the NES and that little gamepad.

Yes, it’s not like this is the first time Nintendo has re-sold you Final Fantasy, but it’s the first time it’s re-sold you Final Fantasy as you first remember playing it. In other words, the NES Classic is selling an experience just as much as it’s selling a gaming console, not unlike the Switch itself. And Nintendo’s been obvious about it since the beginning, with a press release quoting Reggie Fils-Aime as saying, “We wanted to give fans of all ages the opportunity to revisit Nintendo’s original system and rediscover why they fell in love with Nintendo in the first place.”

Nintendo’s fans have had a place in FanSided’s Fandom 250 for both of the first two years. With the NES Classic still going strong, fueled by reports like this, it’s a pretty safe bet that the gaming company’s fans will make it back in this year’s rankings.

Where it’ll land, of course, is a mystery yet.