With the miniaturised replica having remained consistently out of stock at retailers, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé has promised that more NES Classic Edition stock will be regularly made available.
The plug-and-play device comes packed with 30 games, such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, PAC-MAN, Final Fantasy, Metroid, and Kirby’s Adventure.
That 8-bit wonderland became an instant hit and, as one of the must-have items for the holiday, has frustrated consumers in how hard it has been to get hold of.
“What happened with NES Classic is that was a situation where the global demand was well in excess of anything we had anticipated, and that’s what created shortages,” Fils-Aimé explained to Wired. “The good news, at least for consumers in the Americas, is we’re going to continue to make the NES Classic available. With the ongoing level of supply, the ongoing demand is going to be met. We know the concern.”
He added: “We know the popularity of our classic games. That’s a known situation. The challenge for us is that with this particular system, we thought honestly that the key consumer would be between 30 and 40 years old, with kids, who had stepped away from gaming for some period of time. And certainly, we sold a lot of systems to that consumer.
“But what we also see here in the Americas is that we’ve sold a lot to [fans] who just saw a compact, all-in-one opportunity to get the 30 greatest games from the NES generation. I think that incremental demand is what surprised us. Because again, how many times have you purchased the original Super Mario Bros.?
“We thought that the consumer that already had a Wii or a Wii U and had purchased those games once or twice already, we didn’t think that they’d buy the NES Classic. And they did.”
