Mario & Sonic Tag Team for Five Million Sold

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Mario & Sonic Tag Team for Five Million Sold
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games has now surpassed five million units sold worldwide. Sega of America's Simon Jeffery talks with us about the future of Mario & Sonic, Sega's relationship with Nintendo, the company's globalization and more.
Posted by James Brightman on Wednesday, March 05, 2008


Sega announced today that its Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, the first ever pairing of the two iconic game mascots of once rivals Sega and Nintendo, has sold five million units worldwide on the Wii and DS.

The game, published by Sega in Europe and North America and by Nintendo in Japan, reached this milestone in just over three months on the market. While Mario and Sonic in the same game is the obvious appeal of the title, the Olympics is also a setting that everyone understands, and so it feeds into the broader audience appeal. The game is licensed through a worldwide partnership with International Sports Multimedia (ISM), the exclusive Interactive Entertainment Software licensee of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

"With adored icons and fun game play, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games has shot to the top of the sales charts and is clearly resonating with the growing audience of casual gamers that want an engaging and accessible gaming experience," said Simon Jeffery, President and COO, Sega of America, in the release. "The market for entertaining games that everyone can enjoy is growing faster than any other segment in the industry, thanks in part to the explosive popularity of Wii and Nintendo DS. A key element of our growth strategy at Sega is to develop and publish games that appeal to this expanding market."



"The Japanese market with the recent success of the Wii and DS seems to be going off on its own tangent from the rest of the world."



Following the news GameDaily BIZ caught up with Jeffery to discuss the game's success and what it means for Sega. Naturally, one of the first things we asked was whether this great performance means we'll be seeing the famous hedgehog and plumber team up again in other games. "There's no concrete answer to that at this time. Obviously the first one has done fantastically well. The game is based on the Olympics and that's still a good four months away, so this game is going to be out there and selling for a long, long time yet. I think we'll take a look at it after that," he said.

We could easily see Mario and Sonic teaming up in other sports games beyond the Olympics or possibly in other genres altogether, but Jeffery cautioned against that. "I think in some ways we don't want to dilute what we've accomplished here. We don't want to suddenly start throwing Mario and Sonic together, and I'm sure Nintendo would feel the same... That obviously would be an easy thing to do, but I don't necessarily think it would be the right thing to do," he said. "It had taken Nintendo and Sega a very long time to get to the point whereby we found the common ground that enabled us to get these two icons together in the first place. And I think the success speaks for itself, but also the environment in the Olympic games, which is kind of neutral territory for both Sonic and Mario, is really one of the things that makes the game work so well."

We asked Jeffery if the game had perhaps sold much better in one territory over the other, but it appears that Mario and Sonic are liked pretty well universally. "[The sales have] actually been pretty even, almost remarkably so. ... I think the success you've seen has really been spread across the territories, which is a great testament to these two characters; they really are global in their appeal," Jeffery noted. "So many characters in video games tend to predominantly have a cultural affinity with one territory or a couple of territories, but these two seem to work globally."

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This globalization has been key to Sega's success in recent years. Not only is the company looking to the Western markets, but it's trying to create games that resonate worldwide. "We really are all about globalizing Sega at the moment. We feel that most Japanese companies still feel very Japanese and most American companies still feel very American and most European companies still feel very European. And we really are making a very concerted effort to globalize Sega and even taking – going back to Sonic, our mascot character I guess – efforts like the BioWare Sonic RPG on DS is an attempt to contemporize and Westernize Sonic as an IP as well," Jeffery explained.



"We really want Mario & Sonic to be one of the biggest selling games of 2008."



We theorized that it might actually be easier for a Japanese company like Sega to globalize itself, going from Japan outward, rather than a big Western publisher like an EA or Activision to crack the Japanese or Asian markets. Jeffery didn't quite agree though.

"I think it goes both ways, actually. ... I think over the last couple years we've seen that most Japanese publishers have got one or two franchises that work really well in the West, but most of the content they're building in the Japanese market isn't so relevant anymore because Western video game development has accelerated so much in the last decade that a lot of the huge, massive hits – the Halos and Mass Effects and products like that – are built in the West for Western gaming audiences," he said. "And the Japanese market again with the recent success of the Wii and DS seems to be going off on its own tangent from the rest of the world, so a lot of the content being built in Japan specifically for the Japanese market just really struggles to translate to the West."

So what's the next step for Mario and Sonic, or for the burgeoning friendship between Nintendo and Sega? "We still have this great relationship and if anything, it's been solidified and cemented by the success of Mario & Sonic. For both parties it reaffirms what we've been talking about for years, which is that collaboration would be a great, great thing. So we want to see how [the game] does throughout the rest of the year and through the Olympics timeframe in the summer. We really want it to be one of the biggest selling games of 2008."

Jeffery also confirmed that Sega will have another marketing push around the Olympics to help boost sales of the game again. "We will be marketing the game very heavily throughout the summer and throughout the Olympics time period," he said.

We asked Jeffery if Sega has a global sales target for the title in 2008, but he carefully answered, "Not that we're allowed to talk about. It will be another round number."

We'll be bringing you more from our Simon Jeffery interview later today. His comments on the Wii business were particularly interesting.