Nintendo considering further Famicom Mini titles

Only a couple of weeks after the third wave of Famicom Mini titles - known in the west as the NES Classics series - hit Japanese retailers, Nintendo has hinted that it is gauging interest in a fourth series of the budget GBA releases.

"With the third series released to the market on the 10th, we believe interest was temporarily settled," according to a Nintendo spokesperson quoted in a Japanese newspaper report. However, he went on to say that "it's the responsibility of the company to respond if there's demand from users."

The third edition of the Famicom Mini games - which included classics from the Disk System range for the first time, along with NES best-sellers Zelda II: Adventure of Link and Super Mario Bros. 2 - sold some 358,000 copies across the ten titles included in its first week on sale, making it the most popular of the three waves of re-releases.

Originally conceived as a way to mark the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the NES, the Famicom Mini range has become a huge moneyspinner for Nintendo despite its budget price point of around 2,000 Yen (15 Euro) per game. With development costs per title probably coming in at only a few thousand Euro, sales of the games represent almost pure profit for the console giant.

Only the first series of Famicom Mini titles has been launched in the USA and Europe to date, but Nintendo recently confirmed that it plans to launch several further NES Classics titles in the USA in October, including Zelda II and Metroid. It's not been confirmed whether these titles will also appear in Europe or not.