It takes skill to win the latest "Legend of Zelda" video game from Nintendo. But it takes a miracle to find one in the stores.
Retailers across the U.S. are reporting sellouts of the game, leaving Japan's Nintendo Co. scurrying to fill orders. Shoppers around the country, meanwhile, are scrambling to land a copy in time for the holidays.Analysts say the game, released Nov. 23, is on track to shatter video-game sales records. "In dollars, Zelda will probably be the single-biggest item selling this holiday season," says Sean McGowan, director of research at Gerard Klauer Mattison & Co., a securities firm in New York.
At an Electronics Boutique store in San Francisco, for instance, Rennard Williams was told again Thursday that he would have to wait until after Christmas for Zelda. "I've been trying to find this game for two weeks now, and my children are starting to drive me crazy," says the 35-year-old music producer, who wants the game for his two sons, ages 12 and 13. "They don't want to hear no or anything else. Now I'm feeling a little bit like a loser."
Another customer, software engineer Ned Jordan of Los Angeles, has had no better luck finding one of the games for himself. An ardent game enthusiast, Mr. Jordan, 32, says he is especially frustrated because of all the publicity Nintendo has generated for Zelda. "I'm a little angry at being on the short end of the stick," he says.
Store clerks report similar reactions from their customers when they find Zelda out of stock. "There are a lot of disappointed people, because they see it advertised on TV and newspapers, and we just don't have it," says Armando Lopez, a clerk at a Toys 'R' Us store in San Jose, Calif.
On Monday, the company's Nintendo of America Inc. unit, based in Redmond, Wash., said that within a week it will ship "hundreds of thousands of additional copies" of the game, which retails for $70.
Two years ago Nintendo faced a similar shortfall when it launched its advanced Nintendo 64 game player and severely underestimated demand. Some consumers have wondered whether Nintendo has intentionally created a shortage of the Zelda game to try to generate a selling frenzy, but Nintendo denies that.
"You just never can anticipate something like this," adds Perrin Kaplan, a Nintendo of America spokeswoman. Ms. Kaplan says that Nintendo was unsure how well the game would do, given that the last Zelda title was shipped in 1992. "We thought there would be a core group of Zelda players who would want this, but the video-game-playing audience has grown dramatically," Ms. Kaplan says.
The current game, whose full title is "Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time," features a quest by a warrior named Link to rescue the kidnapped princess Zelda. It is the first Zelda title designed for the 64-bit Nintendo player with its capacity for sophisticated graphics.
Nintendo's Christmas arsenal also includes a new color version of its black-and-white Game Boy, a hand-held player that continues to sell in the millions after 10 years on the market.
And Nintendo's major rival, Sony Corp., has a lineup of much-anticipated games designed for its PlayStation machines. Stores report strong sales of PlayStation's "Tomb Raider III: The Adventures of Lara Croft," an adventure game about a long-legged archeologist that hit stores last week.
Analysts expect that the U.S. video-game industry will shortly close out its second consecutive boom year. Prices of the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 machines are dropping steadily, and games are more powerful and realistic than ever, appealing to a more-mature audience that goes beyond the traditional market of young boys.
The Interactive Digital Software Association, a trade group in Washington, D.C., reports that now 56 percent of all video-game players are over age 18, while Sony says 25 percent of its users are female. As a result, Gerard Klauer Mattison estimates the industry's U.S. retail sales will soar 47 percent to a record $5.85 billion this year from $3.99 billion in 1997.
Already, Zelda has broken records, pre-selling an estimated 500,000 copies to customers who plunked down deposits to secure one. That is triple the industry's previous prerelease record. Nintendo originally anticipated shipping one million units before New Year's but now says it expects that number to hit three million.
Nintendo backed the Zelda launch with a $10 million marketing blitz, which began Nov. 1, with game-footage previews in more than 11,000 movie theaters. And the company hosted a flashy industry launch in San Francisco with a dinner featuring legendary game developer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Zelda, Mario and other famous Nintendo characters.
The game has also won critical acclaim for its 3-D graphics and depth of content. Some reviewers have likened playing Zelda to reading a novel, given the game's characters and complex plot line. And the Zelda world is filled with landscape scenes so realistic that reviewers say players can wander into a meadow, for instance, and hear crickets chirping.
"It's the most impressive video game I've ever played," says Peer Schneider, editor of the online game magazine IGN64.com.
Sony, meanwhile, is pulling out the stops with a $40 million national campaign to promote "Tomb Raider" and a host of other titles. The marketing blitz includes 60-foot-high Lara Croft murals on buildings in major cities. To promote the PlayStation name itself, Sony is running billboard and bus ads with taglines such as: "If you're going to lay on the couch, at least keep score."
The early results are promising. Konami Co.'s Konami of America Inc. unit reports it sold 350,000 units of its "Metal Gear Solid" action game for PlayStation during the first weekend it shipped in October. Sony's Sony Computer Entertainment unit, meanwhile, says sales of its PlayStations have jumped 50 percent from the same time last year every week since the price was dropped to $129 from $150 on Aug. 30.
That performance widened PlayStation's sales lead over Nintendo 64 -- which sells for the same price -- to a 2-to-1 ratio during September, according to NPD Group, a market-research firm in Port Washington, N.Y.
Since PlayStation is designed to run on cheaper-to-produce compact disks, Sony has also gained more momentum among software developers than Nintendo. As a result, Sony's library of some 500 games ranges from action and violence to puzzle and strategy titles, including the best-selling "Myst" and its sequel "Riven," both developed by Cyan Inc. of Mead, Wash.
Nintendo has stuck to a cartridge format that is more expensive to manufacture, creating greater inventory risk for game producers. But Nintendo officials argue that developers also enjoy greater sales potential, as the new Zelda title demonstrates.
Overall, Sony maintains a 58 percent share of the estimated 24 million advanced-game players in the U.S., compared with 42 percent for Nintendo, according to Gerard Klauer Mattison. Sony displaced Japan's Sega Enterprises Ltd. as Nintendo's primary competitor when it launched PlayStation three years ago.