When it was revealed that former bitter rivals Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog would finally be facing off against each other in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games on Wii and Nintendo DS, SEGA initially announced that it had high hopes for the product to reach around four million sales across the world. Most people scoffed at the idea, believing the appeal of such a game to be nowhere near as big as that. However, the milestone has not only been reached, but surpassed with style.

It has now been confirmed that the uniting of both Nintendo and SEGA’s key mascots, as well as a plethora of other characters from both company’s games, has been a resounding success and shows no signs of dying down just yet. The Wii and DS games have totalled over five million units worldwide so far! And yet despite this, another collaboration may not be forthcoming for quite a while.

“Getting Mario and Sonic together in the first place took so long, every decade, to make that happen. So I think rushing into any other collaboration is not going to happen. It’s going to be fairly calculated.”
Sega of America COO and president Simon Jeffery said in a phone interview with Next-Gen.

With the Wii version launching late last year and the DS edition only joining the ranks this year, momentum is just starting to build up for the SEGA-developed game, which has been self-published across North America and PAL territories, whilst Nintendo handled the Japanese publishing duties. SEGA definitely does not expect the game to stop selling any time soon either,

“There have only been three months so far and the Olympics themselves are another four months away. We’re expecting to sell quite a few million more globally, hopefully between now and the end of this year. This reinforces what we’ve firmly believed - that there is a huge opportunity on the Wii and the DS to get some breakout hits, especially exploiting our intellectual properties. We’re not going to be shifting our focus any, though. We’re still going to be focusing on hardcore games on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, too, and really all kinds of stuff on Wii.”

Check out footage of the Wii edition below and stick around for more updates here on Nintendic: