In less than four years, Nintendo DS has become the most popular handheld video game system ever. Nintendo announced this morning that the fashionable dual-screen system has shipped 84.33 million units worldwide since it came out in November 2004. And if they’ve been shipped, they’ve been sold, because the highly coveted DS is still hard to find in stores.

The previous bestseller, the Gameboy Advance, had shipped 81.36 million units worldwide, but that surely includes unsold units. (VG Chartz estimates that the GBA sold just under 80 million units.)

DS still has a long way to go to top the biggest video-game system, the PlayStation 2, which appears to have sold about 110 million units worldwide to date and continues to sell well in the monthly U.S.sales report — 173,500 units in September, for example.

By the way, the most popular DS title appears to be Nintendogs, which has shipped 20 million copies worldwide, according to Nintendo.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under Video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.