'Mario Kart 8 Deluxe' sets series launch sales record with 459,000 games sold

After the record-breaking success of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, another Nintendo Switch game has managed to put up some impressive early sales numbers. Though released on a console that has only been on store shelves for about two months, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had the largest launch of any game in the entire series.

“With more than 459,000 combined packaged and digital sales in the United States on launch day alone, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch system is the fastest-selling game in the long-running Mario Kart series,” Nintendo said in a press release.

This is slightly more than the roughly 434,000 sold for the Wii in 2008, but the system had already been on the market for a few years and had exploded into a worldwide phenomenon.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe‘s success was not limited to North America. In the United Kingdom, the game managed to top sales charts — the first Nintendo game to do so since Pokémon White in 2011. Mario Kart 7, which released for the then-struggling 3DS, and the Wii U’s Mario Kart 8, were unable to achieve the feat.

Nintendo also revealed that the attachment rate for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is about 45 percent, which puts the country’s total Switch console sales at about 1 million. These numbers could very well give Breath of the Wild a run for its money. In the latter game’s first month on sale, it managed to move 925,000 copies of the Nintendo Switch version, which was 19,000 more than the total number of Switch consoles sold in the United States. Will eager fans have to wait even longer to pick up their consoles? If Nintendo’s recent decision to move a shipment of systems by airplane in order to get them onto store shelves more quickly is any indication, they will not have to wait much longer.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is available now. Check out our full review here.