Wii VC: 4.7m downloads, 100 games

Today, Nintendo further touted the Wii's success by announcing the platform's virtual console has hit a dual milestone. First, with the Monday release of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the platform's Virtual Console will now have a catalog of 100 games. Originally released in 1988, Zelda II has not yet been priced on the VC, but original NES games typically sell for 500 Wii points ($5).

Secondly, Nintendo today announced that more than 4.7 million Virtual Console games have been downloaded worldwide since the Wii launched on November 19, 2006. Besides titles from Nintendo's pre-GameCube consoles, the Wii's Virtual Console network also offers games from two former rival platforms--the Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16. However, the five most downloaded games are all first-party games for the Mario Factory's own NES, SNES, or N64 platforms. They are, in order of popularity:

1. Super Mario Bros. (NES)
2. Super Mario 64 (N64)
3. Mario Kart 64 (N64)
4. Super Mario World (SNES)
5. The Legend of Zelda (NES)

By comparison, from its launch in November 2005 to March 2007, Xbox Live Arcade--which features both new and classic titles--has seen 25 million downloads worldwide. However, that figure includes demos of XBLA titles, which are free.

[UPDATE] A Sony rep told GameSpot that, as of May 15, 13 million pieces of content had been downloaded worldwide from the PlayStation Store, the PlayStation 3's online service. And although Sony does not break out games from other content downloads, the rep did say there had been 900,000 worldwide downloads of GT HD Concept. The PlayStation 3 went on sale two days before the Wii last November.