The anticipated battle between Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 for videogame console supremacy has become a sideshow to the unexpected rise of Nintendo’s Wii as the new-generation game console of choice. Once a dark-horse contender, the Wii has outsold both its competitors in recent months. According to sales data from the NPD Group, the Wii sold 335,000 units in February to the Xbox 360’s 228,000 and the PS3’s 127,000.

Of the three new-generation game consoles, the Xbox 360 has sold the most at 5 million units in the United States alone, but that’s mainly due to the fact that it was released a full year earlier than either the Wii or the PS3. Since they first hit shelves last November, the PS3 has sold 1.1 million units while the Wii has tallied 1.86 million.
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What’s interesting is that the Wii achieved this feat not by offering a lot of multimedia bells and whistles like its competitors do, but by simply focusing on games.

“We’ve seen Nintendo expand the marketplace and grow it beyond the traditional gamer,” says Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research. “They really redefined the videogame experience by creating something new and different.”

That innovation is the Wii controller, a motion-sensitive wand that allows gamers to control the action onscreen by waving the device about rather than jostling a joystick and pushing buttons.

That controller and the games developed for it have captured the imagination of both the core gamer demographic and their parents, wives and other family members.