Nintendo: 3DS on track for 200k UK sales this weekend

Speaking ahead of today's 3DS launch, Nintendo has said the console has been pre-ordered 140,000 times in the UK, and is likely to sell over 200,000 British units this weekend alone.

The news comes from an told MCV interview, and is likely to mean 3DS will go on to be Nintendo's most popular machine: it sold 400,000 units in Japan in its first two days on sale last month.

“Obviously the original headline statement was that we wanted to sell 4 million globally by the end of March," said Nintendo UK marketing manager James Honeywell.

"What does that mean for the UK? Well, it’s early days, but we do know that we have record pre-orders of over 140,000, which suggests it’s going to be our biggest ever launch by some distance – with Wii we did 106,000 in the opening weekend and with DSi it was 90,000."

Honeywell added that he expects significant sales to continue following 3DS's opening weekend.

“How many people who haven’t pre-ordered will go out this weekend and buy one this weekend? It’s hard to say, but I guess we’re looking at a total of comfortably over 150,000, if not more like 200,000. We’ll know soon. What we know already is that in one weekend we’ll sell more 3DS units than all the 3D TVs sold in the entire past year – so we really are bringing 3D to the masses."

3DS goes on sale in Europe tonight at midnight, and ships in the US on Sunday.

We'll have updates for you from the London launch later tonight.