BEIJING, Nov. 27 -- Nintendo Co's Wii game console was sold out in some American stores as shoppers snapped up limited supplies in Friday's kickoff to the holiday shopping season.

Mary Beth Fanning, a homemaker from Medina, Ohio, left a GameStop store empty-handed after arriving an hour before the 7 a.m. opening. A dozen or so people were ahead of her, she said.

"They were sold out before I got in the door," said Fanning, 42. "They were sold out and you couldn't reserve one. The stores said the game would come in randomly over the next two weeks but there would be no way to know when."

Nintendo, based in Kyoto, Japan, pledged to ship four million of the 250 U.S. dollars Wii consoles by the end of the year and replenish supplies at a rate of 250,000 a week. That led stores including Toys "R" Us Inc to express confidence they wouldn't disappoint shoppers. Some retailers took pre-orders, meaning customers didn't have to wait in lines when the consoles first went on sale last weekend, Bloomberg News reported.

"We're unloading 1,000 of them off the dock right now at Times Square," Kathleen Waugh, a spokeswoman for Toys "R" Us Inc in Wayne, New Jersey, said. "There will be points where we could sell out."

The chain, the second-largest toy seller in the United States, expects to get "continuous replenishment" from Nintendo.

Waugh also said the Wii wouldn't take customers from Sony Corp's PlayStation 3, which sold out in minutes after going on sale on November 17 and has been limited by production snags.

"They appeal to entirely different customers," Waugh said. "PlayStation 3 is for the sophisticated gamer. The Wii is family oriented."

Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft Corp, maker of the Xbox 360 game console, are vying for leadership in the 20 billion dollars console market. Microsoft got the jump by coming out with the Xbox 360 last year.

Nintendo planned to have at least 62 games available for the new player, 32 new games and 30 older ones that users could download from the Internet, according to the company's Website. In addition, games from the previous Nintendo console, the GameCube, may be played on the Wii.

(Source: Shanghai Daily)