No sooner than I had posted the latest collection of retail reports, this email shot right into my inbox. Since I took forever getting up the last retail report I decided not to hesitate a minute and slap this puppy online.

So how’s Nintendo doing in Mario’s home country? We turn to PGC reader Matteo Scarpellini for the scoop.

(That’s a name so badass he doesn’t need a nickname! It kicks the living bejeezus outta any moniker I could ever make up.)

Take it away, Matteo!

Matteo Scarpellini says: Oh this is an interesting one guys.

well.... Italy is a real PS2 oriented market. There is not that much competition for Sony in order to become the king of the hill. And this allows Sony to things which I would never think possible. In December I worked for my dear friend in his videogames shop, quite a big one, with all kinds of imports and so on. The batch of units for Italy ready for launch was not that much big and this is what Sony did (obliged to do ) with retailers:

2-4 Sony published games for each PS2 unit sold (price 899,000 Italian lira = 370 USD). The games were Fantavision, Tekken Tag, Ridge Racer V and DOA2 ($50 each).

Some other very strange promotions with PSone (a steering wheel for each copy of Formula one.... and outrageous number of Jungle book's "dance dance" style pack...)

We sold at least 300 units of PS2 since then, the best selling game at the shop is Moto GP.

Actually Gamecube is known by very few people, so is the X-box. Dreamcast is starting to become popular because of the possibility of burning copies of the games along with the big releases, which were Shenmue and Phantasy Star. Oh, we never saw any TV ad for the DC. Even Saturn had ONE!

Nintendo: holy Pokemon! Yes we are selling a big number of the just released Pokemon gold and silver (in Italian). As for the N64... the usual core of gamers, not that much big but which buy many games such as Conker (published here by thq), Banjo.....

Thanks for writing in Matteo Scarpenilli!