See it » TOKYO--The portable gaming war is officially under way in Japan. According to numerous business press reports, independent research by sales tracking company Media Create has found that Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation Portable sold 171,963 units on its launch date.

　　SCE hasn't released an official sales figure for the multimedia PSP yet, but Media Create's numbers, as well as those of other independent research groups, suggest that over 85 percent of the nearly 200,000 units shipped reached eager hands of gamers on its official launch date, Sunday (see movie link below).

　　Reportedly, the top-selling titles for the PSP were SCE's Hot Shots Golf, Namco's Ridge Racers, and FromSoftware's Armed Core Formula Front.

　　SCE plans to ship 500,000 units by the end of the year in Japan and release the handheld in America and Europe early next year--the company expects to ship three million units worldwide by the end of March. Sony is considering increasing production of the handheld to meet consumer demand, but admits that a boost is unlikely due to arranged contracts with suppliers of the PSP's components.

　　The first shots in the battle for handheld supremacy in Japan were fired by longtime portable gaming giant Nintendo earlier this week. Nintendo's DS handheld has reportedly shipped over 1.4 million units as of Sunday. The number of units already sold in America as of December 8 is 700,000, and another 700,000 units were shipped in Japan as of December 12. Nintendo hopes to ship 2.8 million units worldwide before the end of the year and five million units by the end of March 2005.

　　At Sunday's PSP launch event at Shinjuku's Yodobashi Camera, where SCE president Ken Kutaragi commemorated the launch of the product at 6am (pictured above, far left), there were over 1,200 people waiting in line to purchase the handheld.

　　Because of its popularity, and the modest availability of 200,000 units nationwide at launch, the PSPs at Yodobashi sold out by around 9am.

　　While it's difficult to accurately compare the demand based on the following figures, for comparison, the Nintendo DS shipped 500,000 units on its launch date of December 2 in Japan, and could still be purchased at Yodobashi even late that afternoon without a preorder slip.