The little console wonder, Nintendo Wii, has boosted the financial results of Nintendo. The Kyoto-based company announced today that its net profit nearly doubled in the March - December 2007 period.

Nintendo said it recorded a 96.3 percent growth in net profit to 258.93 billion yen (2.4 billion dollars) in the first three quarters of the financial year.

Its operating profit surged 135.1 percent to 394.04 billion yen and sales jumped 84.7 percent to 1.316 trillion yen, the company said in a statement.

According to the company, since the launch of Nintendo Wii the customers grabbed more than 20 million Wii machines from store shelves, 14.29 million of them during the latest three quarters.

Nintendo raised its sales forecast for the full year to March to 1.63 trillion yen from an earlier estimate of 1.55 trillion yen and its operating profit forecast to 460 billion yen from 420 billion yen.

Launched in November 2006, Nintendo Wii has constantly outsold its main competitors, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

Although from the technical point of view, Wii is inferior to its rivals, thanks to its Wiimote, which resembles a TV remote, Nintendo has practically reinvented the gaming experience.

The magic of the device lies in Wiimote, which is a hand-held joystick-like device that allows players to simulate swinging a tennis racket, racing a car, shooting pool, boxing an opponent or lots of other activities. Players do not have to master a dozen buttons to play a game. Instead, they just take the device and swing it like a golf club.

The movement of the controller is synchronized by Wii with the actions of characters or avatars on the screen. In a game of tennis, for instance, if you simulate a backhand swing in tennis, your player on-screen performs that same swing in real-time.

Players can pit themselves against the Wii console or have fun getting two or more people together, each equipped with a Wii controller, to play together.

In fact, Nintendo Wii is a device for all and Wii has been the most successful console not only in the history of Nintendo, but also in the entire history of console gaming itself.

According to the data released by the NPD Group earlier this month, Nintendo Wii was crowned as last year’s gaming best-seller in the US with 6.29 million systems sold in 2007.

In the US, Microsoft Xbox 360 sold 4.62 million units during 2007, while the embattled Sony’s PS3 sold a disappointing 2.56 million units, being surpassed even by PS2 which reached 3.97 million units. Also, according to the data released by the Japanese gaming company Enterbrain, Nintendo Wii outsold PlayStation 3 by 3 to 1 during 2007.

Nintendo’s other strong point was its DS portable machine, which comes with a touch panel, and sold 24.5 million units in sales during the nine months through December 2007, adding to cumulative sales of 64.79 million.

Due to the good results, Nintendo has modified the financial forecasts saying that it expects to sell 18.5 million Wiis and 29.5 million DS machines for the fiscal year through March 31.

All the results reported by Wii were recorded while the company had been struggling to increase production in order to meet the demand.

 According to Fils-Aime, the company itself is surprised by the huge demand during 2007. "We expected the Wii to perform extremely well within historic launch parameters in video game history," he said in an interview last year. "What we didn't expect was to re-write that history."