But when the next generation of consoles rolled around, the Wii U was sitting at 9.5 million units sold after two years on the market.

Revenue in the latest quarter jumped 21 percent to ￥90.22 billion, as the company’s new line-up of 3DS portable consoles “continued to expand their sales”, it said in a statement. Should the game be pushed into 2017, it’s possible producer Eiji Aonuma and his team are planning to release it on Nintendo NX instead of Wii U. 3DS games sales fell from 8.57 million to 7.92 million.

Shooting game Splatoon, where players aim at squid-type creatures, has sold 1.6 million copies after it was released in May. Sadly, sales were down year on year for this quarter – the console sold 500,000 units in 2014 for the same quarter.

No numbers were given for Amiibo sales, though Nintendo called them “favourable”.

Nintendo’s Wii U has not had the most successful history thus far, even lagging behind Sega’s Dreamcast in sales; a platform eclipsed by the PS2 back in 2001. By comparison, Sony’s PlayStation 4 reached the 10-million-unit milestone less than a year after it launched. The handheld sold just 1.01 million units in the last three months.

The company didn’t provide an update on who would succeed Chief Executive Satoru Iwata, the videogame-industry legend who died of cancer earlier this month.

Perhaps most importantly, Iwata charted a course for Nintendo to break from tradition and offer its top gaming franchises, including Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, on mobile operating systems.