Pokemon Gold & Silver Remakes Tear Up Charts

Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver tore up the charts on their opening weekend, racking up a combined 1.5 million sales in just two days.

It's always nice to know that in this wild and crazy world we live in, there are still some universal constants that will never change: The sun will always come up in the morning, giant robots will always be awesome, and handheld Pokemon games will always sell like proverbial hotcakes. HeartGold and SoulSilver, the remakes of the original second-generation Pokemon games (er, Gold and Silver) generated just shy of 1.5 million copies their opening weekend in Japan - to be precise, that's 1,480,980 copies sold, reports Famitsu.

Gold and Silver are arguably the most beloved games in the franchise, having introduced concepts to the series like Pokemon with genders, breeding, day/night cycles, and actually having a game after beating the Elite Four (and Champion). In fact, after conquering the Johto Pokemon League, the player could go back and explore the entire Kanto continent - the setting of Red and Blue with eight more gyms to conquer. That's pretty huge right there.

I'd go so far as to say that the only people who don't like Gold and Silver are either crusty old fogies who swear that there were only ever 151 Pokemon and as such are missing out on awesome 'mons like Houndoom, Blaziken, and Empoleon, or Communists. No exceptions.

Let's put this in a bit of perspective: While not quite as impressive as, say, the 2.8 million copies of Wrath of the Lich King sold in a single day, that was a worldwide launch, and there are billions of people in the world - while there are only 100 million people in Japan. Or, to look at it another way, for every person who bought the PS3 Slim in Japan last week, ten bought SoulSilver or HeartGold in just two days.

I guess there's no resisting the siren call of catching 'em all.

(Via VG247)