Nintendo is celebrating its first year anniversary for the Wii with more good news. In the first week of release for its heavily anticipated title “Super Mario Galaxy” over 500,000 copies of the game were sold by retailers. This distinction places SMG as the bestselling Wii video game to date. It’s also one of the best reviewed games in Nintendo’s entire history with many publications calling it to be a top candidate for Game of the Year honors.

While Microsoft will likely put out its own press release next week to hype the anticipated big sales of its new IP “Mass Effect” it will also probably try and steal some thunder from SMG’s big sales by pointing out that its flagship title “Halo 3″ sold over 2.7 million copies worldwide within the game’s first seven days of release this past September. To be fair to Nintendo their 500K figure only includes domestic sales of “Super Mario Galaxy” but as PC World’s gaming blog points out its estimates for European and Japanese sales of the game would still peg the title at below 1 million units sold for launch week. So is Mario still as popular worldwide as Master Chief or has a new king of video games finally been crowned?

via Gamespot and PC World