“From our perspective, it’s important to recognize where our future is and the key areas that we need to drive,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, president and chief operating officer of Nintendo of America, in an interview with Time. “We’ve got a lot going on right now and we don’t have unlimited resources.”
“We just didn’t anticipate how incredible the response would be,” said Fils-Aime, apologizing for the product shortages. He added that Nintendo ramped up production and extended it into 2017, but the company was still never able to meet the intense demand for the NES Classic. All the way up until the discontinuation announcement earlier this month — and certainly since then — stores sold through their small shipments as soon as they got them from Nintendo.
Fils-Aime said that Nintendo has now shipped 2.3 million units of the NES Classic worldwide. The company last gave official numbers at the beginning of February, when it said the system had hit a sell-through total of 1.5 million consoles. At the time, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima noted that while “some parts require time to procure,” the company was “working to increase production” of the NES Classic.