MARIO PLAYS HARD TO GET

That pudgy little plumber is jingling all the way to the bank. Two months after its release, Nintendo 64, the 3-D-saturated game machine, and its marquee title, Mario 64, have vanished from the shelves, inspiring rampant supply-side panic among hordes of would-be Santas.

“We have 900,000 machines already shipped to stores, and most of them are gone,” says George Harrison, Nintendo’s vice president of marketing. An additional 300,000 units (at $200 a pop) are en route from Japan, but “a week and a half before Christmas,” says Harrison, “they’ll be completely sold out.”

The result: that rare and glorious middle-class Cabbage Patch-doll frenzy, marked by toy scalping, queuing at dawn, rumors of retailers hoarding product and celebrities besieging Nintendo’s Redmond, Washington, phone lines. Among those pleading for special dispensation: Matthew Perry, Steven Spielberg’s office and, according to Harrison, “several Chicago Bulls who asked to remain anonymous.” Look for Harrison courtside real soon.

The N64’s success has come despite a paucity of software. Until recently only three games were available for the system, though one of them was the masterpiece Mario. A half-dozen more games are now in the pipeline, including the next expected best seller, LucasArts’ Shadows of the Empire, a Star Wars game set for release this week.

How big will the N64 be? Harrison expects 5 million to sell by Christmas ’97. Not bad, but a far cry from the original eight-bit system; almost 40 million units sold in the Stone Age ’80s.

–By Michael Krantz