Japanese video game giant Nintendo Co Ltd said on Thursday it aimed to sell 50 million of its GameCube game consoles globally by March 2005. It still has a long way to go, however, to catch Sony Corp's PlayStation 2, the dominant home video game platform worldwide with more than 30 million units shipped since its debut in March 2000.

Nintendo launched the GameCube last September and has set a shipment target of 12 million units for the business year that started in April, compared with Sony's target of 20 million PlayStation 2s. President Satoru Iwata reiterated Nintendo's strategy of appealing to consumers with innovative games, rather than trying to build ambitious entertainment platforms like Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Corp's Xbox. "We're reaching the limits of how far we can appeal to consumers by boosting the machines' performance or providing more compelling graphics and sound," Iwata told an analysts' meeting. "For the past few years we've been looking for new ways to surprise people, new ways for them to have fun."