...In under five months!
According to a press release today from Sony, 40 million total Playstation 2 consoles have been sold worldwide. Naturally, the United States has seen the most, with nearly eighteen of those forty million units.
Let's look at that from another angle, shall we? There are rougly a quarter-billion people in the United States right now. Eighteen million of them have a PS2. This is a taste over seven percent of the population as a whole - a staggering number for a video game console, especially one that is so young as the PS2 still is.
With ten million pieces moved in under half a year, it appears that the PS2 is just now hitting its stride in a way that the PSX started to do soon after the release of FF7. It seems more than feasable to believe that the PS2 could overtake the NES as the largest-selling console ever in a few years.
Source: GameSpot