Activision: 'Guitar Hero III' nets $115 in first week's sales. Just kidding.

I got a hilarious e-mail this morning from video game giant Activision touting the tremendous sales of the latest iteration of its hit franchise, Guitar Hero.

The subject line of the e-mail began, "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock earns $115 in first week."

After I got through blinking a few times to make sure I was reading it right--I was--I looked into the body of the e-mail and saw that, yes, the company had left out a rather meaningful word: "million."

'Guitar Hero III' netted opening week sales of $115 million, the biggest first week in Activision's history.

(Credit: Activision)

So, no, Guitar Hero III didn't sell two copies in its first week. It actually did rather spectacularly, netting the highest opening-week sales for any game in Activision's history, with a total of $115 million in revenues.

That's not bad, though it does pale slightly in comparison to the opening day sales of $170 million for Halo 3, a statistic that Microsoft touted as the single-biggest opening day in entertainment history.

Whatever. It's pretty clear that Guitar Hero III did pretty well, and kudos to Activision, RedOctane--the Activision-owned studio that published the game--and Neversoft, the developers, for that.

I interviewed Dusty Welch, RedOctane's head of publishing today, and the Q&A will be posted within a few days. Please stay tuned for some interesting reading about Welch's thoughts on Guitar Hero's heritage, its future, its place in the market, and lots more.

[rdupuy11]

interesting indeed

$115 million in a week, means that Guitar Hero III actually sold more than the entire real music industry did in the same week.

OK....actually I'm kidding, $115 million for that week, whereas its estimated the music industry can still sell 10 billion in Cd's in a year, that would work out to 192 million per week, on average.