The new portable video game machine from Nintendo Co. is selling briskly in the United States and Japan, and the company is well on the way to achieving its target of selling 5 million units by April.

The Kyoto-based maker of Super Mario and Pokemon games said Tuesday that U.S. and Japanese sales of the Nintendo DS, which stands for "dual screen" because of its two displays, now total more than a million.

The machine went on sale Nov. 21 in the United States and Dec. 2 in Japan, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. In just five days, 81 percent of the 570,000 hand-helds shipped to Japanese stores had already been sold.