One million pre-orders for PES3

One million happy little gamer-people have pre-ordered Pro Evolution Soccer 3, Konami gleefully announced this morning, ahead of the game's PS2 release on October 17th. Although a spokesman wasn't able to confirm whether that's actual bona fide pre-orders or just the amount that shop owners have requested, it seems a safe bet that lots of people will be picking it up next Friday. We certainly will.

Of course success is nothing new to the PES series. Winning Eleven 7, the Japanese precursor to PES3, is still sitting pretty in the Top 10 of the charts over there after a couple of months. It reached one million sales within three weeks of its early August launch. As for Pro Evolution Soccer 2, last year's (whisper it) arguably a little bit flawed version of the game, that's pretty close to 1.5 million units according to Konami, thanks to a bit of help from a Platinum re-release in September.

We'll be bringing you a review of Pro Evolution Soccer 3 sometime in the next fortnight ahead of the game's release, but we'll be sure to play it thoroughly - the final, signed off version - and for a goodly length of time before we consider wetting our digi-quills. And, it almost goes without saying, we'll be doing the same in the very near future for the PC version, which is due out in November.