After waiting for more than 200 hours on the pavement in Times Square, Isaiah “Triforce” Johnson only had one thing on his mind. It was not food, not sex, not even some sleep.

Although it had just struck midnight the video-game buff could think only of his new Nintendo Wii machine, the first sold in the world.

“I am going to go to the hotel across the street and play this,” Triforce said. “Gamers do not sleep. We sleep when we pass out. I guess my biological gaming clock will tell me when to pass out,” the married 29-year-old gamer said. “I go home when I am done playing.”

The Wii so prized by Triforce is Nintendo’s pre-Christmas entry into the $30 billion dollar (£16 billion) worldwide video-gaming market and its answer to Sony’s new PlayStation 3. Both are competing against Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which came out last year.

While Sony and Microsoft have produced a pricey powerhouse that can anchor a home-entertainment system, Nintendo has taken a nimbler iPod-style approach that fans say will revolutionise video games.

The Wii’s key innovation is a motion-sensitive wireless control — the wii-mote — that lets players interact with the console by waving their hand.

The gleaming white device has the appearance of a TV remote that has mated with an iPod. Wave it at the TV screen and it becomes a magic wand, guiding characters in the virtual-reality world.

“You do the motions. It’s the first time in two or three years that I got butterflies playing a game,” said Kevin Twomey, 25, a computer programmer from Cork, Ireland, who had flown the Atlantic to buy his machine.

For a novice gamer the experience is like shaking your fist at the TV screen, except that the TV responds.

Swing it laterally in one game and it acts as a baseball bat, down to the cocking of the wrists. Thrust it vertically in another game and you throw a basketball towards the hoop. With the right software, the Wii-mote can become a golf club, a bowling ball, a tennis racket, or a steering wheel.

“It’s up to whatever the game designers’ imagination can come up with. It could be a frying pan and you could use it to fry eggs,” said Tom Russo, editorial director of the G4 gaming network on cable television.

The Wii will go on sale in Britain on December 8. Michael Pachter, an industry analyst, predicted that it would achieve a 40 per cent market share in Japan and a third of the market in US and Europe.

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