The door to the haunted house creeks open and a terrified man with a mustache and chattering teeth peers in.

This is not the latest Disney movie, it is "Luigi's Mansion," an adventure game for Nintendo's GameCube video game console.

Powered by a copper-based IBM PowerPC chip, GameCube plays games that look better than most cartoons.

Nintendo is not the only company releasing a powerful new video game console this week.

Microsoft, creator of Word, Windows and a whole lot of billionaires, has also created an amazingly powerful game console -- Xbox. Built around a Pentium III processor, Xbox features an 8-Gbyte hard drive, a DVD drive, the latest and most impressive computer graphics technology, and an Ethernet port.

"Project Gotham Racing," a street-racing game set in such locations as New York City and London, looks photographic.

"Halo," a first-person perspective shooter for Xbox set on an alien planet is just plain dazzling.

Microsoft and Nintendo have the most powerful video consoles ever made, but they do not have a prayer of winning in a $20 billion video-game market. The best they can hope for is second place.

First place belongs to PlayStation2. Sony Computer Entertainment launched its PlayStation2 game console in October 2000.

Over the last 12 months, while Microsoft and Nintendo made marketing plans, Sony shipped 20 million PlayStation2s worldwide.

In North America, where Nintendo and Microsoft are shipping about 1 million consoles each before Christmas, Sony has already sold some 5 million consoles.

That head start also translates to advantages for players. It means that while Xbox will have a library of 18 games when it launches and Nintendo will have 25 games ready by the end of the year, Sony has 300 games for PlayStation2.

A lot of those games are dogs, but Sony has a number of great titles in the mix.

People hoping to trade games with friends will have an easier time finding partners with PlayStation2 than they will with Xbox or GameCube.

Of course, games generally look better on GameCube and Xbox. The Xbox and GameCube versions of "John Madden NFL 2002," from Electronic Arts, have helmet scuffs and reflections not found in the version for PlayStation2. But with several times the market base of its competitors, Sony will get first dibs on many of the most popular games.

Sony has already had a few million-selling games. But it took a while for Sony to reach that watershed, but now million-sellers are coming more regularly.

The first million-seller was Capcom's samurai game, "Onimusha."

More than one year passed between the launch of PlayStation2 and the release of "Onimusha." But "Gran Turismo 3: A-spec" followed right on the heels of "Onimusha." Then came "Devil May Cry." More recently, "Final Fantasy X" set a new speed record in reaching top sales honors.

It's a great game! Square deserves the record.

The video-game business is not a zero-sum game. With revenues that could top $24 billion this year, the games business could comfortably support all three competitors side-by-side.

But ask executives of Atari, 3DO, Sega, and NEC, and they will tell you that the market has little interest in systems that finish in third place.

After all, game consoles are only as good as the software that plays on them.

And what good is a console, if all the top game makers have abandoned it?