Imagine a Sumo tournament with a young Konishiki battling Akebono, the winner of which must then challenge Godzilla. Such a battle is going on right now in the video game arena.

Nintendo and Microsoft, both behemoths in their own right, are slapping, pushing, shoving and throwing for second place in the Japanese game market.

And what's the prize for the winner? It certainly will not be automatic recognition as the yokozuna of Akihabara. In this case, the winner gets the right to limp on to the mat to face a bigger and healthier competitor -- PlayStation2.

Stumbling on the salt

At the risk of carrying this analogy way too far, I would like to point out that both Nintendo and Microsoft began this preliminary match by stumbling.

After an impressive launch in the United States in November, Microsoft's Xbox game console got off on the wrong foot in Japan.

Microsoft sent 250,000 Xboxes to Japan for its Feb. 22 launch and sold approximately half of them. To be precise, Famitsu reported that Microsoft sold 123,000 Xboxes in the first week. All things considered, this was a less than awe-inspiring start.

Microsoft may have tripped worst, but it did not stumble first. That honor went to Kyoto-based Nintendo. Thanks to a nearly invisible advertising campaign and a three-game launch library, Nintendo only sold 175,000 GameCubes during the first week of its September launch.

Consumers only purchased 1.59 games for every Xbox sold last week, but GameCube's hardware-to-software sales ratios were not much better.

Sales ratios may sound like meaningless marketing hype, but they really do matter. Consumers who are excited about their consoles purchase lots of games. Consumers who are less confident will wait.

So here are Nintendo and Microsoft. Both companies had bad launches in Japan and impressive launches in the United States. Both companies sold their entire U.S. inventory in November and December.

Nintendo has an early lead, however. After its dismal start, Nintendo released "Pikmin" and "Super Smash Bros. Melee" and sales picked up. "Animal Forest" has also been a great title for Nintendo.

Between September and October, GameCube sales were in the hundreds of thousands. By the end of December, spurred on by "Pikmin" and "Super Smash Bros.," Nintendo had sold more than 2.3 million consoles.

And now the bad news. Having fixed the leaks at the end of last year, Nintendo is again looking a bit tipsy. As of three weeks ago, there were only three GameCube titles in the Famitsu Top 20 game list.

That's not very good. There were two games on that list for Dreamcast -- a system Sega discontinued nearly one year ago.

But Microsoft has troubles of its own that go deeper than the couple hundred complaints of the brand new consoles scratching up shiny new game discs.

Xbox started out with a bigger library than GameCube, but it was a library filled with duds.

It is fair to say that Tecmo's "Dead or Alive 3" is one of the best games in years, but "Shrek," "Double Steal," and "Kabuki Warriors" are dismal. Microsoft must overcome the problem of being an outsider.

Nintendo has left the door open for Xbox by releasing too few GameCube games. If Microsoft maintains a more aggressive publishing schedule and withholds the future "Kabuki Warrior" class of crummy games, gamers will come around.

So the door is open. If Nintendo's Konishiki comes out with more games, it will win.

If Microsoft's Akebono drops titles the caliber of "Double Steals" from its lineup and floods the market with more of the quality of "Dead or Alive," it will win.

But the winner of that battle goes straight up against a monster opponent.

Godzilla on the mat

In marketing terms, Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation2 is Godzilla on the mat. It goes where it wants, it eats what it wants, and it always wins.

And just like Godzilla, PlayStation2 comes from mysterious origins. When Sony launched PS2 in March 2000 the world went crazy. One Nintendo executive called it the "Hurricane PlayStation2."

Consumers purchased 680,000 on the very first day. It sold out.

By comparison, Xboxes and GameCubes were readily available on Sept. 15 and Feb. 23 -- the day after their respective launches. In fact, PlayStation2 was hard to find for weeks after its launch.

But PlayStation2 software sales were dreadful. It took months before Capcom's "Onimusha" became the first game to sell 1 million copies on PlayStation2, and the software-to-hardware ratio remained below 2 games for every system sold for six months.

And now Sony has sold more than 8 million PlayStation2s in Japan, more than 20 million worldwide. Nintendo and Microsoft need games, Sony has games. Sony has so many good games that such top-notch titles as "Ico" and "Jak and Daxter" are being overlooked in the Japanese market.

Neither Nintendo nor Microsoft are likely to unseat such an unbeatable monster, but that will not stop them from fighting a hard-pitched battle for second place.

This is not a winner-takes-all situation. The biggest winner in this match -- almost certainly Sony -- will make tens of billions of dollars, but the second place finisher will still make billions of dollars.

And for a purse of that size, even Akebono and Konishiki might come out of retirement.