Video-game icons Super Mario and Donkey Kong will soon have a prestigious Manhattan address when Nintendo opens its retail store, NintendoWorld, at 10 Rockefeller Center. A company spokesman said the store, the first in America, should be ready in late spring, but said there was no opening date scheduled. The store will span two floors and feature “sampling bars,” where gamers can pull up chairs and test unreleased games and new releases.

The Manhattan single-brand retail landscape has seen its share of flops – Disney and Coca-Cola are the most obvious examples – when well-regarded consumer product companies decide to get into the mass-retail business and lease thousands of square feet near Fifth Avenue. However, the NintendoWorld store has an excellent likelihood of being profitable, according to the executive editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly, Mark MacDonald, because it will have a hugely popular “Pokemon Center” within the store.

These “stores within stores,” said Mr. MacDonald, regularly draw thousands of families in Japan each weekend, where the children buy dozens of the latest Pokemon games or accessories and then spend hours competing against one another. The Pokemon Company is a unit of Nintendo.

“It’s a pretty cunning strategy. The kids love to go there, the parents spend lots of money, and the older siblings, looking around for something to do, get turned onto the latest Super Mario game.”

Mr. MacDonald said that although the company does not break out Pokemon Center earnings, or discuss how many Nintendo units they sell there, it is a widely-held belief in the gaming industry that millions of dollars in profits are added each year to corporate coffers from these sales.

The company announced this week that they expected to report profits of about $750 million for the year ended March 31.

Within the nearly $25 billion interactive game global market, Nintendo occupies what Mr. MacDonald characterized as a “very profitable third place,” behind Sony and Microsoft. The company’s strategy has been to avoid developing the realistic and often controversial games like Take II Interactive’s “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” and to focus instead on issuing new editions of classic games like Donkey Kong. The annual top 10 rankings of video games by units sold included only one of Nintendo’s offerings, “Pokemon, Fire Red,” according to market-research firm NPD Funworld.

“Donkey Kong and Super Mario are perfect for 9-year-olds; My buddies and I play them still because I remember when they were advanced technology and graphics,” said Mr. MacDonald describing the typical Nintendo gamer. “They don’t have anybody else in between.”

One area where the NintendoWorld store may help boost the bottom line is in the growing handheld video game market, where Mr. MacDonald characterized the company as “far and away the industry leader.” Moreover, portable games are targeted to grow to $11.7 billion in sales by 2007 from $3.9 billion in 2003, according to DFC Intelligence, a San Diego-based market research firm. The company said that the two leaders will likely remain Nintendo and Sony.