KYOTO, Japan, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Japan’s Nintendo Co Ltd said sales of its Wii video game console in the United States hit a record high in December, countering market worries that momentum for the three-year old machine had peaked.

Nintendo said sales of the Wii, which outsells Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360, had recovered from a slowdown earlier last year thanks to a series of strong new game titles such as “New Super Mario Bros. Wii” action game, and a hardware price cut.

Nintendo cut the Wii price by 20 percent in the second half of last year.

“It’s a combination of factors. Towards December, our software lineup got stronger. Also, the price cut certainly helped, although it is not the sole factor,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

Nintendo sold more than 3 million units of the Wii in the United States in December 2009, up sharply from 2.14 million units a year earlier.

On the handheld side, Nintendo’s DS sales in the United States likely exceeded 10 million units in 2009, topping the previous record of 9.96 million posted in 2008, Iwata said.

Before Iwata’s comments, shares in Nintendo closed up 1.4 percent at 22,930 yen, outperforming the Nikkei average, which rose 0.3 percent.

(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka, editing by Will Waterman and Rupert Winchester)