SS4 Shinobi (of DOA fame) waited in line for thirteen hours to purchase his very own wii. Not quite as hip as New York, we passed some time kicking around a soccer ball before abandoning the boys to their vigil.
Wanderer, from Hardcore Gamer, interviewed the kids (text copied and pasted below). We heard about the "rampant anti-PS3 humor" in response to the question, why the wii and not the ps3?
- "It doesn't cost $600."
- "The people at Sony suck."
- "I don't want to get shot."
These were just the answers Shinobi was inclined to tell us grown ups after the fact.
Wanderer: "Due to family obligations, I was in Overland Park, Kansas during the Wii launch. It's one of those peculiar places that have arisen in the Midwest lately, where the city's planners have reacted to the essential boredom of their location by turning some or all of their city into a consumer wonderland, with streets and streets of newly-built condos shot through the neighborhood like a vein of pyrite. It is, in short, a nice place to pursue the quiet desperation inherent to the suburban condition bring your kids up, or to retire to.
For some reason, the two local Best Buys were the only places that pursued anything interesting for the launch; the gaming stores were closed, and while most other electronics outlets had signs up on the door, almost none of them were planning to alter their usual hours. Campers had started to set up tents and sleeping bags on the sidewalks outside on Saturday afternoon; one kid, a fifteen-year-old high school student, had been there since school let out on Friday.
Most of the people in line were die-hard Nintendo fans, with the Game Boys to prove it; one fan was carrying a blue Game Boy Pocket as a badge of hardcore honor. (I really should go ahead and put my old gray brick Game Boy on a chain and wear it around.) Several others, such as a three-man contingent from the local community college's gaming club (truly hardcore individuals who had neither sleeping bags nor tents), were veterans of the Xbox 360 launch, which they had also camped out for.
By nine-thirty Sunday morning, the party was effectively over. You would've needed to be clairvoyant to find a Wii in Overland Park; most of the stores had opened early to accomodate the people waiting in line, and most of them had also given out slips of paper entitling those holding them to one of the rapidly-diminishing stocks of Wiis. Twilight Princess and Red Steel had also sold out right alongside the Wii, and there weren't many copies of Trauma Center or Marvel Ultimate Alliance left either.
All in all, it was a relatively sedate scene. There was a lot of DS multiplayer going on, as well as an improvised soccer game in one store's shipping lane. By about midnight on Saturday, it had gone from a few campers to a bizarre sort of party atmosphere. The best part: rampant anti-PS3 hostility.
...well, I found it funny."
Leave a comment