So, Thursday night after the Thanksgiving Day Afterparty started to wind down Patrick and I decided to go camp Best Buy for the coveted Nintendo Wii. I had heard they were opening at 5am and would have about 50 Wiis in stock to sell for Black Friday. I had come up with the theory that no right minded individual would get up at 3am to stand in front of a retail store and figured we would be the first to get some hot Wii action.
Unfortunately Overland Park is full of non-right minded individuals. When we arrived the line was already around the back of the store. Let me draw a map for you.
Mii (and Patrick)
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People that got there at 8pm the previous fucking night.
So it was stupid to wait, but we waited anyway. Around 4:30am or so a bunch of Best Buy employees started handing out tickets for the sale items and popular items. They just came down the line announcing what they had and you could take a ticket if you wanted to buy it. Finally, the moment of truth came and the Wii guy came out and told everyone that they had not gotten their shipment and that would definitely have them at open on Sunday morning.
You may remember that in my map up there some people had been camping for almost 12 hours. Woops!
Defeated, we headed home and made tentative plans to come back Sunday.
Saturday night around midnight I decided to head to Best Buy to do some recon and see what the situation was. I arrived and there were about 6-8 people already in line and Best Buy wasn’t supposed to open until 10am! I shot Patrick a SMS and let him know and then I hit the sack. Around 4am Patrick called me and told me he was going to suck it up and go for it and by about 6am he had me convinced too.
So Sunday morning I arrived at Best Buy at about 6:15am with a sleeping bag, a lantern, a pillow and a good book. The line was already around the corner of the building but when I got in line I was 34th from the front. The official Best Buy line was that there would be 50 Wiis for sale, so I felt pretty good about my position. Over the next few hours while more and more people showed up I passed the time playing the two longest games of Uno ever with some other campers and around 8:30am the Best Buy folks announced that they would be handing out tickets at 9am and they had in fact received Wiis but didn’t know how many yet. “Around 50, we think.”
The guy in line in front of me seemed to take this as some kind of personal affront. He thought that Best Buy guys were deliberately being vague or lying about the number of systems available. I thought they had probably just gotten to the store and hadn’t unloaded the palette yet. Oh, and at one point someone walked from a car towards the front of the line and people just completely freaked out. “No line cutting!” “Don’t let him cut in line!”
Settle down, consumers. Please.
So 9am rolled around and they did the ticket thing. Patrick was #28 (if I remember correctly) and I was #36. Booyah! The last person to get a ticket had arrived around 8am and I’d guess there were probably 50 or so people in line behind him.
Patrick and I cruised over to The BK Cafe for some breakfast and went back to get some damn Wiis!
By time we got back the line had shrunk down quite a bit but there were lots of new faces. Patrick had a good time telling everyone that if they didn’t already have a ticket that they were screwed and quite a few people simply didn’t believe it. One particularly pasty geek who turned up at 9:45am whined that “They said it would be first come, first serve!” and we tried to explain that “Yes, it is. And we were here more firster by about 6 hours.”
And then we got our Wiis, and no extra controllers cause they were gone, and we got Zelda and Excite Truck and it completely rocks.
I haven’t played the PS3, but I have played the XBox 360 and every other system ever and I can say that so far the Wii is the funnerest of the bunch. Excite Truck is a total blast and the entire experience is just “FUN!”
The graphics suck, and it’s low powered and not HD or surround sound and it’s just totally fun. I can’t wait to get home and play some more Excite Truck.
So, James, that’s the story of the Wii.