I didn’t really think I’d ever be one of those people sitting out in front of a Best Buy for days on end in the hopes to get a console on it’s launch day. That changed when I saw the original gameplay movies of the Nintendo Wii. I thought the specs for the machine were laughable, it’s basically a gamecube with a few tweaks here and there and figured Nintendo had really screwed the pooch on this one. Plus “Wii”!? What a stupid name. But when I saw the movies it just seemed so awesome. I mean instead of sitting with an oddly shaped controller you got to control things by actually moving the remote it seemed to different, and yet awesome.

After I saw that I started to read more about the system and some of the games that were coming out at launch. All it did was get me more into the system and clinched the deal to try to get one on launch day. I’ve never done it before and didn’t think I ever would. I mean I love me some videogames but I don’t love them quite enough to sit around and camp out at some store for a day or two just to get one.

My original plan was to simply wake up really early Sunday morning on the 19th and try to find a local Target or Toys ‘R Us that had a lot in stock. That got changed when Jamie reminded me that we were to go down to the Keys to celebrate one of her friends’ birthday. It kind of screwed up my plans since the Keys doesn’t exactly have a lot of places to buy electronics. There are no Best Buy’s, CircuitCities, Target’s, nothing, save for a lone K-Mart in Key Largo that sells some electronics.

Then Jamie reminded me that not everyone in the Keys is interested in things such as videogames. They’d rather wake up at the ass-crack of dawn and go fishing. So maybe it was a good thing I was going down there when it launched.

After driving down to the Keys on Saturday and partying it up with her friends, she abducted her friend and went off for a girls-only slumber party. I on the other hand drove over to the K-Mart, parked my car and proceeded to get sober while falling asleep in it. It’s a weird sensation sleeping in your car in a parking lot waiting for 7am to roll around. It might’ve sucked more if more than one other person had come around because then I might have had to actually camp outside in the somewhat cold weather.

Instead I got a few hours of sleep and then woke up around 4am or so, after which I would go through this process. Look around and make sure no one else had arrived, when I saw no one I leaned back and tried to close my eyes. Slowly I could feel myself start to fall asleep but almost as soon as that happened I would hear a noise outside and snap awake and look down at my watch, only to see instead of the 35 minutes it felt like had passed, only 5 had passed.

That continued for way way waaay too long. Though at some point I must’ve slept for a bit longer since I don’t really have a recollection of the hours between 4:30 and 5:15 am.

Once 6am rolled around and K-Mart employee’s started to come in the other woman would walk up to the door and try to inform them what she wanted. I just sat in my car and tried to will time to go by faster. Finally at about 6:45 the manager and one other employee came out and told myself, the other woman and a new couple who had arrived at about 6 that they were going to let us in early to get the systems. They wanted us to be able to go home and get some sleep earlier, something which I thought was pretty rad.

What we also found out then was that the store only had a total of 6 systems, 3 of which obviously were sold before the place even opened. When I got back to work on Monday and talked to a coworker who camped out for 2 days at a local Best Buy it made me realize that it probably was a damned good idea to have gone down to the Keys to get my hands on a Wii.

And goddamn is it so fun to play.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 10:13 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.