How to save a Wii (from falling into someone elses hands)

After posting at 3:40am this morning, I did not go to bed as planned. I figured since I had waited in line for such a long time, I would at least hook it up and see the boot screen. Well, a half hour of config turned into playing Zelda until 7am. That game is really good! It uses the controllers in such a good way and it's fun and easy to pick up.

I really lucked out on getting a Wii. A friend of mine called me about 5:30pm yesterday and said that he'd spoken with Game Crazy in Redmond, and that they supposedly still had more units than people in line. I got in the car and drove over there, picking up my friend on the way. When we got to the store there was no line outside the store so we went in and asked what the deal was with camping for the Wii. The guy just said that if we got in line now, we'd be guaranteed one. Now, this Game Crazy is in the same place as the local Hollywood video (maybe they all are arranged like this?), and there's a doorway in the wall that lets you enter from the Hollywood video side, and this is where I saw a few people waiting in line. As we headed into Hollywood video, I realized that the line was slightly longer than I had thought at first. There were at least 70 people ahead of us when we found the end of the line. I was a bit unsure as to whether they would have that many units, but shortly thereafter one of the guys accommodating the camping (inside the Hollywood video store! No out in the cold for us) told us that this was the Nintendo official launch place locally and that they had 200 units and plenty of games to go around. Nintendo also had people on-site that had brought extra copies of Zelda, and they had a bunch of swag that they handed out every so often during the wait for midnight to roll around. The waiting around actually went a lot quicker than I thought, mainly because we had some cool people next to us that we ended up chatting with most of the evening.

Once the clock struck 12:00, the line compacted and then nothing happened for an hour. We didn't move a foot until just past 1am! We started to realize that this was going take quite a bit longer than the 1 hour or so we had guessed initially. Well, long story short, at 3:10am I walked out with a Wii system, an extra Wiimote and nunchuck, a classic controller and 5 games (Zelda, COD3, Excite Truck, Rayman Raving Rabbids and Trauma Center: Second Opinion). But it was worth the wait! While COD3 will probably never get any real play time on the system (I really just bought it because I was curious how an FPS would feel like with the controller), Zelda is definetly one of the better games I've played. The included Wii Sports disc contains quite a few fun party games as well, bowling being my current favorite. The rest of the games will have to wait until I've played a bit more Zelda.

All in all, the Game Crazy and Hollywood video people did an awesome job coordinating everything and they had plenty of people watching for people trying to cut in line and keep people already in line from trashing the place. They also got a guy in from a local deli that sold sandwiches and snacks at normal prices for the hungry. The Hollywood manager even walked around collecting trash at regular intervals and took orders for soda and snacks that he would then bring out to you so that you wouldn't have to leave your spot.  Oh yeah, and the Game Crazy people did walk through the line a few times as it grew and made sure to let people that wouldn't be able to get a unit that evening know early enough so that they didn't have to hang around until midnight.  A decent thing to do, thought.  Much kudos to all of them.