I drove by the Software Etc near my place shortly after midnight and saw a suprisingly long line. So I snapped a picture. Sorry about blurry photo. No flash, so shutter speed was pretty long.
Hi!
I just got back from Toy's R Us. I knew you guys were looking for some pics
to put up on your site, so I brought along my digital camera. This Toys R Us
was located in Brooklyn, New York. They had 500 Gamecube's for the launch
this morning. I got there at 8:00, and the store was supposed to open at
10:00. The first pic is of the line in front of me as soon as I arrived
(about 30-40 people). The second one is a wide shot of the line at about
10:05 (I could not get the whole line in one shot, there was a countless
number of people, I would assume around 300. The white arrow points to my
brother who I was with). Originally, as you can tell from the pics, we were
in a pretty well organized line. We were told that at 10:00 they would open
the doors and let us in 10 people at a time. That story changed fast. At
10:15 the flood gates opened. There was a mad stampede to the R'Zone, which
was loacted at the other end of the store. Once in the R'Zone things went
from bad to worse, memory cards were gone in about 5 seconds, controllers
were being thrown around along with the games. I am proud to say that I did
get my hands on everything that I needed and I was out of the store within a
half hour however I do not know what happened to everyone else.
I hope the pics come out good enough to put up on the site, the early morning
sun was extremely bright.
A proud gamecube owner,
Glen Stoller from Brooklyn, New York.
This was the first time I camped for a system, and we went at 3 pm. There were some people that had been there since 2:45. We were actually quite ready for the long haul, but some of the people that came as late as 8 probably were not. However, the most disturbing person came at 5 pm. She thought she was the leader of this whole line, and even started an unofficial "list." We were planning on buying 3 systems, one for us and two for our friends. This seemed stupid, and I knew we couldn't pull it off, so luckily my mom actually got those people to come and buy the systems themselves. But then the lady wouldn't let them sit near us, because according to the list, they had to be down the line. This was really moronic, cause in the end we were the second people there, but that lady got hers much quicker! But this happened later, because there were many hours of waiting which was to be expected. Finally, my mom got fed up with the lady's list, and started telling her where she could stick her list, and wondered who died and made her the authority. Then she went on to confront the staff of Wal-Mart, who were being cowards and not involved at all, and finally convinced them to give out the tickets so we could return at midnight and not miss out on getting Gamecube. So those of you who are embarrassed of your mothers, you shouldn't be. Most are willing to do the right thing to make everybody happy.
Last night at 6:00 I decided to head out to my local 24-7 Walmart. I got there 7th in line where the people in first had been there since 10:00 A.M.! Thats alot of time. I had fun when my friends suprised me by coming up to see iff I got it or not. My friends and I had fun talking to the people around us. There were also some good loking women there also, WOOHOO! Ahem. Anyways, we were told that they had 36 'cubes and ton's of controllers. The line was slow until 10:30 when 36 people all gathered in line. Good thing was, no one was turned away! They only had 3 games, Luigi's Mansion, Wave Race:Blue Storm, and All Star Baseball 2002. Luigi's Mansion sold the most. After I got my Jet Black Cube, I went home and slept. Today, I woke up and headed out to our huge strip mall containing Slackers(Small St. Louis Cd.Games chain), Best Buy, and Wal-mart. None had cubes and only a few games in stock. Sails were good here in St.Louis, Missouri.
Sincerely,
Matt Ketring
my name's Dennis MOrgan, aka AmazingDM.
My launch went as follows-
it started over a year ago, when I first got excited about GameCube, I immediately went to Software Etc. and reserved one (especially after the PS2 fiasco) and at the time reserves for systems were only ten bucks (a few months later they become fifty dollars to reserve and then they just stopped altogether).
On November 7th I bought Super Monkey Ball and Rogue Leader and last Wednesday I picked up a Spice controller and memory card (had to work for those though, Spice was limited to about 1 per 20 controllers).
Then last night, I went to Software Etc. at 11:30PM and there were about 6-7 people ahead of me, 4 or 5 of which actally bought Cubes. Then around 11:45-11:55 a ton of people, mostly in groups of four started showing up and soon there was a large line behind me. Mind you that the only people allowed to buy one were prereservers. The guy ahead of me didn't have a preorder but was hoping to be able to buy one on Saturday since his religion prohibits him from buying things on Sunday. Lucky him, a girl in front of him had an extra preorder (or did she just not want hers? I couldn't tell, her boyfriend bought one but it's possible she might have scalped it to the guy in front of me for a little extra $$). Then when we got in they made us wait outside of the store and only let two at a time to the two registers and when I got up there I saw behind the counter were about twelve Jet and twelve Indigo. I got my brand new Indigo and walked away very proud of myself. Mind you I did have to wait over a year for the system to come out so I share in the waiting grief. I also geeked out a little and wore a Zelda shirt and wore a Star Tours Jedi Knight pass I got from Disneyland, around my neck.
I took it home, looked at all the stuff for a while, then went into my room, plugged it in, and started playing Super Monkey Ball (I thought it was symbolic that the first game on my new Nintendo was a Sega game) and played until I ran out of continues and then popped in Rogue Leader. Wow what a game!
Wow, what a SYSTEM!
So here I am, in West Bloomfield, MI. I've been reading up on Gamecube for a year and many months. I and my friends have been looking forward to this date for a LOOOOOOONG TIME!!
About a week ago my friend and I went to my local Toys R Us to reserve our games. They say they'll have 170+ units in, so we figure we'll buy our cubes there as well. Yesterday, my friend found an ad for Target, however, and they were giving away free stools with the purchase of a Gamecube. Target opens at 8 AM, TRU at 10 AM. We decide that we'll check out Target at 7:40 or so, because we don't think it'll be too bust around here. WRONG!! We wake up at 6:45 (I couldn't sleep at all in anticipation) and leave the house at 7:30. We get in front of Target, and there's a 30-40 person line. We don't think that they'll have very many cubes, so we just decided screw the stool, and we move on to Toys R Us. We get there at almost 8 AM, and there's only about 10-15 people in line! SCORE!! We set up, sitting on the side walk, and start up a nice game of Advance Wars! (awesome game) Our game (just 1v1) lasts over an hour cause we suck, but I win so it's all good :-D I guess building all medium tanks on a map with only sea and ground units is a bad idea, no matter HOW much money you have.
Anyways, we get our cubes at 10 AM (we're in the 2nd group of people to be let in), I get Rogue Leader, Monkey Ball, Tony Hawk 3, mem card, two extra controllers, they get their stuff, we had back to my house. We play for 4 hours......and I have to do homework now :-(
Oh well, it's worth it! ALL OF IT!!
Well my launch was really good actually... First i went to Circuit city at
around 8:30 or so... waiting in a small line with about 4 other people when
they started to give out tickets for the cube. I was number 4 but i
actually turned out to be number 2 cause the other people didn't show up in
time :). So Circuit city had 20 systems split evenly but to my surprise
they only had 2 games and only a handfull of accessories. I was lucky to
get a memory card from them and one game, Rogue Leader. I went home with my
black GC and two Black controllers and played the first level of Rogue...
well at the end of the level i locked up the GC already :). But no worries,
i played it again and all worked good. I decided i needed to get NHL Hitz
and THPS3 so i went to best buy and got very rude service and they couldn't
get it though there thick heads that i only wanted games and not a system
but they wanted me to take a number and wait for it. Bastards! So i walked
to Toys R Us next store and found the mother of GC stuff. They had every
controller color, and many of them too, loads of memory cards, every game
that GC has currently, and a bunch of systems left. This was at 11:00 and
they opened at 10. Surprised i asked the clerk and she told me they got 200
systems! 200!!!!! and they were still selling like hotcakes and said they
would all be gone. So that was my day, a great day indeed. And now i can't
put down NHL Hitz!!!!
Thanks,
Eric Staskiel
Simi Valley, CA
Started camping the Wal-Mart at about 10pm and there were already 24 people in line ahead of me. Good thing the store had 46 units. By time midnight came it was obvious that there were going to be more people than cubes so I purchased mine and left before the melee had a chance to start. There were 4 security folks monitoring the situation and they had even hired a detail from the local police to be on hand. My girlfriend was camping another Wal-Mart, so I called and told her to just try and get a memory card/extra controller since my store had sold out. So had hers. We got home at about 1am and I played super monkey ball with her until 4. I fell asleep, but she continued to play until 7am, then leaving for Target to pick up the contoller/memory. She reported that there was a line there for the consoles, but they DID have controllers/memory in stock so she picked up a few, came home, dropped them next to the bed and went to sleep.
What a trooper she turned out to be. I might even keep this one.
