Whether you
call it the "Wii," the "Revolution" or the "$250 I can't
afford to spend but will anyway," the long-awaited new Nintendo system
has arrived. We found out late in the week that Nintendo was throwing a
big Wii launch party on the West coast over the weekend. Turns out, they
were holding the party at the EB Games in Universal City Walk. Living only
10 minutes away from Universal City in Hollywood, we quickly hopped in the
car to see exactly what Nintendo stuff was going on there. So here ya go;
a photo gallery of some of the things we saw at the big West Coast
Nintendo Wii launch party!
While this
may appear to be a long corridor of lost souls, it's actually just a small
portion of the ridiculously long line of people hoping to get their hands
on a Wii system.
The line
continued across another bridge, down a flight of stairs and out into the
main city walk area. The line then split and then reformed behind a
pathway of metal railings so people who actually weren't there for the Wii
could walk on by.
There were
several of these Nintendo Segways (or "SegWii" as I'm sure the promoters
would call them) rolling around the City Walk streets to demonstrate the
Wii games.
What's nice
is the Segway riders actually had the Wii controllers with them and would
stop so that people who had been waiting in line for god knows how many
hours could actually try out the system.
A salsa band
also tried their hardest to entertain everybody at a dinner club along
with the people waiting in line...
...but as
you can see, most of the people in line had other things on their mind. On
a related note; I've never seen more Nintendo DS systems together
in one location. It seemed like every other person in line had one, and
that's no exaggeration.
Other
campers tried sleeping away the time, hoping that when they awoke, they'd
have a brand new Nintendo Wii in their hands. These are the kind of pipe
dreams that only Mario should have.
And speaking
of sleep, they apparently decided that a good way to promote the Wii was
to have some giant inflatable pillows outside of the EB Games store.
A lot of
people were talking to this guy because he was the first in line and had
apparently been camping out for the Wii for 40 hours. If
you're wondering why he wasn't wearing a shirt, it's because he clearly
has no job and had to sell it for food.
These two
guys were in charge of blocking off the entrance of EB Games until the
stroke of midnight. This also meant that they had to endure an entire
evening of questions such as, "Are there enough Wii's for everybody?"
and "Where does the line for the Wii start?" As you can see, they
were very happy about it. Very happy.
Here they
are interviewing some executives from GameStop/EB Games about the new
system... because so many kids care about the thoughts of some rich old
guys who would most likely use the Wii systems as wheel chocks for their
private jets rather than actually play 'em.
If you
weren't one of the five-thousand people who brought a DS to the party,
there were still plenty of kiosks set up where you could try out the
latest games.
Many people
gathered around the courtyard to watch some of the acrobatic performers
that were hired for the event. Not sure what that really had to do with
the Wii, but I guess they gotta find some kind of use for circus
performers.
After the
acrobats were done performing, the DJ cranked up the music (which included
techno music versions of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Message
In A Bottle") and the security guys then opened up the gates and
begged allowed people to come up close to the DJ and dance the night away!
My hat goes off to the man in orange because he was dancing up a storm! Even though roughly 15 people out of a crowd of hundreds actually
danced to the music at first, he wasn't gonna let that stop him from
lettin' loose! Me thinks he had one too many margaritas from the
nearby Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant. And if you want to see him in
action, I'll be including a video clip of the drunk man in orange dancing
up a storm at the end of this photo gallery!
