I was one of the lucky ones. On the day of the launch of the Wii last year, I happened to visit the Circuit City website to see if any were there. Amazingly, at 7:30AM on Sunday morning, the site showed an inventory of Wiis ready for sale.
It didn’t make any sense because every other website in the whole world, it seemed, was completely sold out.
I figured it was a mistake or something, but just in case, I hurriedly entered my order online and left the house to do some errands. When I came back in the afternoon, I checked my email and there, in a surreal moment, I saw the confirmation from Circuit City that said my order was confirmed!
As the saying goes, I’d rather be lucky than good.
I went back to the website and discovered that when I stumbled upon the Circuit City website so early in the morning, it just so happened that they had just put up the ad at precisely 7:30AM.
According to those who picked one up during that day, the whole allotment was gone within minutes. The availability of the Wiis at Circuit City wasn’t advertised. They just did it, which explains why nobody (except me) was there at the time. Through dumb luck, a lucky break, or Divine Providence, I had scored a Wii while untold millions of people cried in their morning coffee because they pulled an all-nighter in the hopes of snagging a coveted Wii on the Internet, and failed.
It’s been a year later and this is the official birthday of the Wii. More than a year before its launch, practically every website on the Internet was predicting the doom of Nintendo’s Revolution, since rechristened the Wii. Critics didn’t even mention Nintendo in the same breath as Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. It was a foregone conclusion…the Nintendo machine wouldn’t even be a contender.
But your prophetic GamerNode staff saw past the anti-hype and stated boldly in October of 2005 that:
"Nintendo’s Revolution may be more of a surprise than first thought. As it was in Aesop’s fable about the race between the tortoise and the hare, will Nintendo be the winner of the Console Wars when the dust settles? We’ll all find out in less than a year from now."
In July of 2006, we predicted:
"The next-gen game console race was once considered, by practically everyone, to be a two-horse race, with Nintendo not even being mentioned. But as this story unfolds, it seems as though the "long-shot’ in the race may not only be a contender, but may finish ahead of the odds-on favorite, Sony."
So here we are in 2007 and Nintendo has taken the world by storm with its Wii. How did we know? Call it a gut reaction or gamer sense, but somehow, the possibility of a game console that would do things to offer a new gaming experience tantalized and caught our imagination regardless of it being only slightly ahead of the GameCube in power.
Of course, those who bashed the Wii in its formative stages will now say that they always knew that Nintendo’s game console would be a hit. But here, in black and white, is the evidence that we actually said it would even outsell Sony’s PS3.
And if anyone remembers way back to 2005 and 2006, saying something like this was like saying a high school basketball team could beat the Miami Heat, (when Shaq and Kobe were there, of course.)
Ok Nintendo, we saw it coming, now how about a few free Wiis to show your gratitude to us?
Well, maybe not, but it was worth a try.
