The REAL War of the Consoles

With all of the media created hype surrounding the PS3, it was expected that there would be a number of riots and acts of misconduct. It was surprsing to see how many of them emerged. Due to the severe lack of units, mobs emerged waiting in line for the upcoming realease of the PS3. It was released on November 17, 2006, with lines forming on November 15. With only 400,000 units in North America, it was a given that not everyone would be getting their new toy that day. Tempers flared and greed got the best of mankind that day. One account occurred at the Super Wal-Mart in Palmdale, where it was temporarily closed because of a group of angry line-waiters. The crowd was asked to move the line from inside of the store to the outdoor area in order to provide room for other customers, in order to reserve their place in line, they made a mad dash over to the exit, knocking over anything and anyone they needed to. The local Sherrif's office was called in order to restore the sanity and order. The world as we know it, is about to change.


Luckily, Nintendo had a much smoother release two days later with their Wii. North America was supplied with a larger number of units in contrast to SONY's PS3. Despite the larger stock, gamers around the nation flocked to their local electronics store and snapped up all of the units. Searches show that the Toys R Us in Times Square, New York was the only store to have Wii's available to the public. This brought in a crowd of over 1,000 people waiting to purchase the very first Wii. The honor went to Isaiah Triforce Johnson, who was wearing a Nintendo Power Glove while waiting in line for a week. Johnson told the owner that he had legally changed his name to include "Triforce," a reference to the familiar "Zelda" series.