The Wii Launches in Japan

The Wii has launched in Japan, successfully and without many of the incidents associated with the PlayStation 3 launch. Joystiq's coverage of the Wii's painless Nippon birth has nothing but praise for the crowd control efforts of electronics outlets. The talk is entirely of sellouts and happy gamers. From the article: "Numerous methods of retail were used to launch the Wii, and these varied from store to store. Yodobashi kept its customers camped overnight in a parking lot, distributing numbered tickets to determine the order of entrance, before opening its doors at 7am. Bic Camera also opened at 7am, although most of the 650 people in line there didn't arrive until the first trains of the morning began to run at around 5am. Famitsu reports that the Tokyo Ikebukuro branch of Bic Camera sold out if its allocation of 1,200 units, while the Tokyo Yuuraku-cho arm of Bic Camera declared the console "sold out" at 5.41am when the 1,500th person arrived in the queue there." Kotaku has even more extensive coverage, with plenty of photos of the waiting lines.

Re:wow

[Hubbell]

No wonder the PS3 was hard to find, they shipped half of the available consoles to one store!

Oblig xkcd

[Terminal Saint]

Sums it up pretty well... [xkcd.com]

Re:in other new

[masklinn]

Actually, if you watch Famitsu's pictures of the launch you'll see a frightening amount of women (that's like guys, but with more breasts and less penises, if you don't know what it means) for a japanese system launch.