This morning in Japan was the launch of the new ‘jet black’ DS lite. Despite pretty much everyone in Japan already owning a DS in some form or another, the demand was still there and people were eager to get their hands on one as soon as possible. The Yodobashi Camera store in Akihabara (above) found shoppers outside its doors at midnight, waiting for the shop to open at 9.30am. With around 150 people there at 7am, and the queue becoming increasingly longer, the decision was made to open half an hour earlier at 9am. At that point in time over at the Ikebukuro branch of Bic Camera (pictured below), 300 customers were still waiting for the store to open. As the first customers were let in, the queue had swelled to 400.

One customer when questioned upon their purchased said that the 16,800 yen ($145/£75) DS lite was for their grandfather. Part of me thinks “oh, that’s nice, great to see the Nintendo reaching such a wide audience”, the other part thinks, “why on earth did you wait in a queue for hours, buying a gift for someone who probably doesn’t care one bit what the colour is, when you could of got him a normal DS for half the price?!” I suppose it depends on how much you like your grandfather.

Source: Famitsu

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.