I spent much of Sunday afternoon trying to track down a Nintendo DS. I didn't actually want to buy a system--I just wanted to see if I could find one. I don't know what it is about hard-to-find new releases, but once someone tells me that a new product will be impossible to find, I can't help but go on the hunt. When Greg mentioned that he and Ricardo were trying to track down the redesigned PlayStation 2, I just had to jump on the phones and try to find one. Fortunately we were able to find one at a Fry's Electronics in the South Bay and put together a nice hands-on preview of the system. In my youth, I managed to find a Super Nintendo System three days before release at the San Jose Flea Market of all places, and finding a Nintendo 64 on launch day was surprisingly easy.

I was working at FiringSquad when Sony launched the PlayStation 2. The PlayStation 2 hunt was a little different from the rest since FiringSquad's sister site, Gamers.com, ran a crazy promotion that year where we gave away 60 PlayStation 2 Systems right after the console had launched. Unfortunately, since supplies were short, we could only get a handful of systems from Sony. The entire company was tasked to locate the systems we were giving away for the promotion. We sent people to camp out at the Sony Metreon for the official launch, and one of our programmers even wrote a web program that monitored all the major online retailer sites for PlayStation 2 in-stock message changes. Systems were selling for over $700 on eBay during that period, but we still managed to obtain all 60 console systems from various retail sources.

Finding the Nintendo DS looked like it would be a nice challenge. Judging by the DS preorder stories, I was already pretty sure that the specialized game stores like EB Games and GameStop would be sold out, but I had high hopes for the major retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, or Best Buy. Unfortunately, I waited until Sunday afternoon to start calling and visiting retailers. Most of the stores had plenty on units in the morning, but all had sold out by the afternoon. Right when I got back home after my failed DS hunt, my friend calls me with the news that Best Buy didn't have any Nintendo DS units left, but he did find World of Warcraft sitting on the shelves two days before it's supposed to released.

Hopefully, I'll have my consolation prize installed and ready to go when the World of Warcraft signup page opens up tonight.