Do you remember when....?

[WiteoutKing]

I will admit, I've been a Nintendo fan from the beginning. I was a fan when Nintendo was doing well and I was a fan when it was doing poorly. I knew as soon as I heard about the motion-and-accelerometer controller that the Wii was going to be huge. I just had no idea how huge. I thought "Hey, the Wii may actually be able to put up a fight this time around. But I bet the PS3 will still be on top."

I had no idea how huge the Wii would be until May 2005. I and two of my friends were able to score tickets to the Nintendo World Store's E3 party inside the store in New York City. This consisted of two events.

The first was a live feed of Nintendo's E3 conference. The air was electric. Words cannot describe what that room sounded and felt like. Hundreds of people packed into the two-floor store, cheering at the games getting announced. We saw the video for Super Mario Galaxy and the building erupted in applause. The first in-game action from Twilight Princess was met with screams. After the announcement, the building was open for playing demos of the upcoming GameCube, Nintendo DS, and Wii games. A friend of mine took third place in the Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix tournament (I was in fifth until the last person played, who took fourth and bumped me down).

Then we were asked to step outside for a few minutes, they closed the store to the public, went ticket-only, and it basically turned into a Nintendo club for the night. There was a music contest, where a deejay would play a few seconds of a song from a Nintendo game, and the first person to guess correctly won some small prizes. Some Zelda-themed quizzes were going on downstairs, the other friend that went won a TP shirt for getting an answer correct.

Upstairs at what was normally one of the registers was an station where you could bring a DS and get an official E3 2005 etching on it. I would have gotten mine etched, except I was not going to be in NYC the next day to pick it up. Both of my friends got etches. One of them wound up selling his on eBay... to the second person... who wound up selling his on eBay... to me. I've got it in bubble-wrap right now since I'm still moving things into my new apartment, but I'm the proud owner of 1 of 55 DSs with the 2005 E3 etching.

The response from fans and non-fans alike was enough for me to realize that the Wii would exceed anyone's highest expectations of the system or the company.