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So, as I'm sure many of you guys you guys already know, Nintendo-god Shigeru Miyamoto was at the Nintendo World store in NYC on Sunday morning. Many hundreds showed up; maybe a thousand. When I walked the three or four blocks back to the subway station, the line didn't just stretch all the way back to the station; it stretched around the corner and beyond. I didn't really grasp the enormity of the crowd until I got back there. See, I was with the two hundred-some who had camped outside the store on Saturday night.
My history with Miyamoto games is largely the early work. Like many kids who grew up when I did, I played and beat the Mario games over and over again. SMB 1-3 were the only really memorable NES games I owned back then. However, when Nintendo isolated itself from the rest of the industry in the N64 era, I didn't follow them. I rented the N64 to play Mario 64 in its day, and attempted to play Ocarina when I got the Gamecube port, but I never finished either. I certainly have fond memories of Mario and Zelda, and they're very important games to me personally, but I wouldn't consider myself, right now, to be a Mario or a Zelda fan. Recently, though, I'd been playing Nintendogs on my new DS. This game really gave me a feeling of the smart, experimental game design of the Nintendo of old, and when I heard about this event, I thought it'd be great to get to play it with Miyamoto himself. But I just thought it. I wasn't actuallly about to go do this.
The decision to camp out wasn't really premeditated. I found out on Tuesday, but I didn't make any plans just then. By the weekend I'd decided I wanted to go, but I was only going to come by a couple hours early. I knew I was going, but I was thinking of the huge crowds that would certainly show up to meet Miyamoto. Only the first two hundred would get an autograph, and the first ten to arrive were promised a chance to play Nintendogs with the man himself. A line like that, I thought, must be cut-throat. It'd be a fanboy riot out there. Certainly I wouldn't be able to make it in by just showing up a few hours early. On Saturday morning, I thought it over more seriously. In retrospect, I don't know what there was to think over. I had nothing to do this weekend. Here was the single most influential figure in the history of our young, beloved medium, and I was actually debating whether or not to sleep on the street in order to meet him. Who gives a shit how long the line is? Who gives a shit about sleeping on the street? Who gives a shit if there's a riot?! This is Miyamoto! Where were my prioirities? How often do people get to meet a living legend? I decided not to see Guitar Wolf that one time, too, and Bass Wolf died weeks later! Me staying here, like a pussy, is not what Bass Wolf would have wanted. By noon I'd decided to leave.
I figured that early afternoon, around 4, would be a decent time to get there. Taking into account the magnitude of the event, I estimated I'd be one of a group of fifty or so, maybe more. My line experience comes from anime conventions. If you let them, anime fans would line up outside the con center for next year's con the day after this year's ended. As it turned out, two out of the first ten guys on line were people who did anime cons, and were used to this kind of waiting. One actually recognized me by the Pac-Man hat I wore to Otakon last year. But anime wasn't nearly as big as videogames! Surely the line would be a thousand times worse for a chance to meet the most important man in videogame history.
When I got to Nintendo World, I didn't see anybody. I came in and asked a security guard if a line had started yet. He told me that the line started at 9 PM, but if I liked, I could join those kids across the street. They were waiting too. I looked across and all I saw was some guys standing outside a deli. This group was no larger than any of the others one would see loitering about the city at any given time. Could they be Miyamoto's crowd? Could I really be that early? I pointed.
"Those guys?
"Yeah."
I thought "really?" again, but I thanked him, left, and crossed the street. Upon closer inspection, these guys were all in videogame-themed t-shirts (predominantly Nintendo, and quite a few shirts bearing the likeness of Miyamoto-san himself), with the lone exceptions wearing anime shirts. I was definitely in the right place. So then, no need to worry. I tapped one of the guys and asked them if they were here to see Miyamoto. They turned. There was a pause. A guy in a green Zelda shirt grabbed my shoulder and announced to the group, "NINE!"
I won't pretend that I wasn't ecstatic about this. I was high with excitement for twenty-two hours, from my arrival on line until the moment I passed out at home the next afternoon.
He said to me then, "You're one of the Ten now." If we stuck together, the idea was, our places on line would be secure. We were going to need it. This was an unofficial line, and at this early stage none of us knew what was going on. We ended up not finding out what was going on for a hell of a long time, and honestly, a lot of the time was spent worrying about whether or not our line was going to be acknowledged come nine o' clock.
Number ten came in a group of three. They had to decide amongst themselves who wanted it the most. The guy in the Mario PJs definitely wanted it most, but he couldn't bring himself to take it. I felt so bad that I offered the guy my spot later that night, but he just wouldn't do it. Anyway, with this, we were settled. The crowd grew slowly, reaching the 50-75 range by 9 PM, but for a good part of the time it was really just us.
It's obvious, in a hundred-person camp outside of the Nintendo store, that there was a lot of DS use going on. There wasn't so much so among us early campers. We didn't want to waste our batteries. Can you imagine the embarassment of walking up to ol' Miyahon, pressing the power button, and nothing happening because YOU just couldn't resist the temptation of playing Advance Wars or Jump Super Stars or whatever all night? Mortifying!
Hardcoreness comparisons were, however, a popular activity. The guys were getting out the stuff they wanted Miyamoto to sign. One had an E3 Zelda: Twilight Princess shirt signed by Eiji Aonuma, the game's director. Another had an original, sealed copy of the Famicom Disk System Legend of Zelda. The guy who called me Nine had a Mario tattoo on his shoulder, and took it out as the hardcoreness comparisons escalated. "Have you given it SKIN?" The kid with the FDS Zelda acted impressed. Then he pulled up his sleeve. The shield from the box of the NES Legend of Zelda was on his shoulder. So the guy with the Mario tattoo called them even. The other kid wasn't done, though. He pulled up his other sleeve, and there was Link's shield from Zelda 64. He'd won.
About all we did do at this point was hang around, which makes what happens a few hours later all the more confusing. Someone from security (or something like it) came out to talk to us. It became obvious pretty quickly that we were talking to a small, petty incompetent. His tone ranged from condescending to outright hostile. The first thing we were told is that "this line means nothing," that the real line started at 9. We asked him what exactly was going to happen at 9 o'clock and he didn't really have an answer for us, so he fell back on threats. He told us we'd been shooing people away. This was news to us, and we told him so. Unable to work out two conflicting statements and faced with the possibility of being wrong, he became visibly offended and asked us, "You're telling me THEY'RE LIARS?" It was apparently just fine to assume that we were, in fact, the liars. I got to the point and asked the guy whether he actually intended to organize a mad dash for the line at 9 PM and he told me yes, that was exactly how it was going to happen. I gave up on him then and let the Zelda-shirted guy handle it. He was immediately threatened:
"I'm just saying that if you guys start any crap, I've got cops all over this place."
Not even a real live authoritarian. Just a wannabe authoritarian playing police officer. A mall cop, an embarrassment to mall cops, was telling us this.
This came out of nowhere. We were all pretty taken aback; the Zelda guy in particular was quite offended. The security guy brilliantly defused the situation by shouting HEY COOL IT MAN at the top of his lungs in the most confrontational tone he could possibly muster, and walking away.
From the time that guy came out until 9PM, people were inside the building gesturing at us and discussing us as one would discuss a potential riot. This was a rather docile fanboy crowd; the only people who were stirred up in any way were the people who had been around for the conversation with security. They weren't violent; they were offended, and the blame for that lay wholly on security's shoulders.
With the Every Man For Himself policy in effect, it was a tense situaton up at the front of the crowd. Around 7PM, people were starting to spill out into the street between the parked cars. I was in the back with the Insert Credit Forums' Balzac (picture stolen from fellow camper kamalot.blogspot.com) and his buddies. I joked to them, as I saw this start, that people looked like they were getting in line for a race across the street. I had told them and others earlier that if this was going to turn into a fanboy riot I didn't want any part of it. Miyamoto may be a childhood hero of mine but that doesn't mean I'm going to give up my human dignity to play Nintendogs with the man. Could I really look him in the eye, having lowered myself to that? I had, at this point, given up on being number nine.
The Zelda guy, on the other hand, hadn't given up on any of the Ten.
"Number nine! Get back up here!"
Security wouldn't acknowledge us, so he was taking it upon himself to organize. For the time being, I had to be up front with the racetrack crew. As 9 o'clock drew closer, so did the crowd. The crowd was constantly jockeying for position with itself; one guy would try to get in front of the crowd, and everybody would take a step up right after him to make sure he didn't.At first we were between two parked cars; eventually we ended up in front of them, in the middle of the street. When one of the parked cars left, we took up the space it had occupied. At this point there were somewhere in the area of 80 diehards waiting for the line to start, and we still had an hour or two to go. We found our entertainment the old-fashioned way; a guy put on a show by threatening to throw his DS into traffic.
What he was trying to do was prove a point about Nintendo. We've all heard the stories. The stuff's been carried up to mountaintops, and tossed from buildings, and like a miniature Hiroshi Yamauchi pushing with all his might, Nintendo hardware never gives up. So, this guy figured, ain't nothin' wrong with dropping it on the street. He'd dropped his from a second-story window before and it was fine. Breaking the DS wasn't the point. He was trying to get some sucker to come out and do the same thing with his PSP. There was a lot of "don't break the DS!" noise and even more "BREAK THE PSP!" noise once they spotted a guy with one. What saved this whole spectacle was a couple of punk guys who were just passing through and heard people talking about breaking shit. They immediately came over and stayed for like half an hour, waiting for someone to finally break something. One of them walked up to the guy and asked, "Man, where's the PSP?" The showman told him that we were just WAITING for somebody with a PSP to drop it on the street for us. "Why don't you just drop THAT shit?" He told him that he'd do it as soon as somebody came up with a PSP. "Where's the fucking PSP? Fuck THIS." He came back.
So these guys started asking me stuff. "Dude, what are you doing here?" I told them that I was here on a whim, and that I was going to camp out for the hell of it, which is a half-truth that I thought would sound good. Of course I wanted to see Miyamoto, but actually doing the whole campout thing was kind of a selling point for me too. The line was really an experience unto itself. It worked; the guys were impressed by someone deciding to sleep on the street for fun. Then the hard questions.
"So what are you gonna do when you see this dude? FAINT?"
"Dude. Kiss him. You gotta kiss him, man."
I told them that I wouldn't, but the rest of dudes on the line would totally do it, if they asked them. This may or may not have been true; I can't answer for them. Anyway, those guys stuck around for about half an hour before they decided they weren't going to see anything get broken, and left. Those guys were pretty cool.
At 9:10 security still didn't know what to do, but one guy was apparently very happy to announce loudly to us that he didn't care. I don't even remember what it was he didn't care about. He was just being a prick. 9:20 we still had that racetrack line going in the middle of the street. It had gotten so bad that people were stepping into traffic to be in front. Someone would have to call "CAR" every fifteen seconds or so, and the guys who were trying to get in front would have to move back a half step to let the car through. This went on for a while. Zelda guy eventually had to talk to these guys again about the ten-person business. The organizers being as clueless as they were, they had no choice but to grudgingly accept it. We were tagged, and our places on line were secure. The organizers were still as condescending as ever, but at least we knew where we were on the damned line now. Except for number ten. He got screwed. I'll get to that.
When we had crossed, the rest of the line had not. They were still waiting on security. They were getting restless. A guy called across the street, "CAN WE GO NOW?" Mall cop said something along the lines of "WHY DON'T YOU TRY IT?", which was about the worst thing one could say. You can't expect a sarcastic threat to work on 80 people at once. They tried it, alright. The whole crowd crossed the street right then and there, no questions asked. Again, security had no choice but to go along with it.
Number ten's friends came with him, because naturally you don't want to break up a group that's going to be camping out on the street overnight. This was fine with the first two security officers they talked to. Then that mall cop who had threatened us before showed up. The one who didn't want us to start any crap. This was not okay by him, and he didn't care what security had had to say on the issue. This was skipping.
I should note how ridiculous this is. The mad dash for spots 11-80 had already happened. The line did not have an order to start with. Furthermore, all spots from 11-200 were irrelevant; everybody in there was, theoretically, going to get a signature. Furthermore, skipping was rampant all night and all morning, and he didn't do shit about it then. There was no reason these guys shouldn't have been sitting together, except for the mall cop just kind of being an asshole. He gave number ten a choice; he could either send his friends to the back of the line by themselves, or he could go back with his friends. Number ten gave up his spot.
I told the mall cop, once they were gone, that he really handled that situation in a very classy and professional manner, but he didn't look back at me or say a word. Later, one of number ten's friends tried to talk to the guy, just to try and get an answer out of him as to why he did all that mean stuff with no provocation from anybody. When she told him about "if you start any crap", he pretended he didn't know what she was talking about, and that she definitely had the wrong guy because he'd never say anything like that. This is a bad thing to say in front of the exact fifteen witnesses you threatened. He ignored us, naturally. After she left, he laughed in that awkward, insecure way that people who know they're wrong laugh, when they need to reassure themselves.
Anyway, this whole "I DON'T CARE" business was the kind of Courtesy, Respect, and Professionalism the heads of security treated us with from the time we got there to the time we were finally allowed to make our line. I want to emphasize here that the vast majority of the staff was just fine; most were quite friendly, and many were fans themselves. They really did a great job, going so far as to buy an endless supply of free pizza and water for the camping crowd. However, it wasn't just that the two guys who spoke to the crowd didn't care about the event. I don't expect (hell, I don't WANT) my security staff to have any kind of interest in the event. I do, however, expect a professional. These two treated their customers in an unnecessarily confrontational, condescending manner when it was clear that they themselves weren't sure what to do about the early crowd. You have to expect an early camping situation at events like these, and I hope the store management learns their lesson. Short of another appearance by Miyamoto, though, I don't think I'll wan to visit the place again. I can handle being treated like a weirdo, but I don't appreciate alternatingly being treated like a child and a criminal.
Anyway, once that situation was dealt with, we finally sat down. The crowd was settled down now. They were largely content, docile, and in various stages of readiness for a good night's sleep on New York City concrete. Being as my spot was safe, I took several walks up and down the line to check out the crowd. People-watching is my favorite part of these kinds of things.
Sleeping arrangements were interesting. The further back into the line I ventured, the more prepared people were for the night. People were lying down on and propped up against all kinds of objects. Likewise, the closer I got to the front, the fewer pillows and sleeping bags I saw. Not one of us in the first ten had brought anything at all to rest our heads on. I hadn't intended to sleep in the first place. All I'd brought were my wallet and my bag. I felt perfectly safe in this large group, but I did not feel the same way about my belongings. I wasn't about to fall asleep and leave my stuff out there in the open for a passer-by to scoop up at three in the morning. Nearly everybody up front eventually gave in to the urge to sleep, but I found myself physically unable. I simply wasn't tired. I was too hyped to be tired. I felt my body calling for sleep, certainly, but this was Miyamoto. I could still hardly believe I'd get to meet the guy. Maybe I was dreaming already, I thought. What if I woke up? So, for much of the night, I stayed standing. A friend of a friend stocked his bag with Doubleshots, and I don't usually drink that stuff, but this night, I was grateful. I knew it was doing something, but I also knew I wasn't feeling it.
Despite the looming fear of battery death, I did do some DS-playing that night. The DS really shines when there are a lot of them in the same place. Download play was the order of the night. I only had my three common games (Nintendogs, Advance Wars, and Meteos), and other people had a lot of interesting, unusual stuff that I wanted to try. Jump Superstars was the hot game; I could barely get in on a Download Play match. When one would start, it would be packed in a minute. The most interesting game of the night was an 8-player Band Brothers session. The main problem with 8-player Band Brothers is that it takes a hell of a long time for the host DS to send out the game AND the song being played to everybody. Then, once we started, we ran into some nasty desync about a minute in. A couple of us got error screens, some were allowed to play but not in sync with each other, and one guy never got in in the first place. All around, the connections weren't so great. I assume this is from the sheer volume of DSes on the line. Even ol' Pictochat was fairly packed. I made a lot of keen insights, along the lines of "sup guys", "wut" and "lololololol". I got a lot of Nintendogs unlocks; if I wasn't so worried about losing my batteries I'm sure I could have gotten every breed, at the very least.
The line was quite a spectacle, and passers-by were not at all hesitant to tell us so. We got a variety of responses from confusion, to wonder, to aristocratic disgust. That lady was a special one; her practiced, snobby manner was a geniune living stereotype. It was like a sitcom writer had hacked her into being. When she asked us what we were all doing here, it was with that perfect "what ARE those little people doing?" bemusement, and her "Oh...." came with deep contempt and a lingering stare. She wasn't my favorite that night, though. My favorites were the Krispy Kreme drunks. Two women carrying cases of Krispy Kreme donuts (apparently there had been a giveaway, we saw many people throughout the night carrying boxes) approached the guy sitting next to me and I. They started talking to us about what we were doing, and he gave them the whole line about the creator of Zelda and Mario and Donkey Kong and so on. The first woman didn't quite get it, and, puzzled, responded, "Today show?" He told her, slowly, "Mario."
"Today show?"
"Mario."
"Today show?"
"Mario."
This went on for a while, until he told her "Super Mario Brothers," or some other game title, very, very slowly. She said "OH!" and offered us a case of Krispy Kremes. We took them, thank you, and they weren't poisoned. Thank you, Krispy Kreme lady.
When people came by in a car, people would try to give them the same line we'd tried to give the Krispy Kreme drunks. Due to time constraints, that really doesn't work out too well. I took to telling them that Mario himself was visiting from Brooklyn. People liked that more. A lot of people just cheered for us for the hell of it (especially the tourists on those 5-man circle-bikes), and we cheered back.
Only two people in a car who drove by asking us what the hell we were doing actually knew what it was we were doing. He stood there for a little while, regretting to us that he wasn't there himself, and drove off. The other guy paused when I told him that Mario was going to be here. "What the fuck?", he asked us. "WHERE THE FUCK'S LUIGI?!" We laughed, and he left.
Other memorable passers-by: the construction worker who asked us this: "Let me get this straight: you guys are all lined up here like this to PAY for some shit?", (We weren't paying for anything, but had they charged, I suspect we'd have been there just the same) and the guy in a passing car who yelled "YEAH!!! STAR WARS!!! YEAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
DSes were inevitably not the only thing that got play that night. PSPs, as already mentioned, were definitely out there. Some were even emulating Nintendo games, which was filthy sacrilege, as far as the diehards were concerned. This brings up another issue with sitting on a line with a bunch of hardcore Nintendo fans: people who so much as mentioned competitors names were treated as though they'd just said dirty, dirty words. Just passing mentions sent a lot of these guys into hissy fits. I won't call them anything more polite than hissy fits, because they don't deserve it. While the behavior is typical and expected in a place like this, that fact doesn't make the participants look any less like children. They aren't even fighting over their favorite toys; they're fighting over the names on the boxes of their favorite toys.
The pizza was up at the front of the line, so the people up front eventually saw everybody to come up for food. One guy who came up for pizza made the mistake of wearing a shirt stamped with three very dangerous brand names:
GAMESTOP
XBOX LIVE
And last but not least; the videogame cultural divide itself:
HALO 2
Now personally, I wouldn't wear a Gamestop/Halo 2/XBL t-shirt. Not just to the Nintendo store; I wouldn't wear it anywhere. Gamestop's a shit store, Halo 2's an incomplete release of a mediocre game, and XBL was really great, but is looking pretty ominous this coming generation. The difference between me and the guys on the line is that I have enough perspective not to take the shirts that people wear as declarations of holy war. As soon as they caught sight of him, a bunch of guys on the line started to boo, hiss, scream at, and generally harass the guy. He called them ignorant or closed-minded or something; a fair enough assumption. The thing I remember best was this, screamed several times by a very angry (but faking smug) man at the top of his lungs:
"YOU KNOW WHAT'S REALLY GREAT ABOUT THE XBOX?
ITS FIRST-PARTY SUPPORT!"
I remember it so well because the guy said it a billion more times after the Halo guy left. He was very proud of his statement and explained its meaning to others several times. Anyway, the Halo guy was determined, by these guys, to be the enemy of the night. I wish I was exaggerating, but I actually heard people talking to each other, long after they'd first seen him, about where they'd seen him last and what he was doing. Some of the guys up front whined to security for hours about this guy, trying to get him kicked out of the event. I can't have any respect for that. Not an ounce. It's trying to deny somebody something once-in-a-lifetime because you don't like their shirt. It's as bad as the mall cop.
So we've learned that fans are easily offended for stupid reasons and have skins as thick as a sheet of one-ply. Old news. One guy decided to capitalize. Around 5 in the morning, a guy in a suit showed up, looking like he was just passing by. He asked people what they were in line for. When they told him Miyamoto, he struck.
"TEN REASONS WHY NINTENDO SUCKS!
NUMBER ONE! CARTRIDGES!"
Certainly, you can imagine the outrage. He bullshitted for as long as he could, and the fans were all too eager to correct him. A crowd of at least twenty stood around this guy for hours, countering his points, I guess. All I heard, after the initial accusation, was a lot of incoherent wailing from both directions. People were getting really loud and angry and (more importantly!) annoying, so I decided to start screaming back at the crowd.
"FM TOWNS MARTY FOR LIFE!!
YOUR CONSOLES SUCK COMPARED TO THE FM TOWNS MARTY!
FM TOWNS!!
FM TOWNS!!
FM TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWNS!!!!"
I just got a bunch of confused looks. I don't blame them. I don't even know what they made for the Marty.Did they make anything for the Marty? I wouldn't know! I saw a version of Image Fight for it once. Maybe Itagaki is a fan.
This went on for hours and hours. I didn't even hear what any of them were talking about over the noise, but I'm told that all the guy's points were completely nonsensical. I told the guy sitting next to me that it looked like a troll thread on a videogame board come to life. I was convinced, after the first hour, that it really was exactly that. By morning, the man in the suit was still around. He'd just found a very unique way to cut in line. I don't know whether or not he made it in. Security told him to go back a couple of times, but he never actually STAYED back. He was the only guy I saw security do this with.
Once the sun came up, our ranks started to swell. You could measure this by the amount of pizza going around; that night the staff had to bring pizza down the line only one time. One tray of ten or so pies was more than sufficient for the camping crowd. In the morning, I saw them go through at least five. They say the line blew up to 1500 people, and I'd believe it. Particularly memorable was the guy across the street from us at 7. Walking down the block, he suddenly noticed the blocks-long line outside the store across the street from him. From across the street, I could see this man breaking. He stopped moving. His head and shoulders went down. Where could they all have come from?! His girlfriend put her hand on his shoulder, and they walked to the back of the line together. More than a few personal tragedies like this one happened that morning, as people expecting to get a jump on the line had to come to terms with the fact that very many people had jumped many, many hours beforehand. Then again, a lot of people showed up around this time and just jumped in outright.
A very large number of the people who made it in for the signing were people who cut into the line early in the morning. I heard of a lot of people who were in the first 200 at the start, but actually got pushed out of the first 200 and were cheated out of the signature they camped for because some asshole came by hours later and decided to jump in himself. Those tags they gave out (I don't think everybody got them, or else this whole situation would have been avoided) should have been numbered and checked at the door, but like I said, this event wasn't too well-organized.
Anyway, sooner or later we got into the building. The reality of the situation hit me now; I was really going to get to meet Shigeru Miyamoto, in the flesh. As I walked in, the whole situation felt a little bit unreal. I felt like I used to feel about Christmas, when I was a child. I felt too good to be true. What if our hero was in another castle? I couldn't do this shit seven more times!
Miyamoto was seeing some people before us. There were rumors about who exactly was seeing him and why, but out of respect for the family's privacy, I won't repeat any of them. We were walked to the stairs, where Reggie showed up. I didn't really know who Reggie was, but just about everybody on line did, so I'm pretty sure I smiled and shook his hand anyway. I had to go home, Google it, find out he was a marketing guy, and say "oh, I get it." He's kind of a rally-the-troops sort of dude. It makes sense that the most loyal troops would be really into the guy. I hope they don't just preach to the converted, though.
From the stairs, about half of us could see Miyamoto all the way at the other end of the floor. His table was wisely backed up into a corner, presumably to keep people on the outside from being able to see him. Hell, I couldn't see him from spot nine.
Finally, we were taken up by twos. First, you got to say hello to Miyamoto-san, shake his hand, and so forth. Second, you went over to his interpreter, and you two set up Bark Mode together.
I remember the look on the Zelda guy's face when he came down. He'd told me, when we first met up, that he'd probably lost his job (leaving on short notice and calling the trip a religious pilgrimage), missed a car payment, and overdrawn his bank account 200 dollars to have come here. "I don't swear to God," he told me "because I'd be lying. I swear to Miyamoto." Indeed, when he came down those steps, it was the face of a man who'd seen God. I shook his hand. He was trembling. "I got everything," he said. "I can go now."
After having met Miyamoto for myself, I can gladly report that he is the same jolly fellow the media has been presenting him as for years. That grin really does never leave his face, and he seemed almost surprised to be getting such a reception from his fans. Everything was an "aww, you shouldn't have" look. I shook his hand and thanked him profusely, for everything. I told him that these games he'd made had been a big part of my childhood, and that sleeping out on the street for a night was the least I could do for him. He chuckled. I wonder if he realized, before then, that we'd done that. He signed my DS and handed it back very, very delicately, so as not to harm the signature. I've been handling it like an infant for the past week, but as you can see, I still managed smudge or two. It looks a thousand times worse in the picture. Where you see nothing, I assure you, there is still Sharpie left. Don't worry; I just bought some PROTECT ARMOR. My DS looks like a Gundam now, and if I ever need to lord the signature over anybody, I can just pull the front plate off real quick-like. It's all good. Once that was done, I took a picture with him. I looked like such a damn mess. I don't even know where that spot came from.
Now, the Bark Mode thing. I'll admit I was disappointed. Having camped out for as long as I did, I expected something more personal and special for those first ten spots. I don't blame Miyamoto himself (how could I blame Miyamoto for anything?). His autograph takes a good fifteen seconds for him to doodle. He had 400 signatures to make; the first on the item of the camper's choice, the second on a print of a sketch he drew of Mario in his dog's house. It was clear that he wouldn't really have the time to play anything with anybody himself. However, we'd been explicitly told in Nintendo's advertising that we'd get to play Bark Mode with Miyamoto himself, and this was really a selling point for me. Getting to play with someone else who is holding his DS is quite a different matter. Miyamoto never even got to see my dog, you know?
The way Bark Mode works, in the context of this event, exposed a critical weakness in the DS' connectivity that was on display all night; rampant (and often accidental) item theft. with a large number of DSes in the area, there is no guarantee that two people will actually be able to specfically connect with each other in Bark Mode. The way that connections work in Bark Mode is simple; you set up your DS to find other dogs, and once one is found, the puppy suddenly appears onscreen. At this point, the item that you intended to give is immediately given to whoever finds you. No backsies. One can, theoretically, intercept a Bark Mode session just by having their DS in Bark Mode at the same time as two other people who are trying to initiate one. You can see where I'm going with this. Many, many kids in the line just left their DSes in Bark Mode, hoping to intercept Miyamoto's dog and his present. Again, staff couldn't really figure out what to do about this one. The game allows no workaround. They ended up just telling everybody to shut their DSes off for the time being. But again, people aren't necessarily going to cooperate. Many people got Miyamoto's dog, so honestly, even being in the first ten ended up not being very important when, you know, you could just cheat.
Miyamoto left a little voice message, in English:
"Hello! This is Miyamoto-san. Let me introduce you to my Nintendog, Pic!"
Pic's a sheltie (you'll note that ingame there's an owner and dog named "Shiggy" and "Pik" respectively), like my other dog (I've got a Yorkie and a sheltie). He gave me a pink, rhinestone-studded collar, which is way too girly for me to use. I'm keeping it, though. You can't have it, okay? He's got this huge Mario hat; I don't know whether or not that's available ingame. It looks different from the Mario and Luigi caps I've already seen ingame; it's MASSIVE. I kept Pic out until, eventually, the Wifi connection died on the subway.
As I walked out one of many kids with cameras asked me:
"WHERE'S MIYAMOTO I'M GONNA TAKE HIS PICTURE"
I told him that he was way in the back, and that he'd never get an angle on him from down here. Then I got to walk back down the line to the subway station. It was only at this point that I grasped the hugeness of the line. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. I walked down three blocks with my signed DS, playing with Pic. It turned a lot of heads on that line; a sign of victory, I guess. About four blocks down I finally hit the subway station. The line stretched far past there, but I didn't bother checking. Right now I had done what I had come to do, and the only thing that was important to me was getting home to sleep. I sat down on a bench to wait for the F, playing with Pic. An Asian businessman sat down next to me and started to watch the game, which was odd because it's the kind of thing that happens in a Tim Rogers article.
So I guess this is NSJ.
Right, guys?
Number ten, that is, the second number ten, after the first one gave up his spot, sat down behind me. We'd both lived an experience we weren't entirely sure had happened, and we talked about that for a good, long time. He got off the train, and I had some time to myself, to let this sink in. By the time I'd gotten off the train and onto the bus home, I was back in the world of reality. My high was gone and I was exhausted. I staggered the walk home, said hi to everybody, put my stuff away, fell in bed and was passed out for the next 13 hours. I had been wide-eyed awake for about 28 hours. I needed it. Staggering home I only had two thoughts: the obvious "SLEEP" and:
"Worth it."
[now: discuss this on the forums]
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