One man braves Smash-Fest, lives to tell the tale

As you might know, this year Nintendo hosted an event at Best Buy called Smash-Fest. During E3 and on scheduled days after the show, fans could line up at their local Best Buy store and play the new Super Smash Bros for Wii U. Journalist, cartoonist and all-around cool guy Ron DelVillano over at Nintendolife checked out the event at his neighborhood Best Buy and had an interesting experience to say the least.

As Ron puts it, "There was only one Wii U set up for Smash Bros. to be played on, and only one brave Nintendo rep organizing the whole thing while store employees worked on crowd control. It was immediately apparent that the wait was going to be long."

People had been waiting for hours, some of them driving long distances to get to the closest Best Buy hosting the event. Then a rumor began to spread through the amassed crowd that people inside the store had been cutting in line. Pretty soon the crowd went full Black Friday and collectively charged though the barrier into the store. Nobody was hurt but it took some communication and rather candid threats of "you won't be welcome here again" for Best Buy to get the crowd back under control.

What this tells me is that Satoru Iwata just might be right: all it takes sometimes is one game to change the fortunes of a console. If there is this much demand for a Wii U game--enough to inspire mob mentality for the chance to play a few minutes of one game--the console may have a future after all.

As for Ron DelVillano, he survived unscathed with a cool story to report. I met him at the Skylanders event last September and he's just a very cool dude, so it was interesting to read about his Smash-Fest experience. Be sure to head over to Nintendolife to check out the rest of his work.

Source: Nintendolife