So, the event:
We left Northern Virginia at about 8:30 and emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan about 1:00. From there it was a short hop over to the Nintendo World Store at Rockefeller Plaza, familiar background for any watchers of the “Today,” show. As we turned from 6th Avenue onto 48th Street, we saw a line of people fenced in with metal barriers… and to paraphrase Han Solo, I began to get a bad feeling about this.
We found a parking garage just up the street with only slightly ruinous rates, and discovered that there were actually TWO lines: the line we saw, which stretched from the store west to 6th and then uptown to 51st Street, where it wrapped around the corner again and headed towards St. Pat’s, was the line to buy the game; the slightly shorter line, which started at the plaza and headed east to 5th Avenue was to attend the event.
So Mrs. Bricker, who most surely has earned a nod from the Vatican for sainthood, headed off to get in the “buy it” line and Bricker Jr and I found the end of the event line. Both lines were filled with mostly normal looking people, interspersed with cosplay folks dressed as various human or Pokemon characters. I include us as “normal LOOKING,” although we were clearly not normal because we had just driven 240 miles to buy a game a day early.
I can only assume that turnout dwarfed the Pokemon folks’ expectations, because the other assumption would be that the organizers were new to this sort of thing. The event, when we finally got in, required taking a Pokemon Passport around to five stations to get stamps, after which you were eligible to get free T-shirts and posters. Three of those stamps were given in the plaza area outside, and the last two inside the store; you then had to exit the store and return to the plaza for your booty.
They abandoned this scheme after an hour, because the store was also innundated with the people from the “buy it” line, and in short order had reached its capacity. So the line to buy it was reduced to a crawl, as they started letting in sets of five people at a time, and they announced that only three stamps would be needed to get the giveaway stuff. But the damage was done; the store never recovered from its initial cramming. My wife finally made it inside an hour after the event was to have concluded; the initial announcement was that if you didn’t make it in by 6:00, you were out of luck, but after the crowd started gathering pitchforks and torches, this decision was reversed and anyone in line by the event’s start time was promised the opportunity of buying the game.
The event itself was very fun – they had demo stations to play a portion of the game, and info sheets on various new Pokemon, and a live band. Presidents of the United States of America, the band that did the theme song for the Drew Carey Show, has done an updated “Gotta Catch 'Em All” song for this new release and they played it for the enthusiastic crowd.
There was also a trivia contest, and I am proud to say that my nine-year-old son won an additional T-shirt and poster for his encyclopediac knowledge of all things Pokemon. Not only did he answer every single question correctly, but he also helped a struggling 20-something kid next to him who didn’t know the answers.
We stayed overnight at the Club Quarters, which was just the other side of the plaza, and ate dinner at Johnny Utah’s, an honest-to-goodness country bar / restaurant complete with mechanical bull. We had talked about maybe seeing Lion King, but neither Mrs. Bricker nor I had any energy to do anything so ambitious, and we fell asleep listening to Bricker Jr play his his new game.
So that was our story of getting the game a day earlier than the rest of North America. I, and my trusty companion Tepig (the fire starter in this version) will travel the world of Unova righting the wrongs of Team Plasma on our way to becoming a Pokemon Master! (Or until I can’t figure it out). Further updates as they occur!