Xbox 360: How's your Nintendo?

I was out doing more pre-Black Friday Christmas shopping last night. I picked up a major gift for my mom and most of the accessories that go with it. (I won't say what it was just yet - there's a teenie tiny chance that she might read this before Christmas.) While walking into the store of national electronics retailer Best Buy I noticed a line of people off to one side of the entrance. Some were in camp chairs, some were sitting on blankets, some were standing, some were using cell phones. They all looked about college age. It looked like the line waiting for the opening of a new Star Wars installment.

Hmm, I thought. The store is open, so I don't see why they're not in there. Are they protestors? Nobody has a sign, and nobody is accosting me, yelling "Just say no to Coltan!" Maybe they're job applicants? Best Buy can't be hiring that much seasonal help! Has the economy really gone that far downhill that people are willing to line up in the cold for a handful of seasonal retail jobs?

I went into the store in guided missile mode. I quickly found the thing I was looking for - a saunterer was standing directly in front of the display for it, wobbling from side to side, so I had to keep ducking around him, first to the right, then to the left, then back again, just to read the card under the display model. Finally I caught the eye of a clerk - he wasn't really the clerk there, he was just a substitute clerk, and I think he was relieved to meet a customer who knew exactly what he wanted and didn't have any questions. He managed to talk me into a two-year service plan for $20 - hey, this is for my mom, and if something goes wrong with it, I'd like her to be able to get it fixed.

I went to the checkout and struck up a trivial conversation with the generation-Y girl who was ringing up my purchase. "Why are all those people lined up out there?", I wanted to know. "Oh, you silly old man," she replied*, "they're waiting for the Xbox 360 to come out."

Oh, I thought. Well, that's certainly worth standing in line in the cold for hours.

I flashed back to a time years ago when the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was all the rage. This was 15 years ago when I was living in Delaware. I was getting a ride back to Pennsylvania with my sister. We had stopped along the way at a McDonald's to grab something to eat and I was browsing through a newspaper that someone had left lying around. There was a small side article that stated that apparently imports of the NES system at that time constituted a significant portion of the U.S. trade deficit with Japan.

Back then, "Nintendo" was synonymous with "video game". And now? Nintendo is still in the game with the GameCube, but I think it's a distant third behind the PS2 and Xbox. And who uses the old NES anymore? Maybe some retro-gamers, but otherwise it's just a museum piece. Today's hot technology will be obsolete in a year and nearly forgotten in five, and the people who were standing in line in front of Best Buy will wonder what they were thinking. Years from now I suppose at least they'll have memories of a night spent in the rain and the cold with a bunch of other gamers, waiting for a chance to buy a game that now sits in the back of a closet collecting dust.

*No she didn't. But she was probably thinking it.