I regularly sneer at Disney adults, so cringe in their slavish dedication to corporate consumerism, so cringe in their unsophisticated taste, so cringe in their fashion choices, but the fact of the matter is, I’m a Nintendo Adult.
My lifelong fandom made it a foregone conclusion that I’d be doing everything in my power to get a Nintendo Switch 2 the moment of its release, and, dear readers, I did it, but it proved to be quite the journey.
For those with more responsible and mature inclinations than me, the Nintendo Switch 2 is the successor to the massively successful Nintendo Switch console, originally released in March 2017 (I picked up a preorder for that on day one at the now-closed Forbes Ave. GameStop). In the 2010s, Nintendo struggled with its poorly selling Wii U home console and suffered a slow start with its eventually-hit handheld system the Nintendo 3DS, but, with the Switch, Nintendo merged its focus into one platform that could be played both handheld and docked to a television and won people over with now-classic video games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey.
Ever since Nintendo unveiled the console on Apr. 2 (my birthday!), online discourse has been a mish-mash of extreme excitement for a much more powerful successor to a now more than eight-year-old console and heavy backlash for its $449.99 starting price and the $80 launch game Mario Kart World. On top of that, the same day Nintendo announced the console, President Donald Trump unveiled his tariffs plan, which has people worried the price will eventually be raised once again.
However, none of these concerns seem to have any effect on demand. Even though Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa admitted himself in an investor’s meeting that the high price would present “challenges to early adoption,” preorders in late April for GameStop, Best Buy, Walmart and Target sold out almost instantly.
The night online preorders went live at midnight, after an hour of fiddling with the Target, Best Buy and Walmart websites, I secured a preorder for the $499.99 Mario Kart World bundle. Or, at least, I’m pretty sure I did.
In the past week or so, several people have shared on social media that Walmart canceled their preorder for unclear reasons. Some chalked it up to banks’ snappy fraud detection thwarting the transactions; others speculated that Walmart realized too late that it didn’t have enough inventory for release day.
Either way, as recently as Wednesday evening, my order’s status had been stuck on “Preparing,” with only a pending charge and a supposed delivery from a warehouse of June 6, the day after the console’s official release on Thurs., June 5. It turns out the combination of my Nintendo Adult status and obsessive-compulsive disorder turned this process into an embarrassingly stressful cycle of refreshing my Walmart app and email and repeatedly searching around on social media for advice and stories. I wanted to be sure I’d actually get one, and, yes, I wanted to wait the least amount of time possible.
On Wednesday, the day before release, I decided to look into alternatives. I checked out the GameStop and Best Buy locations off McKnight Road, and it seemed bleak. The Best Buy employees told me things don’t typically get too crazy at the store, but that it was hard to say there will be consoles available to anyone but the folks willing to camp out the longest. Policy forbade them from telling me how many they had. At GameStop, the workers didn’t know if they’d get extras.
I heard rumblings online that some GameStop stores would have extra units up for grabs on Wednesday that could be preordered at 3 p.m. for a guaranteed console come midnight. I called a GameStop in Robinson around 12:30 p.m., and an employee told me they had about 10 to 15 people in line and 30-some consoles. I liked those odds, but I needed to be somewhere about an hour south of Pittsburgh by 3:30 p.m. So, I called my old stomping grounds — the Belle Vernon GameStop that I loyally shopped at as a teenager living with my parents in the Monongahela area. The employee told me they had 22 consoles and one person in line, so it was settled.
At the GameStop, the manager gave me a GameStop gift card with the number 5 written on it and the word “Mario,” signifying I wanted the version of the console bundled with Mario Kart World. Eventually, two dozen fellow nerds filled the store. One perhaps-middle-aged man, with a Cobra Kai t-shirt and a Top Gun ball cap, praised me for choosing to get the bundle instead of the standalone console option. Another middle-aged man, who resembled a classic Mon Valley dad with a tucked-in business casual Steelers shirt, told me about playing one of the recent Super Mario games online with a friend. I talked with a few younger guys about how great it would be if Nintendo remastered Super Mario Galaxy 2 and gave it the new console’s mouse controls, which is the sort of thing you only hear when you’re surrounded by Real Deal Nerds, and the sort of thing I won’t bother explaining for anyone else reading.
I secured my console and decided the online Walmart preorder would go to a friend at the cost I paid for it, assuming it arrives.
It didn’t make sense to drive an hour back home to my Pittsburgh apartment, an hour back to Belle Vernon, then another hour back to Pittsburgh, so I stayed with my parents in the valley. Mom made extra klobasi and cut-up potatoes and gave me a long-overdue haircut while Dad updated me on his sports card eBay hunting, and, as I sat waiting to return to the Belle Vernon GameStop, I felt like a kid again, that same kid who got a ride from Mom to pick up the 2012 3DS game New Super Mario Bros. 2 but couldn’t go home to play until he practiced driving ahead of his driver’s test.
After a Monongahela Sheetz run, I went back to the GameStop, where I got destroyed in a game of Mario trivia (I knew most of the answers, gosh darn it, but I crack easily under pressure). I got my system without a hitch, drove up 51, and busted that puppy open.
(P.S.: The bulk of this adventure took place on June 4, 2025, my three-year wedding anniversary. Let’s all give a round of applause to Libby for picking such a great husband. We’re doing a Gateway Clipper dinner on Saturday, and the Switch 2 will stay home.)
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2025.
