All Work, Few PlayStations

Eyes burning from no sleep, joints aching from huddling on pavement overnight in the cold and rain, hundreds of determined people surged into a Costa Mesa electronics emporium as its doors opened Thursday to nab what promises to be this year’s must-have--and hardest to get--Christmas present.

Girlfriends lost sight of boyfriends sprinting to the back of MetroPointe’s cavernous Best Buy. There, workers were mobbed as they passed out black boxes with the big, yellow PS2 logo of Sony’s new-generation video console, PlayStation2, which the maker warned would be in short supply this season.

It was a scene repeated in stores across Southern California and the nation. The excitement turned downright dirty in some spots. Police were called to a Wal-Mart store in Minot, N.D., where customers reportedly threatened others waiting in line for the product. At another Wal-Mart in Woodstock, Ga., police ticketed two people for disorderly conduct, the Associated Press reported.

And in Torrance, a young man was arrested on suspicion of stealing one of the hot properties in the parking lot of a Best Buy from a teenager who’d waited 16 hours in line to buy it.

Throughout the Southland, hundreds upon hundreds of avid gamers and kid-wise adults began their vigil even before stores closed Wednesday night. At $300 a pop, the device expected to bring retailers an estimated billion dollars in sales in the next few months features a DVD/CD player, Internet access and--most important--sophisticated graphics, all delivered through a television.

For Denise Chrisman, 41, the payoff for a night outside a Best Buy in Pasadena and a downpour Thursday morning was being first in line.

“I just had to have this,” said Chrisman, who lives in Pasadena with her 66-year-old mother, also a gamer. She brought her brother-in-law along to buy her mom’s machine, since the store was selling only one per customer.

The long, cold vigil at MetroPointe was a mere inconvenience for 29-year-old Andrew Pascual of Costa Mesa. “I’ve been waiting over two years [for the system]. I bypassed the Sega Dreamcast for this.”

The rush was spurred by warnings of a parts shortage that led the electronics giant to cut in half, to 500,000, the number of consoles it could ship to U.S. stores for Thursday’s launch. Some stores had presold their initial shipments.

Toysrus.com sold its limited number of PlayStation2 consoles within 30 seconds.

“We knew it was going to be fast, but we didn’t think it would be that fast,” said Kristin Schaefer, a spokeswoman who wouldn’t say how many the company had available.

Some angry customers suggested that Sony was manufacturing the shortage, and they complained about their treatment.

However, Chris Byrne, an independent toy analyst, told Associated Press, “Nobody makes money with shortages. This was clearly a component problem. Sony didn’t make it up.”

Some stores began handing out numbered tickets before dawn. Many people who waited until daylight to line up found themselves out of luck.

Bob Blake began hitting several Orange County stores at 5:45 a.m. and would have gone home empty-handed if he hadn’t finally offered to pay someone $200 for his spot at the Costa Mesa Best Buy.

“I promised my sons I’d buy one for their birthday,” the 45-year-old Newport Beach man said. “So I got up at 5 and got to Circuit City. They had 14 games, and I was No. 60 in line. Then I went to Target, and they gave out 30 tickets. I was No. 32. I came here, and all the tickets were gone. I’ve never broken a promise, so I just started asking people if they’d sell me their place in line.”

The general reaction to his offer: nothing--not even money--was worth sacrificing a spot.

For it had been a long night. When the overnight group was kicked off the shopping center property, it had to move from place to place throughout the night.

“It was the worst night of my life,” said 19-year-old Andy Vu of Santa Ana. “But there was this guy in an orange vest that was like our savior. He organized everybody.”

That man in the orange vest--not the kind Caltrans workers wear, but more the fleecy variety found at Old Navy--was George Carter. The 29-year-old Huntington Beach man turned up at the MetroPointe store about 9 p.m. Wednesday, shortly before security guards told the group to disperse.

Carter started a list of people in line, then suggested they gather at a nearby drugstore. Once assembled there, he checked the names.

“If you were there, good; if not, you were off the list,” said 21-year-old Tammi Bui. “Then the police came and told us we had to leave there, too.”

They found parking in a nearby residential neighborhood and regrouped on foot at the corner of South Coast Drive and Bear Street, near the shopping center.

“About 3 a.m., we decided to come back over here [to the store],” Carter said. “I had some people running reconnaissance to see if anybody was starting to line up, and there were a few, so we came back and waited.”

A few hours later, when store employees came out with the numbered tickets for the 160 consoles they had for sale, Carter stepped up, handing his list of overnighters to the workers. By that time, about 500 people had assembled.

Carter said the store manager agreed it would be best to give tickets first to the people on that list, “since they’d been waiting all night.”

General manager Mike Bier said people had been calling the store for weeks in anticipation of the game’s release.

“I haven’t seen this kind of excitement in a while,” Bier said. “It kind of goes back to the days of He-Man and Cabbage Patch dolls.”

Back in Pasadena, gamer Kevin Low, 30, was turning the craze into a business opportunity.

“You can get $650 for one of these on Ebay,” he said. “I’ll make $300 or more.”

Besides, he added, “I can wait until February to get one for me.”