The princess is in another shopping cart
Hope you weren't pinning holiday hopes on Nintendo's mini-NES.
As 2 p.m. PT approached, our quest began. Fingers poised to click, we logged into our Amazon.com accounts to vie for a chance to buy this holiday's must-have item.
But there was nothing -- Amazon's listing for the Nintendo NES Classic Edition, the "mini-NES" you've heard so much about -- still showed the system as "currently unavailable."
At 2:06, we punched through Amazon's big question-covered brick to the magical, wish-fulfilling "Add to Cart" button. But pressing it did nothing. Or perhaps you saw this:
By 2:08, the button seemed to work! If by work you mean a warp whistle to an empty shopping cart.
At 2:12, the world's leading retailer found a brilliant way to solve the issue: a totally blank white website! It's still blank, 45 minutes later.
And at 2:13, presumably because the company had no way to update its own completely blank webpage -- perhaps they should have used EC2? -- Amazon issued this tweet:
E-commerce in 2016!
(But hey, you can still buy these pretty decent alternatives.)
You might have seen a similar sequence of events if you tried to buy one from GameStop.com this morning -- us would-be buyers totally knocked that website off the internet.
Hey, maybe we'll get to do this all over again when Sega announces a more portable Genesis. (Oh wait.)