Following the very recent announcement by Nintendo that the SNES Classic would be available later this year, fans have been eagerly refreshing Amazon and GameStop pages in an attempt to see when the preorders would become available. In fact, several retailers in the UK made pre-orders available a couple days ago. Within a couple of hours, all the SNES minis in the UK market had been sold out, with many of them being scalped with jacked up prices on EBay.
Is it possible Nintendo has learned nothing from the fiasco that was the NES Classic? Are North American gamers doomed to the same fate as the British?
According to a tweet from NintendHOME, that might not be the case. NintendHOME, a French Twitter account that reports news on Nintendo, recently tweeted that 160,000 SNES minis would be available for the French launch of the console. By comparison, only 84,000 NES minis were available for France during the entirety of that console’s run, meaning many other regions could be receiving double the number of retro consoles than were available to them last year.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy for fans to get their hands on one. Immediately following Nintendo’s announcement, news of the SNES mini spread like wildfire across social media. The SNES Classic has a list of fantastic games (including the never before released Star Fox 2), and even though it may be missing a few classic gems (ActRaiser, Chrono Trigger, Earthworm Jim), many gamers want to grab it as soon as possible, especially when considering last year’s fiasco with the NES mini.
The SNES Classic will be available September 29, 2017.