World Of Warcraft: WarCraft III : TFT Signings!

It was a semi-warm night at 10:45 PM PST in Los Altos California when I finally decided to push myself out the door and head towards the Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale California. I figured, something like this won't happen all the time, and I'll end up getting a free poster, which I probably won't hang on the wall and a T-Shirt I'll probably never wear :). But hey, beggars can't be choosers, and who the hell turns down free stuff! That's right, no one, not even me.

So I get there at about 11ish expecting to see a few people standing in line to get in, only to see, as I'm pulling into the parking lot, a line of about 250 people. It wasn't as bad as I first imagined it though, but it was still a lot more than I had originally expected. As I'm standing in line I observed many different people arriving and complaining about the lines. Saw a bunch of ricers, sporting neon lights under the car, blasting hip hop music. Sadly though, I was unable to take any pics :(. Oh well. The pictures don't really illustrate the amount of people that were there, but there were plenty.

I walked up and down the line trying to see if anyone I knew was around as I wasn't too excited about waiting in line for an hour. Unfortunately, my attempts to cut in line failed. All my friends were apparently tucked away in their beds. Screw them, I got TFT a few hours earlier than them and it's signed! I noticed in front of the store a bunch of guys with Blizzard T-Shirts. I approached them and asked them if they worked for Blizzard. They did! So I started talking to them about what they did for TFT and I asked them about recent events concerning four Blizzard employees who had resigned earlier that day. They were all really cool guys.

At about 11:20 I notice these guys walking towards us-had some friends standing in line behind us. This guy obviously has a point to make.

At 11:30ish the line started moving at intervals. They let a bunch of people in sections, but in the end, it was just one long line around the store.

Here's a pic of a guy on a walky talky informing an employee to come over to me and tell me I'm not allowed to take pictures. Something about their policy. As you can see, however, I didn't take them too seriously. Luckily, this guy trusted me and didn't watch me "delete" the pictures. I was pretty careful after that to not attract too much attention.

The wait wasn't too bad. They had some TV's going showing off their audio equipment. But alas, they played the same scenes over and over. On the plus side, I got to see a couple of times Vin Diesel jump 12 feet in the air on a motorcycle over a barbed-wire fence, somehow maintaining balance and killing about a thousand guys in the process. XXX(Triple X) in case anyone was interested...didn't think so :). They also had the truck scene close to the end of The Fast and the Furious going and some scene from Biker Boys. They also had Celine Dion singing some song from Alladin while J Lo got her grooves on a few screens over. She sure can shake that thang.

As you can see, we were easily distracted.

YES finally! We are closing on the table! I didn't recognize the first guy to sign the box, but it turned out to be Mike Morhaime, President of Blizzard Entertainment. Sorry, but I did not catch the names of all the signers. I'm still kicking myself for not asking (later found out there were signs on the desk. Aren't I the observant one). I tried looking at the signatures, but that didn't help much.

Here was a station set up with TFT. The guy on the left was the one holding up the sign a few pics up.

Alrighty then, as I was walking out the door, another guy approached me about my camera. I looked at him and said was it really necessary for me to delete all my pictures I have taken? Would it really be that big of a deal? He smiled and said no, I'll let this slide, or something like that. He was cool about it.

So here we are outside once again. Got a little colder, but was refreshing as it was a tad warm inside. It's about 12:50 AM right now. And I am ready to go home!

Mad props to the guys at Blizzard who came up here for the event. Forgot to mention this, but when I spoke with them outside, they mentioned they came all the way up here JUST for the event. No sightseeing, nothing! They got here, did their thing at Fry's, then will leave the next day. They are pretty cool for doing that without having that much of a grudge. Thanks a lot guys!

And finally, here's a pic of all the 1337 loot I made out with that night. Spiffy aint it? Well, hope you liked this summary of the event and I appreciate it if you read through the entire thing. And even if you didn't, thanks for checking it out. Later guys, have fun with TFT, I know I will.

--Kieros
Kieros@sbcglobal.net

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