Marcel Winatschek

Germany’s PS4 Launch

The PlayStation 4 hit Germany on Friday and it was complete chaos. After six years—six fucking years of waiting while everyone else played—people could finally walk into a store and buy one. Of course they lost their minds.

Media Markt and Saturn turned into absolute madhouses. The kind of retail apocalypse you see in videos, except this was happening everywhere at once. Our American friends were already cracking jokes about the German launch disaster. They didn’t understand the pressure that had been building. Six years of imports, of workarounds, of watching other countries get theirs, and then finally it’s just there on Friday afternoon.

What got me was the sheer absurdity of it. After six years, everyone had completely lost it—treating a console like it was the last one on earth, frenzied crowds, shelves clearing instantly. There was something darkly comic about watching an entire country lose their mind at once. The desperation made sense, but the chaos was just too much.