Six Years and Then They All Went Feral

The PlayStation 4 arrived in Germany on the last Friday of November 2013, and something about six years of waiting apparently cracks people open. The scenes at Media Markt and Saturn locations across the country—queues that had been civil for hours suddenly collapsing into something more honest—were bad enough that Kotaku ran them as spectacle, and Americans had a field day.

There’s a specific humiliation in launch-day chaos that I find both entirely relatable and a little pathetic—and I say this as someone who has made questionable decisions in service of being among the first to own a piece of hardware. The PS4 was a genuine generational leap: cleaner architecture, a controller that finally felt like something designed for human hands, launch titles that actually demonstrated what the thing could do. But it was also just a console. It would be in stock the following week. The people throwing elbows in the electronics aisle were going home to plug it in and play whatever they grabbed, and it would be fine, same as it always is.

That doesn’t make the footage less funny. There’s something clarifying about watching adults abandon the social contract over consumer electronics. Whatever we tell ourselves about being measured, rational people with priorities in the right order—launch day is the truth serum. Germany just happened to have cameras running.