When DualShockers’ Co-Founder, Joel Taveras, successfully managed to land his pre-order for the highly-anticipated SNES Classic Edition at Walmart, we knew in an instant that the scenario was too good to be true. In a flurry of pre-orders from nostalgia-prone gamers and Nintendo fans alike, the SNES Classic Edition sold out mere minutes later.
But just like all contentious, limited pre-orders, there is always the chance that there will be an internal error or over-selling that will result in cancelled orders. And it seems like the first round of Walmart’s SNES Classic Edition pre-orders may be rife with those problems.
Almost as soon as the pre-orders ran out, Redditor Ptizzl on /r/GameDealsMeta posted a conversation between him and a customer service employee at Walmart:
It seems like the reasoning that Walmart is sticking with is that the pre-orders went live early due to a system glitch. Even worse, this one representative noted that “all orders for the item will be cancelled.” Similar language had been mentioned in a chat received by Polygon, though there has been no official confirmation about whether all or only some of the pre-orders will be cancelled by Walmart.
In the meantime, once-joyful purchasers are busy stressing over the status of their orders. While some are being outright cancelled (mostly if there is an error in billing/shipping information), others have found their order in a processing limbo — so to speak. Hopefully Walmart will be updating people soon about the actual orders.
The SNES Classic Edition will release September 29, 2017, offering some of the best-and-brightest Super Nintendo classics (including the unreleased Star Fox 2). While you may have missed the very limited NES Classic Edition, Nintendo has vowed it will be producing more SNES Classic Editions in this run — assuming that the scalpers can’t get to that stock as well.