Lucky gamer gets Xbox One two weeks early; reveals new details

Thanks to a screwup by Target, André Weingarten got an Xbox One on Friday — a full two weeks before it’s set to start shipping.

Like any self-respecting fanboy, he immediately turned on a video camera and uploaded an Xbox One unboxing video to YouTube.

Now, the unboxing video is a pretty poor example of the form — and that’s saying a lot, for a genre typified by shaky camera work, poor lighting, and orgasmic moaning as someone unwraps power cords, removes plastic wrap, and struggles to extricate his beloved gadget from the packaging in which it’s contained. Weingarten’s video has all of that, and it’s also out of focus much of the time or just pointed at some black thing. You won’t get much out of it.

Fortunately, Weingarten didn’t stop there: He continued to tweet about his discoveries as he plugged in the Xbox One, fired it up, and started downloading some games.

During the process, he learned a few interesting nuggets of information:

• You must download a 500MB update before you can play any games.
• Call of Duty: Ghosts is a 39GB installation. However, you can start playing it once it’s 51 percent installed — which took about 15 minutes.
• Microsoft can lock you out of its Xbox Live network once it detects that you’re playing on a console that is still two weeks from launch. You can still play games, but only in single-player mode.
• Microsoft may also try to get Google and Twitter to shut down your ability to publicize its mistakes. Weingarten’s video disappeared from YouTube, and his Twitter account temporarily shut down, after he started crowing about his new find. (They’ve since been restored.)

Apparently, Target mistakenly mailed about 150 of these consoles to customers before discovering its error. If you were the lucky recipient of one of these, send us your photos or videos, and let us know what you’ve learned!

Hat tip: Kotaku