TOKYO - A large crowd gathered in Tokyo's Akihabara district on January 30th, leading to chaos as customers rushed to secure a chance to buy a highly sought-after Nvidia graphics card.
Footage from the scene shows a dense crowd pressing forward. A staff member in a blue shirt urged the people to stay calm, saying, "Please don’t push, take a step back." Despite the warnings, the crowd remained uncontrollable, with one person shouting, "Stop filming and get away, damn it!"
The commotion began just before 3 p.m. when a computer shop held a lottery registration for the sale of the latest Nvidia graphics card. The registration was conducted in front of a kindergarten, which quickly became overwhelmed by the influx of people.
Videos captured at the scene showed the sheer number of people blocking vehicle traffic. One individual was seen climbing over the kindergarten’s fence.
A man who filmed the event speculated, "He was probably being crushed and climbed up to escape, or he might have trespassed into the kindergarten to cut the line. The kindergarten staff were standing guard with pole weapons, seemingly prepared for trouble."
After the crowd dispersed, images from the scene showed a broken kindergarten sign lying on the sidewalk.
"It was terrifying," said another witness. "I arrived just five minutes before registration, and there were already 100 to 200 people lined up."
The frenzy was sparked by the release of Nvidia’s latest high-performance graphics card, a critical component for rendering visuals on PCs. Due to reports of limited initial production, the store announced it would sell just ten units, with a lottery open to the first 100 customers.
A man hoping to buy one of the graphics cards described it as "the most powerful GPU in the world," explaining that the top-tier model was priced at around 580,000 yen. "It's expected to go for around one million yen in the next sale," he added.
Following the chaos, the store issued an apology on social media.
Source: FNN
