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Congrats to Amazon on the biggest troll of the year

Published Dec 8th, 2016 2:02PM EST
NES Classic Edition Stock
Image: Jacob Siegal/BGR

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It’s not quite the end of 2016 yet, but I’m going to call it a little early: Amazon’s social media PR department wins the prize for troll of the year. In 12 months that have included the rise and fall of fake news, the election of a reality TV star to the biggest office in the world, and season 7 of The Walking Dead, that’s no mean feat.

Tuesday saw Amazon, the biggest online retailer of things in the country, tweet out that it had some “exciting announcements” to make about the NES Classic in the coming days. You would be excused for thinking (I sure did!) that this meant Amazon would have some kind of chance to buy a NES Classic Edition online this week. That would make sense. But no!

As it turns out, what Amazon actually meant is that it’s going to sell a limited number of NES Classic Editions (at this point, I’m assuming that means they have one console per store) in Amazon’s three physical bookstores on the West Coast. Awesome.

Objectively, there’s no reason to be mad here. Amazon only promised an exciting announcement, and I guess it kinda delivered. But Amazon must have known the hype around the NES Classic right now, and people were always going to make that assumption from that tweet. So, well played on the elaborate troll I guess, and huh tickets to San Diego aren’t as expensive as I thought.

Chris Mills
Chris Mills News Editor

Chris Mills has been a news editor and writer for over 15 years, starting at Future Publishing, Gawker Media, and then BGR. He studied at McGill University in Quebec, Canada.