Japanese teen first to be robbed of PlayStation2

By Azad March 5, 2000 5:39 PM

	??	TOKYO (Reuters) - A suburban Tokyo teenager watched in horror as thieves snatched his PlayStation2 dream machine within minutes after he bought it at the weekend.? The 15-year-old schoolboy shelled out 39,800 yen ($368) for the gleaming new video game
console at an electronics store in Saitama prefecture -- only to have it grabbed from his helpless hands by two men on a motor scooter who fled. Police said the bandits grabbed the victim's PlayStation2 a couple of minutes after he left the store, leaving him with just the paper handle from which the shopping bag had been ripped.?Police said the boy had been saving up for months to buy the game console when it first hit store shelves on Saturday.?The assailants -- described as men around 18 to 20 with bleached hair (damn western influence) -- are still at large, they said.?Hundreds of thousands of people mobbed electronics stores across Japan over the weekend to try to buy the first 1 million PlayStation2 video game consoles to hit the market.?The game console is due to be launched in the United States and Europe later this year.?So for all you kids out there waiting to get your hands on one, make sure that you've got a sawed off shotgun handy just in case those scooter thieves decide to show up again.