Summer. The dog days.

During the day it’s genuinely dangerous to walk to the mailbox, and at night only slightly less so. There is a limit to how many times you can go to the neighborhood pool before it gets stale, and only so many rewatches of the same series on tv before the voice in your head sounds like the main character.

You message your friends: “hey, wanna do something?”

Before you can even close your screen you get a response: “yes. please. literally anything. what do you have in mind??”

It takes no thought, but it is genuinely exciting: one of the biggest games of all time, anticipated since it was announced 5 years ago, just came out. Novel gameplay. Interesting characters. A setting that sets your imagination ablaze. The kind of game that makes you remember the halcyon days of your childhood summer vacations, when you’d spend all day in the AC playing, and here you are, presented with an opportunity to genuinely relive that.

“yeah. come over so we can try to build mechs in Tears of the Kingdom.”

Or:

“I’m hopping on to grind the new meta. drop in ten?”

Or:

“my favorite streamer is climbing the elim tower. I just picked up my copy, so what if I bring it over and  we play while we watch them stream?”

Summer gaming. Whether it’s the newest releases that everyone is playing at the same time, or classics of a bygone era that hold a very special place in your heart, summer gaming is magical. 

 

Maybe it’s the long days that let you squeeze in endless hours of trying to master that particular attack combo. Or it might be the fact that your friends have the same obsession as you, so you’re all trying to access the secret multiplayer area that got patched in overnight. Or it just might be the way everything gets bigger and more intense when the weather is hottest, and that applies to the brand new game just waiting for you in your disc tray.

There aren’t a lot of ways to capture that feeling and make it last beyond the summer. The crinkle of the cellophane and the slight flex of the game case in your hands as you bring your copy home goes away once you break the seal and pop the disc out. The excitement of calling off work to sink 22 straight hours into the game that you know is going to change the way you think about, well, everything; that goes away when you stumble into the office bleary-eyed the day after your marathon.

But sometimes you can keep those feelings fresh in your mind. In a brand-new WATA holder, you can see the crisp seal on that perfect wrapper. You can look at that perfectly shiny rare holographic slip cover, cradled comfortably where it’ll never get dinged, or the corners rubbed, and remember how carefully you handled the case to bring it home. 

You can relive the hours you did play the game while you look up at that absolutely perfect display on your shelf, where your copy lives in its beautiful crystal-clear case right alongside the other two games in the series that defined your childhood summers. 

Maybe you threw that copy in your backpack and rode your bike across town to your buddy’s house a few too many times, so now the jewel case is scratched and dinged, but those are scratches and dings attached to specific memories. And now they’re preserved, exactly as they were after the last time you played the game however-long-ago that was, and those specific memories will be as fresh as the beautiful CIB designation on the badge.

Summer. It’s magical. Don’t forget to save. At $39 per game (at the Turbo service level) through the 30th of June, getting your game in our beautiful new holders is about as easy as hitting the options button, scrolling down, and clicking yes to overwrite.