Our resident retail mole and NWR Forums regular UncleBob has informed us that his Walmart store has already received shipments of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Nintendo's all-star fighter for Wii. This delivery, and presumably many other deliveries in the Walmart chain of stores, comes eleven days ahead of the official March 9 North American release date of the game.


A pallet full of Super Smash Bros. Brawl,currently residing in
an unidentified Walmart warehouse.

Walmart computers will not allow the sale of the game before the official release date, so anyone hoping to score an early copy (from Walmart, at least) will be out of luck. However, NWR has been seeing unconfirmed reports of North American retail copies of the game floating around the Internet, which could mean other stores that are also receiving the game may be inadvertently breaking street dates.

Furthermore, this news begs the question: Why is Nintendo shipping the game out to retailers this far in advance of the release date? Traditionally, the dates Nintendo lists on its release calendar are when it ships a game off to retailers, with games being available in stores a day or two after that.