It was the middle of the night when Fedor Volkov found himself anxiously waiting on the streets of Moscow for a ride back home. In his arms he held a Switch 2 box and nestled within was the console fans had been waiting years to get their hands on, but which still didn’t officially go on sale for more than a week. He was too nervous and excited to remember to bring something to hide it in.
“I forgot the bag, I forgot everything,” he told Kotaku. “And it was night, like 1:00 a.m. I am standing with a Switch 2 box, waiting for for the taxi to get back, to go back home. And I’m like, hope nobody will…” Volkov, speaking over Discord with ski glasses on and a sprawling Doom Slayer tattoo snaking up his arm, trails off and starts laughing. His t-shirt says “welcome to hell” and a glass vase of what look like white carnations sits on a book shelf behind him.
He and his friends, Vlad Malykhin and Artem Kolomiets, host a casual Russian gaming podcast. It’s name, “Попы и культура,” literally translates to Butts and Culture. Its logo is a Goatse reference. They started only a couple of years ago and will be hitting their 100th episode, they tell me, after Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest this year. How did these guys get a Switch 2 before almost anyone else?
The answer is both simple and complex, they explain. It begins with Volkov seeing a friend post in a random Telegram group about securing a Switch 2 order that was scheduled to arrive the Monday before the official June 5 launch. When Volkov inquired about the details, the acquaintance gave him the name of a seller who had a handful of Switch 2 units coming in on a plane from Dubai.
“So I wrote to this guy,” he said. “We cannot tell his name, sorry, and I wrote him like, ‘Hey, man, I want to pre-order one Switch 2 for myself to make some content, you know, I have a podcast, blah, blah, blah, and also for me, for myself, to play video games, not to sell it or resell it, no, just for myself.’ So he told me, ‘Okay, yeah, good. I will have some in on Monday.”
Then the guy pinged Volkov back 10 minutes later. He actually had a guy with an extra Switch 2 on a flight that would be arriving much sooner. Would Volkov be interested? They settled on a price: roughly $800. Volkov conferred with his podcast mates before accepting. “I couldn’t believe I [was] really going to get the Switch 2 nine days before release, first in the world, that we’ll unpack it, unbox it,” he said. “Until I saw the box, until I touched it with my hands, I couldn’t believe that it’s real.”
Volkov immediately started making videos, which quickly disseminated throughout a ravenous Nintendo fandom on social media. He showed the setup sequence and its bespoke musical theme, as well as the system settings, including the existence of only two menu themes at launch: black and white. He also confirmed that no existing Switch 1 games could run on the new machine just yet. Due to a required day-one patch, and without access to Mario Kart World or another Switch 2 launch game cartridge to test, there’s not actually a whole lot you can do with the console right now.
After a flurry of bombshell leaks all but confirmed what the Switch 2 would look like ahead of its official reveal, Nintendo has been trying to keep the rest of the console’s launch on lockdown, to the point where reportedly not even most media and content creators will have access to the machine to review it before it’s out. The company has much less leverage in Russia, however, a market where it stopped officially selling products along with other big console makers following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Mario maker cut ties with the controversial CEO of Nintendo Russia back in 2023, began winding down the regional subsidiary soon after, and put the eShop into maintenance mode.
The sanctions and boycotts have made it much more complicated to be a gamer in Russia, but a thriving black market for unauthorized imports and a litany of digital workarounds provide avenues for fans willing to jump through those hoops. Apple’s new M4 MacBook Pro also popped up for sale in Russia before anywhere else. Podcast cohosts Malykhin and Kolomiets point to the use of Indian and Turkish PSN accounts, prepaid cards from overseas, and even bank accounts set up in neighboring Kazakhstan as ways to bypass the various restrictions. HBO Max isn’t available in Russia, but they’re caught up on The Last of Us thanks to VPNs (season 1 was great but season 2 has had more ups and downs, they say).
Unlike some leakers, Volkov hasn’t tried to anonymize his identity. In fact, his face is the first thing that appears in the group’s initial pre-release Switch 2 unboxing, the YouTube comments for which were littered with people joking about “Nintendo Ninjas” being dispatched to disappear Volkov and the channel. “I thought about it first, like, ‘Whoa, what if they’re gonna, like, ban my Switch account?’” he said. He’s not planning on logging into the console with his existing account until June 5.
I mentioned the new provision that lets Nintendo brick anyone’s Switch 2 if they violate the company’s terms of service. He didn’t seem worried. “I didn’t sign any NDAs. I bought this with my money. I bought, it I didn’t steal it or something like that. Also, Nintendo is from Japan, you know, and they don’t have any official shops in Russia anymore. They don’t have a jurisdiction in Russia.”
That’s no doubt part of why he ended up purchasing one for almost twice the sticker price from a guy on Telegram instead of at a store like he did with his original Nintendo Switch. The other, of course, was internet clout in a gaming culture that prizes being first more than most things, though Volkov, Malykhin, and Kolomiets claim the goal wasn’t to troll anyone. “It’s not like we want to show that, ‘Oh, we got a Switch 2, you didn’t get a Switch 2,” Volkov said. “No, we just want to show you, like, some content and show that even in Russia, we have a lot of sanctions, you know, a lot of big companies banned us, yeah, yeah, but we want to show all the world that Russia also has, like, just some guys that just want to play video games.”
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