The beta test only recruited a thousand testers; it's said that one hundred thousand people, the number of half the Nerve Gear sold at that time, volunteered to be a tester. Luck was the only reason that I got through the narrow gap and was picked. Also, beta testers received the additional benefit of being given the priority when the game officially came out. The two months of beta testing was like a dream. At school, I thought endlessly of my skill set, equipment and items, and ran all the way to my house as soon as school ended and dived till dawn. The beta test ended in the blink of an eye, and on the day my character was reset, I felt a sense of loss as if half of my actual self had been cut away. And now—November 6, 20, Sunday. «Sword Art Online» after all the preparations had been finished and at 1PM officially started its server service. Of course, I had been waiting for 30 minutes and then logged on without even a second delay, but when I checked the state of the server over ninety-five hundred people had already logged on. It seemed as if all of the people who had been lucky enough to get their hands on the game had felt the same as I did. All the online shopping sites announced that the game was sold out seconds after it had gone on sale and the offline sales, which had started yesterday, had created lines of people who had queued up for four days, creating enough of a racket to go on the news. That meant that all the people who had been able to buy a copy of the game were almost all serious game addicts. The actions of Cline showed this clearly as well. After I had logged onto SAO, I started running through the nostalgic stone paved roads of the «Starting City» to go to the weapons shop.