Good news, says Andre Weingarten: "I'm unbanned!" Sometime in the early afternoon while the college freshman was in class, his Xbox One—the thing Target mistakenly delivered early two weeks ago—went legit. What's the first thing he's going to do?
"Well, I'll be streaming," he said. You can watch here as he plays Call of Duty: Ghosts, Madden NFL 25 and NBA 2K14.
Watch live video from Moonlight_swami on www.twitch.tv
You might rememberWeingarten as "Moonlight Swami," whose last minute preorder resulted in a way, way early delivery on Nov. 8, thanks to a warehouse computer screwup. As he took to YouTube to document all he was seeing and doing, Microsoft booted the console from Xbox Live with a foreboding message that the console had been banned.
All was smoothed out quickly however, through Larry Hryb, the Xbox Live spokesman who has been leading a charm offensive of late. The ban, for lack of a better term, was meant to keep Weingarten and some estimated 150 others from posting video of a service still under construction at the time.
Privately, Hryb assured Weingarten he was not forever console non grata and that his Xbox One would ultimately be connected. Weingarten, whose story made a lot of noise on this site and others, and through social media, was also offered a seat at tomorrow's worldwide Xbox One launch event in New York, where he'll be a VIP guest of the company.
"I knew I'd be able to get online again; Major Nelson (Hryb's Gamertag) thought it would be Thursday at the latest," said Weingarten, who lives on Long Island. "I was thinking, 'Ah, great, I'll get out of class, then I'll have to go into the city,'" and he wouldn't be playing his console until after midnight, with the rest of America.
But when he checked it this afternoon on the off chance things had been smoothed out, he was greeted by a notice he'd connected to Xbox Live and his console was downloading a 1.25 GB update. Once that finished he was in business, and today uploaded a comparison video of Ghosts on the 360 and the Xbox One.
Weingarten had figured out how to play his console offline since the "banning" on Nov. 9.; he had found himself unable to play Call of Duty: Ghosts after the console ban, but said Hryb put him in touch with a technical adviser who explained how to resolve that.
And he savored a small bit of celebrity. "I didn't mind it, I loved talking with my friends about it," Weingarten said. "It was that I was obliged not to tell them certain things, and I wasn't going to break that agreement, so I couldn't go into too much detail.
"A lot of my friends on YouTube had friends who were saying things like, 'I totally know that guy,'" Weingarten said.
Weingarten and his buddy from childhood, Patrick, are on the list at the Best Buy Theater in Times Square for tomorrow's event, where he'll be one of 1,000 early-bird buyers to see Macklemore and Ryan Lewis perform.
"It's been a very wild ride but it's quieted down, thankfully," Weingarten said. "I've got the end of the semester coming up here and of course I have schoolwork to do. But today's going to be a fun day, and then tomorrow will be the launch."
To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.