Game On!

For thousands of devoted gamers, the waiting will finally come to an end at the stroke of midnight, when the Sony PlayStation 3 goes on sale. There are long lines trailing around electronics stores from coast to coast — and some people have been waiting in line for a week, in all kinds of weather.

In Manhattan, CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason stood in line with a few hundred anxious future PlayStation 3 owners.

"When did you get here?" he asked Angel Paredes.

"Monday night at 8 o'clock," Angel says.

There are now hundreds of gamers behind him in a line that stretches for a full city block. And the list for those in line is long.

"It's about six pages so far," said Sean, who is keeping watch over the sign-up sheet.

"We take names. We gettin' 'em in order. Everybody gotta fair chance to get their game," he said. "That's all."

So what is it about the PS3 that's worth spending three nights on the street for?

"It's the most wanted piece of technology right now," a girl says.

But the new PlayStation is not the only game in town. Nintendo's new Wii console comes out this weekend.

"So for the business, this is as big as it gets. This is the huge monumental shift that happens once every five years to the next generation of consoles," said John Broady of Gamespot.com.

Microsoft's XBox 360, already out for a year, has sold 6 million units. But Sony, which still has 60 percent of the market, spent billions to create the PlayStation 3. Most of that money was spent on a set of revolutionary microchips that generate its incredibly detailed graphics.

Kaz Hirai, head of gaming for Sony USA, says in its new basketball video game, a player's sweat is actually calculated according to his exertion and the contours of his face.

Of the six years it took Sony to develop the system, were they working on the sweat the whole time?

"No, we were sweating the whole time," Hirai says.

They were sweating because the states are high in this $10 billion gaming business.

"It's undoubtedly the most advanced piece of electronics that anyone's ever tried to mass-manufacture," Broady says.

And Sony literally can't make them fast enough. That's why there are lines all over the country tonight. In California, two kids even offered their places in line for sale on the Internet for $1,300 apiece — double the price of the PlayStation 3. But most of the crowd isn't budging.