In May 2000, Nintendo announced the official North American release date of "Gold" and "Silver" to be on 16 October of that year. Nintendo started accepting pre-orders for the games in August, and announced that consumers who pre-ordered one of the games would receive a free CD-ROM with a Pokémon-themed web browser developed by MediaBrowser which featured floating Pokémon species and links to "Pokémon" sites. The application was available for download on the official "Pokémon" website. The games had record sales as approximately 600,000 copies of them were pre-ordered in just two months, compared to "Pokémon Yellow"s number of 150,000. As the release date neared, retailers such as Electronics Boutique reported receiving shipments of the games earlier than 16 October, and opted to sell them immediately; first giving them to pre-orderers and then selling the leftover copies. The games were reportedly obtainable as early as 11 October.