I did once.
It was Black Friday of 2006, a week after the release of the Wii. My friend had to work at a store in the mall in the wee hours of the morning, and he dropped me off to wait at GameStop so I could test my luck. Nintendo has always been infamous for engineered scarcity, and the Wii was no exception, so I was fully prepared to leave with nothing but an interesting story to tell. I had never seen the horrors of Black Friday, and was morbidly curious to experience it for myself at least once.
The experience was pretty tame. At first I waited outside the mall. I had my guide dog with me, and I allowed other people in line to give her pets and scritches as we waited. Not gonna lie, me bringing her was a bit of social engineering. Who’s gonna hit a blind guy? We got to chatting about what the line was for, and I discovered it was for an unrelated promotion. I asked if I could be let in to wait in front of the GameStop in the food court out of the cold, and they let me enter.
I can’t remember if others in the same line came in with me, or if they had already been there, but I ended up behind a dad and his two kids, and they were both getting a Wii. There were only three in stock, so I ended up getting lucky. I even got a copy of Twilight Princess, as well as FF XII on the PS2 as a Christmas gift for my sister.
tl;dr: veni vidi wiici
Well, not camped but went to a midnight sale of a WoW expansion and there was a bit of a queue.
Did something similar for Doom 4, but never camp out.
Same. The only time I have ever waited in line for a game release was the midnight launch of The Burning Crusade expansion for WoW and I can’t say it was worth it. Certainly never did it again if that tells you anything.
Same here. I had been playing World of Warcraft for over a year and still hadn’t reached max level with my main character, so I spent a whole day grinding to finish off the last few levels. Then I walked down the street to my local Walmart and went to hang out in the electronics section until midnight.
This was back when Walmart was open 24/7. I asked an employee where they would be releasing the Burning Crusade Collectors Edition and they said they’d bring them to the electronics register exactly at midnight. So I started a queue next to their sole register. By the time midnight struck, there were about a dozen people behind me in the line.
It was the first and last time I showed up for a midnight release of anything. I personally thought it was worth it, but I never did it again. The next WoW expansion released while I was stationed overseas with the US military, so I had to order it online.
Friend and I did this and setup a lan party. Not realizing we’d be spending most of the night updating the game….
This was me as well. Which expansion did you do that for? For me, it was wotlk and it was really fun at the time but looking back, nothing particularly memorable happened. Except that I went home and had to install the game so I didn’t get to play till the next day anyways.