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
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.