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
When I was a child my parents took me to a midnight release reading of probably the fourth Harry Potter book. After some woman read aloud the first chapter, at midnight, everyone was allowed to buy the book. It was very fun for little me back then.
These days it’s a complicated feeling, tainted by Rowling’s behaviour.
We did that for one of the books. We even invited the kid down the street to go with us, for a Tuesday Midnight release on a school night. He told us his Mom said it was all right and off we went.
We had a great night, ate dinner, wandered around the store (the friend had never been in a book store before), and finally bought the book at midnight, and headed home.
We got to his house, and I walked him to the door, and knocked. His Mom answered, and I said, “Here he is, everything went great, he had fun!”
And she said: “Oh! I thought he was in bed. I hadn’t heard from him all night, I just assumed that’s where he was. Oh, well, thanks!” And shut the door.
She’d never known that her kid was gone all evening long and until about 1 AM, and wasn’t even concerned about it.