I mean, the act of people scalping stuff has existed before the digital age. Even a century ago: scalpers would pay a third party to hold a spot in line on purchasing concert or theater tickets to resell at a higher price since the internet didn’t exist back then. Like, in the 90s: scalpers showed up in person (paying someone to hold the spot for you whilst in line) for acquisition of the product, that’s how they’ve done it.
At the time, pre-orders for an upcoming console or game were done in store (you physically went there placing an order after seeing an ad on TV or a magazine). But, how common were scalpers during that era? It would be like a group of scalpers pretending not to know each other or split into smaller groups heading to different retailers on buying the same product whilst playing as another customer.
I don’t remember lines in front of stores. I would split the decade roughly into two halves. The first half was one person buying a game that came on 15 floppy disks and a million people of friends and friends of friends and their friends would copy it. The second half was more about CD-ROMs but we figured out how to copy those two. In the background Nintendo was picking up steam and then PS. But for my money console gaming was still a bit of a niche business in the first half for sure. The geeks were excited but it wasn’t a mass phenomenon.
People stood in line to buy Windows 95 though. Imagine that. People stood in line waiting to give their money voluntarily to Microsoft. I’m sure there were scalpers there as well. In my memory that was more impactful than any game release.
The only time I heard of a line for a video game was one of the WoW expansions, but I never played those games. I guess it made some sense because, being a live service game, there was an element of value attached to how soon you got access to a shared world.