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
My friend and I camped out for the original Xbox launch (I was only going to pick up Metal Gear Solid 2 which launched the same night). he had saved up his money from his job to buy the system, 2 controllers and 1 game. Now you’re assuming it’s Halo…no…he wanted Cel Damage. The game was a cel shaded twisted metal style game. That’s all he wanted. I convinced him to also pick up Halo because I had read good things about it in some gaming mag. I said I would go halves on it with him and call it an early birthday present.
We go back to his place and we play like one round of Cel Damage and then stay up the entire night playing Halo.
Split screen coop Halo was the bees knees. We did the midnight launch for Halo 2 and played it all night, then had to go to class the next day.