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
I camped overnight for The Phantom Menace tickets. We were not allowed in theater property until 6am release day, but we were allowed on the sidewalk loading up to their property at 6pm the day before release.
When they let us move up to the door we figured someone would walk over to us and lead us to the door… nope the manager stood at the doors and yelled across the parking lot and beckoned us. It turned into a mad dash.
The sidewalk turned and went up a hill, those of us nearer the end of the line were closer to the entrance than the front of the line. We just ran down the steep hill and moved way up in the queue. I was wearing a kilt, I felt like Mel Gibson in Braveheart as I ran towards the door.
The people that had been near the front were complaining we cheated, but they were the ones that started running first. If they had walked up nice and orderly like we learned in kindergarten they would still have been first.
Anyways, I saw TPM 9 times in the first 48 hours.
My friends thought I was nuts for seeing it six times during its first and dollar-theater runs. There was so much interesting stuff to unpack…
…except the plot or acting (barring Ian McDiarmid and Liam Neeson).