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 do it once in a while for stuff I’m excited about. Not really to “get it first,” but more to have an experience I can remember and hype myself up about it.
In high school, I worked at Walmart, and I got a pretty nice (I think 10%) employee discount on everything including electronics, so when I heard we were getting a shipment of Xbox 360’s that night, I decided to wait for it. Some friends joined me while I waited and everyone else waiting was very friendly. We all talked about what we were excited to play and how cool the features were (at the time). They just told us to hang out around the electronics section, so as people showed up we all kind of knew who had been waiting. Around 11:30 they told us to form up a line and a guy who showed up about 15 minutes earlier tried to get in towards the front. I had never seen a group Walmart customers work together before, but everyone ran the guy off haha.
I did it for the original Switch because the day after I had a flight between the US and Korea, so I figured playing the new Zelda would be a good way to eat through the time. I had a preorder so that kind of killed the excitement around the uncertainty of getting it, but it was still a good time.
I most recently did it for the Switch 2. It was actually pretty difficult to find any local stores selling it without a preorder, and none were doing midnight releases. The only place I could find was Staples that was selling them at opening the day of release. I knew they wouldn’t have very many in stock, but I figured I would wake up early, go to the store and if the line looked short enough, I’d camp out until opening. I got to the store at like 3:30 am and there was one guy there… Was cool to get to hang out, talk games, drink coffee, and watch the sun rise.