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
Twice. Once for the launch of the GameCube which had a midnight launch. There was essentially no queue for that
Second was in the run up to Christmas. We do one big present for each kid at some point and I had to queue for a very limited number of PS3’s in the country from about 3am. We knew there were some coming to a local store but it was very limited.
Nearly got in a fisticuffs with an attempted queue skipper. Prick. He was behind me so it didn’t directly affect me and he kept saying as much and telling me to relax but fuck that for a game of soldiers. I wasn’t going to let him steal someone else’s further back.