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 can top that.
I queued for steam. the software. over night.
Back in 2003 when steam launched, hosting was still a bit tricky, and serving software to a ton of people at once, was not as easy as it is today.
When steam launched, you could download just the steam client like today, and install stuff via steam. But it was very slow and buggy as hell
So a couple days after launch, they started to release steam bundled with CS 1.6, so you didn’t need to install it via steam.
But that was of course a much bigger download. And a TON of people wanted it.
So they published it via a download service that integrated a queue, so they could still provide some reasonable bandwith to the people downloading.
I remember that I joined the queue in the evening before bed, let the family computer run over night, started the download before school, and the download was roughly finished when I came back home.
fun times