Midnight launches. Some people look back at them with fondness, while others do not. I worked at EB Games for about 4 years and worked a number of different midnight launches, and while I didn’t love all of my time in games retail, there was something special about midnight launches.
Welcome to another community post, where we give you the opportunity to tell us some of your most treasured (or degenerate) gaming memories, opinions, and bits of advice. In this post, I was inspired by the words of Matt Cook in Destructoid, talking about his love for the many midnight launches he had gone to in his gaming life. It’s nice to see somebody care for the events that ex-retail employees like myself put in extra hours to get right.
I’ll go first in saying that I have never been to a midnight launch that I wasn’t actively working at. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to, but because I simply had nobody to go with when I was a teenager. And then by the time I was 17, I worked at EB Games and just worked at midnight launches for the next four years. By the time I was out of EB Games, I couldn’t think of anything worse than being in an EB Games unless I absolutely had to be. I was jaded.
But alas, I loved midnight launches. I loved getting dressed up when the time called for it, with one of the only pictures of me working at one being a low-quality snap of my old store’s Fallout 4 midnight launch. My former manager Kristy and co-worker Kimmie made this great vault door with our store number on it, and I was dressed like a housewife with a Pip-Boy 3000 on my wrist. Big thank you to Kristy for letting me use this picture, it’s a throwback!
Then there was also the midnight launch of the Nintendo Switch, of which I have absolutely no photographic proof. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one. That guy Danny from Channel V was there for some reason, and we talked about The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. There were so many people crammed into what I still believe to this day is the country’s smallest EB Games, which I’m almost certain was about the size of a shipping container. Happy to be proved wrong!
Those were just a couple of the midnight launches I worked at, and I’ve gotta say that they all felt pretty special. To be so excited about a game that you go outside your house during bedtime hours to buy it, joining others just as excited as you and taking part in whatever activities the retail workers have cooked up? It’s beautiful. It’s so deeply niche. It’s an experience exclusive not just to the gaming world, but to the market of physical video game sales.
And that’s where it ends, really. As digital marketplaces have become the norm as well as the most convenient option for playing a game as soon as it’s available, it seems like midnight launches are becoming somewhat obsolete. Sure, they still happen, but they’re not the only way to get a game before everybody else these days. They’re not even the easiest way to do it. However, they’re still a special kind of event that most video game lovers have been to at least once.
So in saying that, I turn to you. What was the most memorable midnight launch that you’ve ever been to? Let us know!
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