When Midnight Releases Were Special

Midnight releases are a wonderful thing. Well, they used to be a wonderful thing. The first midnight release I went to was in 2011. I was picking up L.A. Noire with a friend. There was pizza, there was soda, there was about six people who picked up the game at midnight. It seemed like a rare occasion and was treated like one.

Flash forward to 2016 where nearly every game gets a midnight release at your local video game retailer. Because they're so common now, the luster of the midnight release has worn off. There's more people than ever, but less fanfare than ever. Sometime's you'll get the tournament set up for a midnight release for fighting games or sports games, but they are the exception. A lot of the excitement is dampened by the availability of digital versions and the realization that once you get the game home, you'll have to install the game and the day one patch.

Over the last two years, I've been to at least ten midnight releases. Almost every one of them ended with me falling asleep while the game and update install.

However, for those of us who need the physical versions of games, let's not forget the real heroes of the midnight release: the retail employee. They keep the store open past midnight just so we can we can get a video game as early as possible.