Roughly a year ago, I found myself sitting on the floor of the local GameStop, slightly intoxicated and eagerly counting the minutes until the release of Bungie’s hottest release at the time, Halo: Reach. A little over a week ago, I did the same for Gears of War 3 and tomorrow I’ll be depriving myself of sleep yet again for Dark Souls. I attended the midnight releases of four titles in 2010, with an anticipated total of four by the end of 2011, as well. I guess you could say that tomorrow’s late-night event won’t be my first rodeo.
You see a lot at these events: drunks, geeks, nerds and super nerds, kids up far past their bedtime and exhausted parents who obviously need to increase their whining threshold. Midnight releases can either be a total bust or the best gaming nights of your life. But you’ve either got to know what you’re doing, or make sure you’re tagging alongside a veteran for the ride. I think I can help in that department.
It might look like a doomsday clock, but it's actually just counting down until the next Call of Duty release.
First things first: you have to be fully aware of just what type of experience you’re getting into. I rarely attend midnight releases of films anymore, simply because of how big (read: annoying) they’ve become. In the Golden Era of midnight releases, you were sure to find yourself amongst a small group of dedicated fans as worked up and eager as yourself. In my early days I was treated to sights such as parking lot lightsaber duels (a few of which I participated in), chatting up a girl dressed as a seven-foot Ringwraith, and a classmate reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets to entertain a theater full of nerds. Nowadays, something like that is hard to find.
Contemporary midnight releases are practically weekly events, no matter how big or small the title is. Fallout: New Vegas only managed to draw myself, two adolescent boys and their father. The simultaneous release of The Force Unleashed II and Fable III drew fewer fans than the first Mass Effect, a new IP at the time. I've been to every Mass Effect, Halo and console Fallout midnight release, and I can tell you that the social makeup of nerds is quite varied. The unwashed, unsocialized fanboy ready to debate the finer points of the Jedi Code are far less common now than the clueless, drunk roommate just tagging along for the ride, or Force forbid, somebody’s mom.
Ignore the sign and notice what's behind it. Yep, sweatpants…in public.
Though I’m sure as we get older there are far fewer of us that are ashamed of our guilty geek pleasures, it’s still hard to talk shop around a group full of people wondering why a twenty-something gives a damn about space piracy, and practically no one will think it’s cool that your speech skill was high enough to convince Saren to blow his own brains out. The lesson here: make not only that you’re bringing friends, but that your friends actually care about what’s getting released.
Taking into account the potential for disparity in relative fandom levels of attendants, the type of game you’re pitching a tent for (sometimes there are literal tents, get your mind out of the gutter) also plays a role in your experience. I’ve found that RPG’s, while usually well worth getting excited for, don’t make for as memorable of a release. You can chat with others about what type of character you can create or what twists and turns you think the story might hold, but around 3 in the morning you’re still sitting alone in the dark trudging through an enchanted forest hunting for ingredients. There’s nothing wrong with that because it is how those games are meant to be played, but it doesn’t exactly scream “memorable.”
Dragons, forests and swords don't exactly scream "social event."
Unfortunately, as inundated with them as the market seems to be, in my personal experience shooters provide the most enjoyable releases. Obviously the primary reason for this is that they lend themselves particularly well to both quick play sessions and night-long marathons. As beyond blown away as I am to pick up Skyrim at midnight, it isn’t something that my friends and I can plow through in six hours on co-op mode. Nonexistent are those that come with a team death match, now that I think of it. I suppose that chatting with a friend over a headset as you both play through the same story is technically a possibility, but it certainly isn’t desirable. I hate to admit it, but something like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 or Madden 12 might give you a more memorable night than Fallout: New Vegas. Without friends to compete with or talk to, I fell asleep after a measly two hours of irradiated adventuring.
The Dark Souls release I’m attending this week might be one of the strangest I’ve ever been to, as it’s coming out simultaneously with NBA 2K12 and Rage. When I attended the release of Mass Effect and Rock Band way back in November 2007, I couldn’t really tell who was waiting for which game unless I talked to them. This release, on the other hand, might be like a middle school cafeteria. In one corner there’ll be run-of-the-mill nerds eagerly awaiting a romp through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and in another corner there will be hardcore nerds who can’t wait to be massacred repeatedly by minion after minion and boss after boss in Dark Souls. Where the “jock” types will fit in as they camp out for NBA 2K12, I have no idea. It will be quite an interesting group, to say the least.
You win a prize if you can guess which one of them can throw a football and which one of them knows what a manticore is.
So, provided that your anticipation of a title hasn’t been completely obliterated by the gaming industry’s sentient hype machine, you might have a night ahead of yourself. Though gaming is often stigmatized as a lonely hobby, I think that we all know that while we’ve all had moments, hours, even days of solitude locked away in a room trudging through a title, more often than not the opposite is true. Gaming is becoming more of a social activity, and midnight releases are perfect expressions of this idea. Some titles or genres, or even certain sects of nerds, might be better at facilitating this than others, but it’s hard not to find the fun infectious as the clock strikes twelve.