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 did not camp out myself, but I did work a register when some early World of Warcraft expansions came out. People went crazy for them.
I remember one evening we had some Wrath of the Lich King collector’s editions available for the release event and there was a huge rush to get in when they opened the doors. I had this sweet old lady come through my line with one of the big boxes. She was very excited because she bought it for her grandson and she wanted to give him a special gift. She was all smiles.
A few minutes later, I had a guy come through my line. He looked a little flustered and had a regular edition in his hand. He said some old lady ran up, pushed him out of the way, hit him with her purse, then grabbed the last collector’s edition and ran to the front.
Pretty sure my sweet old lady customer was the same one that hit him with her purse lol. It was a weird night.