this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
44 points (100.0% liked)

Games

32627 readers
1627 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I was reading how Dragon Quest III's release in Japan in 1988 led to almost 300 arrests for truancy among students absent from school to purchase the game.

I also vaguely remember reading about Western games that had very big queues at physical stores during their release. I assume these can only be heavily anticipated old games before online distribution took off. I checked up the wiki articles of Super Mario Bros 3., Super Mario World, Sonic 2, Sonic CD and Mortal Kombat II but saw no direct mention of queues or otherwise remarkable physical activity at stores on release.

What do y'all know about this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lypticdna 10 points 1 year ago

A number of games over the years have had that. The only one I witnessed myself (and feel is was more the console release) was Halo. I attended a midnight launch and that was just crazy. I was also working for a retailer at the time of the original Modern Warfare launch which was pretty hectic. We had some people that had be queuing for nearly 7 hours.

Others have been the release of the Wii and the PlayStation 3 which I was also present for.

After the Xbox escapade, I vowed never to bother with those releases but just ended up working for a retailer where it was part of my job.