I went to a Tears of the Kingdom midnight launch and partied like it was 2006

gamesradar.com:

When I pulled up to the parking lot of my local GameStop to pick up Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom last night, I was expecting to see a fledgling crowd just sizable enough to make the tiny store feel busy, but not crowded. I thought there'd be a couple of Zelda shirts, maybe a pair of elf ears, and a Triforce tattoo at the very most. Holy Hyrule was I wrong.

See, this particular store lives in a suburb on the far-north edge of Phoenix, Arizona, in a slightly older community of working class families, retirees, and as I've since learned, a shit ton of Zelda fans. They were everywhere! When instead I saw a shambling, disorganized multi-line throng of literally hundreds wrapped around the store and encroaching on the nearby grocery store, I couldn't believe my eyes.

It wasn't as if I doubted the thundering momentum of a new Zelda game's big launch day, but let's be real, it's 2023. If physical media wasn't already dying a slow and painful death, I figured three years of Covid-19 had nailed that coffin shut and buried it under six feet of concrete.

I can probably count the number of midnight launches I've been to on two hands, but it's been enough to see a steady decline in the crowds they attract over the last decade and a half. Modern Warfare 2's in 2009 was a rager, but when I went to pick up the original Destiny in 2014, I remember wondering where the party had gone. It was Bungie's new game and its first new IP since birthing the legendary Halo series, and yet it couldn't draw more than a couple dozen people to its early launch.

The last midnight launch I went to was in 2019, and I sincerely reckon there were six people there. Granted, it was for Luigi's Mansion 3, but even for a relatively niche game like that, I remember