(It's the 15th anniversary on Sunday, so I'm using that as an excuse to collate all my scattered dev memory stuff onto cohost dot org.)
We heard that there was going to be a midnight launches at Best Buy, so a bunch of us bought some donuts and drove to a relatively far away Best Buy (it was the one closest to the mall that Paul Blart: Mall Cop was filmed in) to hand them out to people and cheer when they left the store.
I get that "oh, there's a huge line" seems like a normal response looking back on it, but to set the scene for not-old people: 2007 was the wildest video game holiday season ever. We were launching the same day as Mass Effect. The day before, Uncharted came out, and the last week or two had seen Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Super Mario Galaxy, Gears of War, The Simpsons Game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, The Witcher, Virtua Fighter 5, and also Neversoft's Guitar Hero III. Oh, and Bioshock, Portal, Team Fortress 2, a new Zelda game on DS, and Halo 3 had come out a month or two earlier than that.
We had no idea if anyone would pay $170 for a box of plastic in general, let alone when you could pick and choose between three of the above games for the same price and still have change. So, I guess I was expecting at best like 10 or 20 people waiting at midnight at this suburban northeastern Best Buy in freezing November weather, especially after seeing 50-60 person lines for the Wii the year before.
There were 120-ish people there at 11pm. Absolutely bonkers. We did not have enough donuts.