This week in video games..holy crap.

So I know I have done a few posts about video games, but this week was really something. As an employee of GameStop, I know first hand how much advertising is put into the games that come out at this time of year, and how the developers push them back to maximize sales. This week was a little more crazy than usual.

I worked two midnight releases (an event were we stay open until midnight to release a new game). Usually, we only do them every once and a while, and only for really big games (Call of Duty, for example). But within these past couple of months, we have already done about five, and this week had two in one week!

Now I don't usually mind midnight releases, and I expected the first one for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to be huge, many people of all ages play Call of Duty. And it was. At midnight, and through about 12:30, we sold over 200 copies of the game to some very eager people. It was a fun night though, we had lots of freebies to give out, and throwing out hats and dogtags to the crowd randomly was like watching seagulls fight over fish. Entertaining stuff.

Later on in the week, we had a second midnight release for the fifth game in The Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim. Now, like I said, I expected Modern Warfare 3 to be huge, but for Skyrim (an Action/RPG/Adventure), I expected maybe 25-30 people. Boy was I wrong. By the time it hit midnight, there were over 100 people at the mall, and the crowd was actually worse than Call of Duty's. Whereas Call of Duty had a ton of people, with ages ranging from 5-60, the Skyrim crowd was a much smaller gap (mostly 20-30 I would say) and I expected them to be pretty behaved, but some of them got a little rowdy, making the night a little annoying.

Overall though, it wasn't so bad. People got their games, I got paid, and I myself enjoyed some Call of Duty. I still can't believe how many games are pushed out for the holidays, but I suppose its the way its going to be when there is money to be made.