Let the Games Begin

Hundreds of gamers stood patiently in line, enduring near-freezing temperatures outside of GameStop at the Overlook Shopping Center Monday night in Watsonville for the much-anticipated midnight release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

A quick glance and one would think a gathering this big was meant for tickets to the next Justin Bieber concert.

Thankfully, Bieber and his awful music had nothing to do with this occasion.  Instead, it was the vast growing community of gamers that were hungry for the new installment made by Infinity Ward. 

Some people in line cleverly prepared themselves with fold-out chairs and bags of snacks to get by the long night. And there was even a guy that brought his guitar for a bit of some crowd entertainment. A tiny scuffle broke out in the front of the line, but it was nothing serious enough to break up the fiesta.      

The thought of standing in a long line for hours to pick up a video game isn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea. But as for Kevin Dawal, or also known as "tagginondawal" on the Playstation Network, he didn’t mind the wait.

“I’ve been here since 2 p.m," Dawal said.

When asked what he did for food, Dawal simply replied, “I went down to , got some snacks there and went down to .”

The staff at GameStop was hard at work organizing the hectic event and thought of a new strategy to hand out copies of COD: MW3. The customer was given a green wristband to simply show proof of purchase instead of turning in a receipt. 

Shaun Alcoraz, a GameStop employee, had this to say about the wristbands: “I think this is a better way to get the game out. It’s much faster and everyone is happy about that.” 

It looks like this new method by GameStop actually worked and it could be used for future midnight release parties.