I guess my harrowing game purchase would have been the Uncharted 3 launch. I was living in a brand new country, had no cash, only my debit card. Without a car or the ability to catch the bus, I walked about 2 hours to the mall and another 2 hours back just to get the game day 1. I wasn't entirely sure how to get there by foot either, but I figured it out. To make matters worse, it started raining a little bit on the way back. I could have waited for another day to pick it up, gotten a ride.... but I had to have it at launch. On top of that, the game was €69.99, which at that time, the exchange rate made it over $90 out of my American bank account. There's no stopping me from getting a new Uncharted game though!

My most harrowing video game purchase.... if it includes the snes mini then it was getting up early on launch day. As in 3am early to go to walmart and finding several people waiting already. I was worried about getting one for my family. Alas, I did get one. Joy to me!! I was upset though because there were other people in line that had several 'friends' with them to each buy a SNES mini. It was only allowed to buy 1 per person. No online sale for it, and the scalpers found a way. Those dicks. As I said, I did get mine, and still play it frequently. I could also mention waiting in line for a ps5. That was harrowing as well. A bigger line. I was the 2nd to last person to get one. Thank you EB GAMES in the Midtown mall in Saskatoon.

I don't remember the actual game I was trying to purchase, but I do remember why the PSN store was loading to buy it my PS3 fat decided to have it's heat sink fail.

Most harrowing game purchase was Panzer Dragoon Saga on Sega Saturn
Basically did a 4 hours car drive to another town that had a copy in store (the only copy).
Still have that game today :)

Also bonus point to taking a 2 hours bus ride to grab Cosmic Carnage on 32 X and the game was pure garbage.

My most harrowing video game purchase experience was way back 20 years buying Warhawk for the original PlayStation. When arriving home and opening up the game, the disk ended up being damaged. Went back to “Babbage’s” (remember them?) to return it but they were sold out. Tried 4 other stores who supposedly had it in stock with no luck. Ended up returning back to the original store leaving my name / phone for a future call when restocked. My Girlfriend thought I was nuts spending nearly all day seeking this one game out; it was worth it....

Standing in line, waiting to buy the disc version of Diablo 3 only to reach home install it and being hit with the dreadful ERROR 37!

I know I'm late, but my most harrowing video game purchase would be Diablo 2 back in 2000. I was a young teenager, cutting lawns to save money just for the game.. I didn't cut anymore lawns until the following year after release.

I stood in line at a Walmart for almost 24 hours for a PS2. I wasn't even old enough to drive but there I waited. No bathroom break. No snack. No water. Haha.
Walmart handed everyone in line a ticket to account for a console and had 27 tickets. I won't ever forget that. I was the 12th person. I mowed lawns and walked dogs for months to save for it.

All day long people, often groups of people, would come in and offer to buy your place/ticket. Nobody budged.
Then night came and groups came in...a bit angrier. Pretty soon it wasn't asking to purchase your ticket but outright threatening people. Being alone and young, I had many adult men tell me they would do awful things to me if I didn't hand them my ticket. One man and his friends came in close and whispered tone that they'd stab me on the spot.

I did not budge. When the most persistent finally gave up they shouted to everyone that they'd be waiting outside for us all and that was the only time security could do anything. They walked us all to our cars/rides and I had my PS2. It ruled.

Collector's Edition of GTA 5, on PS3. Standing around the Union Gap, WA Gamestop parking lot waiting for the doors to open. Tons of other people around, at night, was interesting to say the least. Good thing was that we all had pre-orders, so we weren't waiting to rush the door, but I did get a lot of envious looks walking out with that big box.

i mean this year is one of the worsts i guess i can just say that clicking on everything hoping to not double purchase and then the wait in fear of a delay or cancellation

Camping out for the PS3 launch in the ghetto Target while being freezing cold, only for there not to be any available. Of course.

My most shocking purchase of the game was when I was collecting for Assassin's creed Valhalla for a long time, and with almost all the money, the pandemic came and I was fired from my job. Before I found the next bit of money I had saved for the game but I decided that in this case I would not give up!

The end of the story is positive because I finally got the game for Santa XD

During the launch of the Switch, 3 of my friends and I had agreed to camp out at a Best Buy to snag a few consoles. 3 of us showed up at around 4:00 pm but our 4th friend didn't show up at the time we agreed. We called his phone for about 2 hours until it stopped ringing and instead went straight to voicemail.

At this point we started getting worried and started calling his live-in girlfriend but she wasn't answering either. A thing to note here is that we knew that he and his girlfriend were having problems, and we weren't very fond of her to begin with, so we started coming up with crazy assumptions about how she finally snapped and killed him and now he was lying in a ditch somewhere. It started jokingly, but as we came up with more reasons for his disappearance, we slowly started realizing that she was definitely crazy enough to commit murder.

For hours we waited in line at the Best Buy, hoping our friend wasn't dead but also unsure of what else to do. It was one of the longest 6 hours of my life. But at the end of the night, we got our brand new Switches and heading to my home.

The next morning, I get a call from jail from our missing friend and he explained what happened. He had been on his way out to meet us when his girlfriend stopped him at the door. She confronted him, thinking that he was going out to cheat on her (he wasn't) and wouldn't let him leave. Long story short, the police were called after she slapped herself around to claim that he had beat her (my friend is very non-confrontational and she was crazy so I 100% believed my friend). But when the police arrived they believed her so he got arrested.

So we hurried to the jail and posted his bail, bummed that this had happened to him, but happy that he was alive after we had let our imaginations run wild. They broke up and she dropped all charges weeks later but it was still my most harrowing video game purchase experience.

Mistaken identity. Went to Gamestop with a good friend, and upon parking at the mall, suddenly surrounded by police with their guns drawn, screaming at us and pointing them in our faces. They got the license plate number wrong apparently, pulled us out, ran IDs, then left immediately without an apology. We got up and went to Gamestop after xD

The most harrowing game purchase I had must have been the one time I bought a game off of amazon third party seller. I thought I had found a great deal for fallout 4 gold edition which included the little bobblehead figure. When it arrived it was just the figure and no game. I went into the description of the item and realized that the seller had mentioned that it was just the collectible and no game was included. I got so mad I chucked the bobblehead at the wall and broke it. Lesson learned, read everything and be careful when buying from third party sellers. Oh and I ended up never getting that game to this day.

Buyihg Anthem day one. Saddest day of my gaming life. LOL.

My most harrowing game purchase was buying WWE 2K18 for Switch when I found it for $9 at Target. I knew it was bad, but I didn't figure out just HOW bad until I tried playing it. My god... how could a major publisher like 2K actually release a game in that state? Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 on the PS2 ran better than that did by a country mile. It was immediately traded into GameStop for a profit and is officially the shortest time I've ever own a game.

Back to the Future for NES. If only my 9 year old self had known better......

Picked out a game for my birthday early, watched my parents buy it and then had to wait a whole week before I could get to it. Younger me thought that week felt like an eternity.

So it was the night of October 27th, 2000... the day after the Playstation 2 was released. My mother and I were driving from Chicago to Hartford, Connecticut. Just before we got in the car I'd started telling her about how we could earn a fortune over the holidays if we got ONE Playstation 2. (Preferably two of them so that I could keep one.) That was all she needed to hear. We stopped at every retailer and every major electronic show between Chicago and Hartford. Every Toys R Us... every Best Buy... Every Walmart. There had to be about a hundred of them. 24-hour K-Marts in the middle of Lake Wannabe, Ohio... Video game truck stops at the end of Fort All-Is-Lost, Pennsylvania. NOTHING... not a thing. We learned a lot about American geography that night... but nothing about how to pick up a new game console. Three months later I was living in Tokyo an I got a package in the mail from my mom: A brand new Playstation 2 with Tekken Tag Tournament. I was in heaven. (Technically I was in Japan... same thing.)

Tell me again how the multiplatform strategy was supposed to fix everything. Look at your results and compare them to Nintendo, which keeps thriving with exclusives. Your loyal fans are gone. And let’s not forget the pile of IPs you purchased only to let them rot.

The worst thing is this is down from last years numbers/expectations which was down from the previous years numbers/expectations. You think about how long “down” has been a consistent part of the communication and you realize those subscriptions are what’s holding that boat together. The price cut of gamespass is still a price raise in a string of price raises. They are trying to use players to offset the missing revenue. Now call of duty is out of gamespass, which is literally WHY they bought the company. To draw people to the subscription. They realized they missed a boatload of money and that wasn’t sustainable. Now you pay for it like you would have if they never bought the company… so why buy the company? Mind you those billions still need to be paid back. Yeah it gives you a chance to say we make the biggest FPS… but the internal conversations must be brutal at high level on topics that really matter. Like revenue. Profitability. And ROI for the shopping spree.

Is this like the 10th quarter in a row they're down 33% on hardware how is that even mathematically possible. You would think their mediocrity would Plateau