A bizarre turn of events involving paper bags, Accident & Emergency and an uncomfortable chair-bed led to me walking through London’s usually bustling Oxford Street last week at quarter to six in the morning. I say usually bustling because it was strangely deserted during my journey, making the scene eerily reminiscent of the start of 28 Days Later (Also filmed during the early hours of the morning, doncha know.), but minus the zombies, although there were people resembling the walking dead, grunting miserably as they slowly shifted down the pavement, an assemblage that included your weary author.

The significance, patient reader, of my traversing Oxford Street at should-be-sleeping’o’clock was that it reminded me of two gaming launch events I’d attended on that very street – actually, the only two gaming launch events I’ve attended ever. The fact that they had both taken place on the same street only hit me in the desolate air of that early morning’s frigidity. I then remembered that both events had been totally embarrassing, encompassing the kind of memories that shouldn’t ever be allowed to resurface. So, in the spirit of Very British Gamer, I selflessly present them to you for your amusement.

The first of these embarrassing launch events occurred just over two years ago on March 23, 2007. Being a smart, stylish, and devilishly handsome kind of reader, you’ve already realised that I’m referring to the European PlayStation 3 launch. If you’re a cheeky kind of reader then you’re already wetting yourself in hysteria at the fact that I actually bought a PS3 at launch. Yes, I must admit that I look back on the £425 I spent, consider how the economy has fucked us all over, and laugh myself to sleep with big man-tears of joy. So, the actual funny part is that that’s not the funny part.

I was (and still am) a huge fan of the PlayStation 2, and as such was sitting-on-hands excited about the PS3’s launch (please stop laughing). Sadly no-one I knew was of similar mind - the prophetic bastards – so I solitarily headed into Central London to the Oxford Street GAME store with the aim of being one of the first Europeans to get their grubby mits on the big black box at a midnight launch. I reached the store at 11:30pm, only to find it as barren of people as I’d find it two years later. The store was completely darkened, and there were only fifteen confused people waiting outside. After talking with the people in the queue, who were as sure as I was that the store had announced that it was having a midnight launch, I decided that maybe it was just going to be a low-key event, and that there was no harm in waiting until midnight to find out. We waited until twenty past midnight; clearly the store was not going to open. I considered trying to find another launch event, but disgruntled I instead decided that rather than doubling my journey’s length by having to use the night buses, I would get the last underground train home, albeit sans a PlayStation 3.

That’s not even the funny part. When I went to GAME in the morning I found out that, because of fears of overcrowding and mugging raised by the police, a bunch of stores had decided to not have a midnight launch for the PS3, including said store. Of course they’d failed to put up just one measly sign to inform Joe Public of this. The funny part? I also learned that the only real midnight launch event that had taken place in London had been on the same, long street but at the Virgin store. It gets worse; all the people in the know who had attended Virgin’s midnight launch got free 46-inch HD televisions. Oh, and just to rub salt into my already deep wounds, apparently they all got a free taxi ride home. Bastards.