My favourite EB experience (story time)
Back in the day (yeah I’m old) EB was a magical place. We had PCs running demos of the latest games to try out (or sometimes just the full game). “Online subscription” didn’t even exist yet, and “micro transaction” was a literal description of the size of the transaction.
Another great thing about this time was a relative lack of enforcement around release dates. Maybe the industry just wasn’t big enough for people to care that much. Either way you could often walk into EB the day before and casually ask if an upcoming game was in stock yet and sometimes they will just sell it to you a day or two early. It was one of those things where if you were just friendly enough you could get a deal.
Well I think it was the original Prey for the Xbox 360, so this would have been 2006. I wanted this game so bad, and I was in the store talking to the staff about it, and it turns out they had it “in stock” even though it didn’t release for about another week. This was a dream come true. So I’m spending every moment street school playing Prey. I’m unusually addicted and manage to finish it in a few days. It was pretty good, but it felt unusually short. Then I remembered that EB would process a return within 7 days with very minimal questions asked. I had returned a few games in the past so I knew the routine. So I took it back and remember taking them it was just too short, and so they processed the return. But the funny part was it hasn’t technically even been released yet 🤣
TL;DR Many years ago I returned a game before it had technically been released yet.