Midnight. Most of the world is asleep, but many college students are up and looking for entertainment.

Businesses like Carmike Cinemas and GameStop are taking advantage of this hour to offer special showings and releases of their products.

“I think college kids like to go to midnight shows,” said Ruth Kreiser, district manager of Carmike Cinemas, which owns and operates the Beverly Cinema 18 in Champaign. “They like to be the first ones to see it.”

With that in mind, Kreiser said, Carmike decided to institute a new program: this week is the beginning of an experiment to have midnight showings every Thursday at the Beverly and other Carmike locations.

“Thursday we’ve done (midnight showings) here and there depending on the movie, but we decided we wanted to do it on a regular basis,” Kreiser said.

She added that all customers, but especially students, will want to go to Thursday showings to see new releases at the earliest possible moment.

“We’re gonna show all approved movies,” Kreiser said, referring to movies that distributor companies allow to be screened. “We plan on playing everything that we can.”

Bryan Baker, store manager at GameStop’s Green Street location, said his store does 20-30 midnight game releases each year, but not because those events are tremendous money-makers.

“A lot of times it actually costs us more to do the midnight launches, but they do them just for the sake of the customer. Most of our customers know that if a big enough game is coming out, we’ll do a midnight launch for it and they can come get it early,” Baker said. “They want to get the game as soon as possible. They don’t even want to wait for it to come out to begin with.”

Nearly 50 people turned out at Monday night’s God of War III launch event at GameStop to buy the game, support a friend who was buying it, or simply chat with other gamers and participate in trivia contests.

“I’ve been waiting for this game since the second one, three or four years ago,” said Jake Welch, an Eastern Illinois University student who attended the event.

Welch said he planned to play God of War III through the night to complete the game by Tuesday morning and he wants to spend his spring break playing as much as possible.

“I frequent many release events,” said Evan Landreth, a graduate of Parkland College who said he bought Sony’s PlayStation 3 console specifically to play God of War III.

Landreth added that he had attended GameStop’s Final Fantasy XIII release event a week earlier.

“I’m kind of nocturnal anyway, so I figure if I live near campus I might as well just head over to GameStop and check it out,” he said.

Baker said doing programs like midnight launches just for the customer encourages repeat business, and such events have helped his store spawn a community of college-age regulars like Landreth.

“We’re all at that age where we’re very aware of what’s going on,” Baker said. “I have guys that will stop in between classes and just see what’s up, see what’s coming out soon. Sometimes they buy something, sometimes they don’t. They stop in just to say ‘Hey.’”

Kreiser said college-age spirit could help Carmike’s Thursday movie showings become a hit, as well.