Best Buy is expecting a lot of excitement when Sony's PlayStation VR becomes available for sale next month.

So the Richfield-based retailer is going to open about 350 of its stores at around midnight to enable eager gamers to get their hands on the virtual reality headsets as soon as they officially go on sale.

In the central time zone, select stores will open at 11:01 p.m. on October 12. If you're on the East Coast, stores will open at 12:01 on October 13 and on the West Coast it will be 9:01 p.m.

In the Twin Cities, Best Buy's stores in Apple Valley, Coon Rapids, Maple Grove, Maplewood, Minnetonka, Oakdale, Richfield and Roseville will open late for the release. Other stores will have "limited quantities" of the devices available for sale the next day as well as on BestBuy.com.

Best Buy, which is hoping that virtual reality takes off and becomes a big new source of revenue, has already been offering in-store demos of PlayStation VR for the last few months, as it's also done with the Oculus Rift.

It's not unusual for Best Buy to open some of it stores in the middle of night. In October alone, select Best Buy stores will open around midnight releases of games such as Gears of War 4, Mafia III, Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, and The Elder Scrolls V. And in November, it will do so for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.