What memories do you guys have about renting video games at places like blockbuster or hollywood video

[Boofytan]

I loved the smell of popcorn in the morning. Free popcorn!

The horror sections were usually the best because they had cool giant standies for Creepshow and giant statues of Aliens, Freddy Kreuger etc. Most of the bigger video stores had a great horror section ambiance.

One mom & pop place had a few Master System games but that was about it. Same for Turbografx but I never had one. For nes/genesis/snes, after a month you had to go to a new place to change things up so there were a few places we had in rotation. Everybody seems to have massive nostalgia for Blockbuster but there were a few local chains that were just as good, and one place that was about 3x larger than your average Blockbuster. They were selling Neo Geo home consoles, and i think they even had a few arcade cabs.

And giggling when guys would awkwardly go to the curtained off section. I remember that too. Otoh hentai wasn't really well known so it was right next to copies of Tank Police & Guyver.

 

[MrBird]

I remember that before I rented Gamecube games from Blockbuster, there was a smaller rental store called Mr. Video that we would go to, which I only vaguely remember renting some N64 games, and it's a place I associate with Bomberman Hero, of all games.

 

[Lod 10]

I'm not that old, but I love a good VHS tape.I remember buying DVDs of movies when I was a kid.

 

[MangaMunchkin]

Sorry to young for me too, I imagine it would have been nice. Kinda like you want more what you can't have right? Or you have it for a little while and you appreciate it more as you know you wont have it very long.

 

[Lg42inchtv]

Sorry to young for me too, I imagine it would have been nice. Kinda like you want more what you can't have right? Or you have it for a little while and you appreciate it more as you know you wont have it very long.

Video games rentals haven't totally gone away. Xbox Game Pass is a rental service and Xbox Game Pass has worked so well that Microsoft conditioned Xbox fans into not buying games

 

[iamthemilkman]

My family mostly rented games from Phar-Mor as a kid. They were definitely my favorite. We didn't start regularly going to Blockbuster until Phar-Mor closed. I also started going to Family Video, I'd rent a stack of games for a day (one day rentals were cheap), I'd rip them to my Xbox and then return them the next day.

 

[StopTheCatastrophe]

Blockbuster was very corporate, and felt like a Best Buy if Best Buy only had games and every game had 2 feet of shelf space. Spacious but weird. There is nothing nostalgic about it, it wasn't fun or special except in the basic social sense like if you were shopping with a friend and going up and down the aisles. Blockbuster had a small "movie screen" playing a movie, but it felt dry and soulless, and it's not like you could sit down.

Local independently owned video stores (which had videogames) were like a cramped secret library with 20 books per foot on the shelf. Traditionally it was like $2 per night, but Blockbuster corporation of course had to pervert that with their business school nonsense so at Blockbuster it was like $5 for three nights (OOOHHH! /sarcasm), in other words an over-priced lock-in scheme. (Makes sense for games maybe, but terrible for movies.)

The "video counter" as a spiritual cultural institution lives up to the legend. Actually I was too young to make use of it at the time, but when I meet someone who was a video store counter person today they're always cool.

The funny thing is...almost none of my Great Game memories were rentals. It was always either borrowing from a friend or family member, or a small handful of greats that I bought myself. My friends' families were all richer than mine. One of the few special rental experiences was Cybernator on SNES, a good game that is also obscure enough that nobody I knew owned it.

BANAL MEMORIES

• I had to return the movie-based Batman Forever (I think) game on SNES (not the anime-based one) because I couldn't get out of the first room (or thereabouts). There was no way to exit the area, I tried going to every pixel and pressing every button, etc. I thought it was broken. It turns out that you had to do a special controller input to jump down through a hole, and no it wasn't the usual Down + Jump, the devs were obtuse. I think at the counter I said some equivalent of "it's broken" and got my money back.
• I had to call a slightly-distant video store on landline phone to ask if they had Killer Instinct on Super Nintendo, to make sure the copies weren't already taken out by somebody. At the video stores closest to me, Killer Instinct was always already rented. Then my mom drove me to the distant one because she knew I was obsessed with that game.
• We thought Battletoads on NES was funny as kids, with the "large foot" kick and so on, so we rented that multiple times.
• Massive corporate money was spent on lying to children about videogames. An example of a lie was that the puzzle-game Zoop is an exciting product. Ridiculous marketing scheme surrounding that game, there was some business school gambit but I forget the details.
• This is movies not games, but I remember when "anime" was first becoming known in the USA. The Anime section/shelf at Blockbuster basically had like 2 things on it: Akira and something else I forget. I don't think it was Miyazaki, maybe Ghost in the Shell.
• I wanted to rent Hyper Zone. A family member with me said they heard it wasn't great so don't get it, my other family member didn't care about games so brattily agreed by default and said don't get it. I rented it anyway, and it was indeed bland, and when I was playing it they made jokes and zingers making fun of how bad the game was. I was younger than them, so I was less able to be sarcastic and funny at the time.

Most of the memories above are banal without spectacle. I believe that is the substance of most human experience.

 

[Dyne]

Blockbuster was very corporate, and felt like a Best Buy if Best Buy only had games and every game had 2 feet of shelf space. Spacious but weird. There is nothing nostalgic about it, it wasn't fun or special except in the basic social sense like if you were shopping with a friend and going up and down the aisles. Blockbuster had a small "movie screen" playing a movie, but it felt dry and soulless, and it's not like you could sit down.

Local independently owned video stores (which had videogames) were like a cramped secret library with 20 books per foot on the shelf.

So true! My parents always took us to the local independent video store. Way cooler.
I remember the NES section of the store in late 80s was like this secret vault of dozens of games that I'd never heard of. I would just stare at all the cover art trying to pick one until my parents said we were going to leave.

Blockbuster isn't something I ever went to until I was a teen in the late 90s I think.

 

[χKai]

Sorry to young for me too, I imagine it would have been nice. Kinda like you want more what you can't have right? Or you have it for a little while and you appreciate it more as you know you wont have it very long.

Rentals bypassed the need to make a purchase on any movie or game, because they were at a time where we didn't have reliable review websites to be able to find out whether a thing was good or not based on the commercials, magazijes, and billboard advertisements.