Just dinking around at lunch and I stumbled upon a website full of blockbuster video memories and it got me tripping down memory lane. That game rentals as I knew them as a kid really aren't a thing anymore kind of blows my mind. I know there is gamefly and I think redbox rents games too, but it's not the same.
When I was in elementary school, my friday routine was set in stone - get out of school, watch afternoon cartoons (this isn't a thing anymore either, wtf??) then head to the video rental store with my sister and rent a movie and game while we waited for the pizza place next door to make out pizza. Then we'd go home, watch some movies while eating pizza, then I'd spend the rest of the night digging into my new-ish game for the weekend, often playing till late into night.
It was such a huge deal to me. Part of the reason it was such a big deal was that, being a kid at the time, I didn't exactly get new video games regularly like I do as an adult. And, in those days, despite having the internet in 89, finding out when games were released was still sort of a crapshoot, and nobody knew every video game ever. Often times, games would just show up on the store shelf to rent. Like, "holy shit, there's a wonderboy 3 now??"
We used to rent from a small place called Movie Shack until they got run out of business for what was at the time the brand new Blockbuster Video. I rented soooo many Sega Master System games this way. You'd only have the box art to go by some times, and that lead to me renting so many awful games. When the Genesis first came out, I must have mistakenly rented Last Battle like 3 times before I committed to memory that the game was garbage. This is also how I found Decap attack.
Renting a terrible game would ruin your damn weekend, lol. Take it home, play a bit, and realize the game sucks... and you got that sinking feeling. And even if the game sucked you'd still play the shit out of it, dammit, because it was a game you didn't have.
I even remember the smell associated with walls of VHS tapes and game cartridges, it was a smell of plastic and silicon. And bubble gum, too. the Movie Shack had a huge bubble gum container in the front of the store by the return desk.
I remember, later on, right before I stopped actually renting games, Blockbuster had a promotion where if you rented a movie and a game, you got a "free" PC game, one of like 8. In actuality, they were giving away Epic Pinball on 3 1/4" floppies board by board. Over the course of several weeks, I got the full version of the game this way.
The other day, I drove past my old movieshack/blockbuster and it's a carpet store now. Just kind of blows my mind that such a huge ritual of my childhood is pretty much no more. Very soon, we will talk to kids about renting movies at stores and they will look at us like we are fucking crazy, lol.
When I was in elementary school, my friday routine was set in stone - get out of school, watch afternoon cartoons (this isn't a thing anymore either, wtf??) then head to the video rental store with my sister and rent a movie and game while we waited for the pizza place next door to make out pizza. Then we'd go home, watch some movies while eating pizza, then I'd spend the rest of the night digging into my new-ish game for the weekend, often playing till late into night.
It was such a huge deal to me. Part of the reason it was such a big deal was that, being a kid at the time, I didn't exactly get new video games regularly like I do as an adult. And, in those days, despite having the internet in 89, finding out when games were released was still sort of a crapshoot, and nobody knew every video game ever. Often times, games would just show up on the store shelf to rent. Like, "holy shit, there's a wonderboy 3 now??"
We used to rent from a small place called Movie Shack until they got run out of business for what was at the time the brand new Blockbuster Video. I rented soooo many Sega Master System games this way. You'd only have the box art to go by some times, and that lead to me renting so many awful games. When the Genesis first came out, I must have mistakenly rented Last Battle like 3 times before I committed to memory that the game was garbage. This is also how I found Decap attack.
Renting a terrible game would ruin your damn weekend, lol. Take it home, play a bit, and realize the game sucks... and you got that sinking feeling. And even if the game sucked you'd still play the shit out of it, dammit, because it was a game you didn't have.
I even remember the smell associated with walls of VHS tapes and game cartridges, it was a smell of plastic and silicon. And bubble gum, too. the Movie Shack had a huge bubble gum container in the front of the store by the return desk.
I remember, later on, right before I stopped actually renting games, Blockbuster had a promotion where if you rented a movie and a game, you got a "free" PC game, one of like 8. In actuality, they were giving away Epic Pinball on 3 1/4" floppies board by board. Over the course of several weeks, I got the full version of the game this way.
The other day, I drove past my old movieshack/blockbuster and it's a carpet store now. Just kind of blows my mind that such a huge ritual of my childhood is pretty much no more. Very soon, we will talk to kids about renting movies at stores and they will look at us like we are fucking crazy, lol.
