The thrill of borrowing or renting video games
Nintendo / Sega / Sony
Some of the best memories of my gaming childhood were the "trying something new" moments. And once upon a time, that was very possible with console games through something we called the video rental store. The most popular of which was Blockbuster Video. And much later came Hollywood video (at least, in the Chicago-land area).
If you were a family like mine, you didn't really have the money to routinely rent new games from Blockbuster or Family Video or whatever. There were no video game demos to download and just like today, video were expensive! What you did instead was borrow games back-and-forth from your buddies. This was an age before emulators and ROMs.
Doing this with NES games was always fun but for some reason, the better memories I have of borrowing games was with the original Game Boy. I was able to experience Game Boy games such as Double Dragon, The Simpsons: Escape from Camp Deadly, Gargoyles Quest, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan and so much more. It is difficult to explain why the Game Boy stands out so much to me because I have great memories of doing the same with the NES.
Again, we didn’t do much renting of movies or video games. It wasn’t cheap. At least not in the beginning; that is, until the competition eventually forced the “big guys” to become more cost competitive and lower their prices. However, even though my better memories are of borrowing Game Boy games from friends, the best are of when we got together with my cousins from Michigan. It was a family of all girl kids and they typically just hung out with my sister, leaving me to do my own thing. That is, until my uncle would take me for a drive to a nearby rental store and let me pick a video game or two of my choice to play while we were together. It was a simple act of kindness and yet, it meant the world to me.
Nowadays, children (and adults) don’t experience that same excitement of walking down the aisles and perusing the boxes of what could be an exciting new game to play. Everything is now instant gratification. Although, it should be noted, not all games were good choices.
What are some of your favorite video game rental / borrowing experiences from when you were a child?
There is something truly lost, sadly, about biking down to the local rental store with your buddies to walk the isles and discover new games (& movies). The 80s & early-mid-90s was a great time, still innocent & real before the Internet.
I tried to keep my local rental stores open by being a regular customer; after Blockbuster failed, local chains popped up and they eventually all went out of business by the late 2010s and, by then, my kids were only babies, so I can never experience that with them.
Tough watching my kids growing up today, especially in the 2020s; I'm trying to enable that genuine childhood experience… but it just doesn't seem to exist anymore… too much change, and it isn't just the digital age…