Aside from allowing people with less disposable income like my family enjoy a wide variety of games, renting gave me other interesting memories. For one thing, poorly photocopied manuals which often were missing pages or just incomplete. I still have a few of them from used rental games I purchased where the original had been lost or thrown away. Even with the shortcomings they had, I preferred them to what they were eventually replaced with. By the time PS1 games were common, many of the older game manuals that were lost/stolen/destroyed were replaced by a blue and white sticker on the outside of the clear plastic case rentals came in. These usually only had the basic game controls and some very brief game summary type information. It’s ironic that many physical games I’ve bought since come with an insert that is essentially that blue and white sticker and rely on in-game content for instructions.
An interesting feature of rentals during the cartridge era were the save games you would find. I played Final Fantasy III for SNES one weekend but wasn’t able to finish. The next weekend I found that the copy I brought home wasn’t the same one I had gotten because the save data was completely different. I came up with the idea of making a subtle marker in the photocopied manual in order to find this copy next time. I made it a little further than the previous weekend and returned the game on Sunday evening. The following Friday I found the copy with the note I made in the manual, even though I felt sort of paranoid about an employee seeing me open multiple copies of the game. When I got the copy home I noticed my save data still intact and was able to finish. Games with multiple slots also had the chance you could load someone else’s save. You could then see where they were in the game and what they had named their characters. It felt a little weird as a voyeur in someone else’s game and I avoided overwriting their saves in case they had an opportunity to finish later. Other than seeing AAA or POOP for character names, sometimes I got ideas for things to try out or characters I hadn’t found.
Blockbuster didn’t make it to my town until I had sort of gotten past the point of renting many games. Part of this was that I was playing more PC games, and the other part was that I finally had my own disposable income to buy games with. It sounds weird but even though Blockbuster cost more than the staple rental places that were already in business, they eventually ran the others out of business. The main factors from my observation as a rental employee was that Blockbuster:
- Did not require charge customers when VHS tapes were returned without being rewound
- Rented by default for two days instead of one
- Allowed you to drop off movies and games without having to go into the store
Instead of paying $2 for a nightly rental that you would have to pay $0.50 for not rewinding, people chose to pay $4 for a two-day rental with no rewind fee. People REALLY hated that rewind fee. Of course what happened next was Blockbusters popped up everywhere, then all the franchises were bought back by Blockbuster corporate, and then they were ultimately all closed. Pretty big changes within a period of about 10 years from the first time I walked into one.
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