Best Video Game Rental Memories

[mooblius]

It was around 1990 or 91 when I discovered a small shop in a strip mall that rented video games.  It was run by a couple of personable guys, who were really into video games. At that time, the the local video stores, Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, I Love Video, etc., were primarily renting NES games, but this was the first shop I had seen renting games for the Sega Genesis as well as many games for PC and Mac.

My first rental from them was probably Castle of Illusion for the Sega Genesis.  My last rental from them was Ultima VII: The Black Gate for PC DOS a couple of years later.  They closed their shop shortly afterward.

[Warmsignal]

Not 10 minutes after we've started playing his mom comes downstairs and freaks out once she sees what's happening on the screen. Even though she'd the one who paid for the game and let us rent it, she goes off on my friend and I, makes me go home, and my friend is in tears.

Never could grasp the insanity of such helicopter parenting. What do they think? A kid plays a goofy ass game like Bio Freaks and his soul is lost? It sends him down a dark path of destruction and evil, all because he played some absurd arcade game? Grown ass adults walk around with such lack of logic and reasoning. I've often seen it, but I can't understand it.



I don't really have any super interesting stories about my rental experiences. Most were just pretty standard. I remember being super excited to rent games like Cruis'n and GoldenEye 007, and just the excitement of seeing copies available there on the shelf, at a time when it was kinda hard to find certain games in stock at retail. I remember first discovering Driver at BlockBuster, just taking a chance on it. Ended up loving that game, and later owning it. I think one day I kind of just randomly discovered Yoshi's Story N64 at BlockBuster, and they were selling a copy so I bought it as it was kinda cheap.

In the early days I had a local mom'n pop rental store near my home, where we'd go and just pick out games based on their cover art alone. We had no other knowledge of what games were like. I did end up finding an NES game (P.O.W.) that came from this store, now in my collection. I've forgotten what a lot of my rentals from that era were. I remember renting Mario Paint from there, also Snow Brothers, and I think Pac Man The New Adventures the SNES version. It was just sort of random.

After the N64 / PS1 era, I think I stopped renting games. Don't recall ever renting Dreamcast or PS2.

[telly]

Some of my fondest early memories with our PS2 was renting games. One of the first ones I rented and played was Klonoa 2. Other ones on PS2 that I can remember include Freakstyle, American Chopper (actually kind of a fun game), and Mercenaries. The was a mountain biking game too that was really bad called Mountain Bike Adrenaline. I guess my brother and I really liked biking games for some reason.

Didn't really rent anything for any other system that we owned growing up as we were right on the cusp of video game rentals becoming obsolete.

[bikingjahuty]

Not 10 minutes after we've started playing his mom comes downstairs and freaks out once she sees what's happening on the screen. Even though she'd the one who paid for the game and let us rent it, she goes off on my friend and I, makes me go home, and my friend is in tears.

Never could grasp the insanity of such helicopter parenting. What do they think? A kid plays a goofy ass game like Bio Freaks and his soul is lost? It sends him down a dark path of destruction and evil, all because he played some absurd arcade game? Grown ass adults walk around with such lack of logic and reasoning. I've often seen it, but I can't understand it.

Me neither. It was during the late 90s, so it was still in that period of the older generation wondering if "realistic" video game violence was causing violent behavior in kids and teens. I think more than anything though, his mom was just very awkward to be around and she always had this seriousness about as if she was trying to find something to scold you for while also being incredibly judgmental. It's too bad because he was one of my best friends in elementary school, and unfortunately due to this incident and him going to a different middle school than me, that was sort of the end of of friendship sadly.

[Warmsignal]

Not 10 minutes after we've started playing his mom comes downstairs and freaks out once she sees what's happening on the screen. Even though she'd the one who paid for the game and let us rent it, she goes off on my friend and I, makes me go home, and my friend is in tears.

Never could grasp the insanity of such helicopter parenting. What do they think? A kid plays a goofy ass game like Bio Freaks and his soul is lost? It sends him down a dark path of destruction and evil, all because he played some absurd arcade game? Grown ass adults walk around with such lack of logic and reasoning. I've often seen it, but I can't understand it.

Me neither. It was during the late 90s, so it was still in that period of the older generation wondering if "realistic" video game violence was causing violent behavior in kids and teens. I think more than anything though, his mom was just very awkward to be around and she always had this seriousness about as if she was trying to find something to scold you for while also being incredibly judgmental. It's too bad because he was one of my best friends in elementary school, and unfortunately due to this incident and him going to a different middle school than me, that was sort of the end of of friendship sadly.

Yeah, well my own parents were sort of cautious about the media we were exposed to as well, although they didn't monitor the games we played much. I still know I would have gotten into trouble with anything that had suggestive themes, or use of profanity. Of course, grotesque violence didn't matter at all. Just make sure there's no bad words or nudity.

Come to think of it, I believe they did go over-the-top monitoring my music choices as a kid. One time I got into trouble just for being interested in the music of a band called "Suicidal Tendencies", just because of their name. I guess they thought it was music focused on convincing kids to off themselves? That's 90s parenting logic for you. I reality, I didn't care what their name was, probably didn't understand a lot of the political themes, I just liked the music. Ironically, they had no problem allow me to by CDs from another band "Suicide Machines" just like maybe a year later. I think I heard about both these bands from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. I wasn't interested in being edgy or suicidal, I just liked the music. I think one time my mom threw away one of my Slipknot CDs in disgust of the band. Probably did me a favor in that case, but still. Albums like Nirvana's Nevermind would be deemed inappropriate just because of a naked baby on the cover, and I certainly couldn't have any albums with a parental advisory sticker on them.

Apparently, they believed music was the devil's avenue above all else. There had been a lot of nonsense in the 80s and maybe 90s about how music was influencing or brainwashing violence and bad behavior in the youth. Everything has been the scapegoat, aside from the parenting itself. Sheltering children is always the answer to all of life's more complicated matters, and we see that theme continuing to this day. "Kids are too young to understand this or that, we must keep them away from it", yeah I kinda think that's a time-tested crap philosophy.

[betelgeuse]

A friend of my back in the day had a small tv and no PlayStation.

He would go to Walmart to “rent” a PlayStation and a 27” tv.
Rentals there were free and would last 2 weeks lol.

The games were legit rented from blockbuster, since opened games couldn’t be returned.

[wolff242]

Renting Golgo 13 and having no clue what to do. No instructions, no internet to look it up.

[pzeke]

In the Blockbuster Video that was the closest to where I live, one day they had a PS1 set up with Tekken, and I remember there being a small crowd of like 4 guys, probably in their early teens, hovering over someone else playing the game (only one controller was plugged in). This was during the night, and I noticed them while in the car while my mother was parking, rushing over there as soon as I entered the store while my mother veered elsewhere looking for some movies. I just stood there watching like a little kid until the one playing lost and asked me if I wanted to give it a try and I just nodded and took the controller. Somehow, someway I became proficient at fighting games that night and competently beat nearly the entirety of the game, passing the controller to one of them once my mother came over. The guy I gave the controller to looked at me and told me in a rather confident tone that I had the game and played it every day, and I was like, "Nope, I don't have a PS1". They all looked at each other dumbfounded then went "What?!" in near unison; I remember I relished that night for quite a while growing up, but that fighting skill prowess never returned. It was quite a fun night.

I have other great memories, especially with the Pokémon Snap Station kiosk, but that's the one that flooded my mind as soon as I saw this topic and, quite frankly, I'm fond of it. At the time I still owned my original SNES and was still super into it, and that day, if I remember well, was the second time I came across a PS1. Funnily, I don't own the first Tekken; I do have the third one.