Zoomer here, I'm asking this because I wasn't there and also out of curiosity.Why do the older generations look back mostly fondly on video game renting stores like Blockbuster? Surely you can't be nostalgic for... renting a fucking video game, it's basically on part with the whole "you'll own nothing and be happy" shtick. Maybe there was a magic in renting a game and having only the weekend to beat it which I can see but it seems pretty silly to me anyways.
>>736515350u jelly?
You ever go to a library? It's the exact same thing.
>>736515350Now you pay subscribe service. Netflix kill it.
Internet didn't exist. Going to a phyaical location was the only exposure to video games you ever got.
>>736515350Imagine you buy a dogshit game and then you're stuck with itBut instead of 30 or 60 bucks it was 5Even better if the game was actually good
For those on the lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the $2.50 your parents gave you for the weekend rental was a risk of being an absolute shit game or the best shit ever. RPGs were out of the question and didn't like sports games so the selection was limited.
i didn't have money to buy games when i was a kid so it was good to be able to try lots of different ones
>>736515437Libraries have video games now
>>736515429Not really, I can buy any game I want or pirate it.>>736515437Makes sense.>>736515463I thought gaming magazines were the main way people learnt of the newest games and went out to rent them.>>736515490I assume that's why demo discs became a thing, a sort of taster to see if you think a game is worth your money or not.
OP has never gone outside his house
>>736515463someone usually had a gaming magazine to pass along during recess, then i modded my PS2 and downloaded all my games from the interwebs. but i get what you're saying.
>>736515437>>736515350I'm simulating the experience using the library nowadays, but it's even better because it's free. Got this near release. You get 2 weeks.
>>736515350Because it was a zeitgeist for a better time where everyone was still happy
>>736515668Unfortunately I have a job so I have too.
>>736515350Because it was a way for poor kids to play games at 1/10th the price of retail. You could finish a game in a day or two, and do that with 10 games, you basically get 10x the value. I do value replaying games now, but it was still a great option and a fun thing to go do with the family.
>>736515350Partially paradox of choice. You could rent a new game every week because it was cheap as fuck. It was the only new-ish game you had so you gave it proper attention. It didn't go on a backlog, you didn't read what the hivemind thought about it and hated about it. You just grabbed a game that had a couple cool screenshots on the box and went and gave it a try. Better times, but there's no going back. We have nearly every game at our fingertips now.There's probably a bunch of other minor reasons like the ritual of it being more physical, healthy, slightly more social. Other stuff like that.
>>736515350It was a very cheap way to play games you didn't want to buy for full price especially when piracy wasn't as easily accessible.
>>736515350most people couldn't afford to constantly buy new games but most could afford to rent new games constantlyeach week you might get one or two new games to play which was amazing
>>736515350I was poor. I'm poor right now.
>>736515350this is what you have now:>buy console>buy game (game code)>pay for internet to download game (you literally pay for the way to download a game you already paid for)>pay for extra storage if you need it>pay for online access to the game>buy disc drive for the console if the game is a physical disc>play gamevs then:>buy console>rent game (always physical)>play game
>>736515350Most people owned very few videogames back then, most were either borrowed from friends or rented. This was before there were even free games online, before newgrounds etc so we were truly starved for gaming content and had to squeeze everything we could out of them. It wasn't like today where even if you're broke you can download a thousand different free games.When things are less common and harder to obtain, accessing them feels more exciting.
>>736515350Many of us didn't have rich parents, so renting a game on the weekend was the best we could get. Home PCs weren't commonplace yet and mobile wouldn't exist for another decade. Getting a console for Christmas and new games coming out much faster than now made it worthwhile to see what the Network Video had. Blockbuster was the expensive one growing up.
>>736515729Also this, it's a lot of intangible things that aren't necessarily directly related, like the general attitude people had back then in that era. People were more content, more sociable, and not everything was online. Even as someone who has always been an extreme introvert and didn't experience it much, I miss it for the same reasons I miss the world in general back then. There was more effort put into making stores fun to go to and search through than there is for soulless digital storefronts now. Even installing a physical game on PC was more of a memorable experience than it is downloading it from Steam now. The smell of the ink on the manual, the excitement while you read through it on the way home, buying gaming magazines which had more effort and aesthetic value put into them than learning about games online now. If I had to sum it up, it's the people and the general zeitgeist that I miss.
>>736515350Back in the NES/SNES era most games weren't worth playing more than a weekend anyways so getting to play everything for $2-3 a pop was a godsend. Sometimes if the game was bad enough I'd take it back the same day and they'd let me pick something else.
>>736515350>Why is video game renting looked on so fondly?It's the experience. The same thing as getting a game at the local GameStop at some long-distance location during a family trip, reading the manual 5 times cover to cover, and imagining the game and the world in your mind.>Friday night>Mom decides to hit up the local blockbuster to rent out a movie for you and the family to watch.>Perusing through a catalog of horror movies and laughing about some titles with friends or family>Look through the game section>Find the game you want to play for the weekend.>Grabbing popcorn and treats in the store>Go home and try to beat the game in 3 days with your friend before you have to return it.You zoomfaggots will never know this experience.
>>736515853spot on, this
>>736515350Actually playing a rented game sucked compared to owning it, that much is obvious. Although there was an element of extra thrill in trying to complete it before you had to return it I guess. No such problem with movies though, since you could easily watch them in one sitting. However, the activity of just going there, browsing the boxes, checking what's available, getting excited bringing the disc home to try it out etc., often with friends, was fun and memorable.Humans weren't created to exist entirely within cyberspace. Experiences that actually require us to go somewhere, do something in real space and interact with something physical will almost always feel more meaningful, tangible and satisfying to us, that's just how our brains are wired.
>>736515729What a load of fucking bullshit. Maybe YOU were happy back then but both of my parents were alcoholics who'd spend entire nights screaming at each other, slamming doors, throwing full plates of food at the wall, sobbing and gnashing teeth, clawing at the floor etc etc etcPeople just share their struggles more freely these days and then everyone circlejerks about how miserable they all are and how much better things were in the past. But they weren't better at all, it was the same spectrum of happiness and misery as it always has been.
>>736515350Back before everyone had infinite entertainment at their fingertips 24/7 you often had to wait for stuff. That makes when you do get the stuff more special.
35 year old boomer here.Renting sucked complete and total ass for new release games.Movies were usually okay. They'd have an entire wall of new movies.Games? Nope. You'd have to have them call around to the 5 nearest stores and sometimes even end up going elsewhere like to Family Video or Hollywood Video, which both sucked total ass compared to Blockbuster.The people who nostalgia-ize this shit are retarded. It was $7.99 for new game releases and you'd have it Friday and Saturday and need to get it back before they closed Sunday.
>>736516562Your shitty childhood doesn't deny the fact that depression has skyrocketed in the past decade people where actually happy back then
We rented a game and returned it a few days late because my dumbass brother lost it, we found it thankfully, and they charged us $40 dollars.
>>736516389There was no experience.I swear to fucking god you people made this shit up. Laughing about titles with friends and fucking family? What the fuck? My friends and I went to Blockbuster a couple times and no one EVER FUCKING BOUGHT the treats or popcorn in the store, it was overpriced as fuck.
>>736516562I'm sorry about that, but he's right just because of social media and smartphones alone. Most young people live in a permanent state of quiet misery and anxiety. Knowing that you can be filmed at any moment for something embarrassing, or even something that could be perceived as wrong, we're just not ready for that.>>736516573Being ok with boredom is probably the biggest thing we've lost as humans. That, and actually having real places you could go that weren't overrun with crime and astronomical prices yet. It's actually unbelievable how alien 20 years ago feels compared to now. You can't just turn off your phone to avoid it either, because the people are different and everything needs a phone now.
>>736517005>Being ok with boredom is probably the biggest thing we've lost as humansNo one was ever ok with boredom and my friends and I desperately sought ways to fill time and come up with things to do while bored. I distinctly remember my friends sleeping over and we couldn't figure out what to do and one of us was agonizing over how we're wasting our night doing nothing.
>>736516772>Family Video or Hollywood Video, which both sucked total ass compared to Blockbuster.True, but the local mom and pop stores were the best.
>>736516808Alright whatever zoomer, you just won't get it. You have no understanding of how much the way people talk about their feelings and struggles has changed. Anybody over 40 seeing a stat showing increase of people reporting poor mental health thinks "no shit, because people just didn't used to report on it.". Believing that kind of data means people actually had less mental struggles back then shows you obviously just weren't there.
Going to Blockbuster with "Friends and family' has nothing to do with Blockbuster. You are remembering your friends and family. You could have been at any store or location.
I was alive during this time. I don't look back on it fondly. Fuck renting.
>>736517186>you obviously just weren't there.Yes I fucking was everyone was actually happy because we didn't have a pocket device that kept feeding us ragebait
“Fuck renting”, he says, as he pays $70 for games that turn out to be absolute dogass.
Our generation is way worse than fucking boomers.>Back in my day, back in the 60swas all I heard as a kidBut now we're fucking setting up fucking pop up stores and pop up "experiences" of a fucking consumerist Blockbuster bullshit store? What the fuck. I'm 38 and I am so fucking tired of hearing about Blockbuster and shit from the late 80s and 90s. Move the fuck on. Blockbuster was a fucking box store designed to rent the same fucking piece of plastic over and over so you owned nothing and they profited off late fees. Predator late fees. They made fucking a BILLION DOLLARS off late fees.New games in the 90s were $12.99. Not fucking 7.99 here. And if you were 1 day late they doubled the rental.
>>736515350Thats like asking why is traveling to a place better than just looking it up on Google Maps streetview. It's the experience
>>736517076Well I mean, young people that are bored now can go on Twitch or TikTok and doomscroll if they're bored, which is why even playing a game can feel like a chore by comparison for a lot of young people now. Back then if you were bored, there was no easy fix in your pocket. You had to commit and be purposeful, or sit around and be bored, which usually lowered your activation energy required to do more productive things. Nothing can compete with doomscrolling now, that shit has fucked up the human species in ways we don't even understand.
>>736516389Let's distill what htis anon wrote into reality>We went to a store to pick up a movie and game. We went back to the same store to return them two days later. I talked to some people when I went there.
>>736517076But that’s the point. I’m boredom you become creative. You try new things. You discover new hobbies. Without boredom, you are stuck in a terminal algorithmic loop of bullshit literally designed to make you feel like killing yourselfBoredom is the last bastion of a healthy mind
>>736516405This, 100% Objectively, renting was shit compared to what we have now. But subjectively, the physical aspect of it made it feel much more meaningful and created stronger memories than just pressing "download" in a virtual library.The animal part of our brain needs interaction with actual world out there and stuff that takes actual effort every now and then instead of only clicking shit on the screen. Which makes the diminishing amount of such interaction in modern times all the more depressing.The fact that people feel nostalgic for literally objectively subpart services just because they were actual physical places says a lot
>>736517664>The fact that people feel nostalgic for literally objectively subpart services just because they were actual physical places says a lotI think it's mostly the internet nostalgia bait shit that constantly make people think Blockbuster or that experience was even an experience. My Blockbuster closed in 2012. A little over 10 years ago. I remember going to BB well into my 20s. That place was pure ass and fighting traffic on a Friday after college to pick up a fucking game for $15 dollars was ass.
Bottom line OP, it's the fact that when you rented a game, that was it for the next 2 days. That game was how you spent your free time, and there was a finality where you had to finish the game and return it in time. That's much better than having a backlog of dozens of half-finished games you've never returned to.
>>736517321Look dummy what I'm telling you is that the countless people like me who were NOT happy back then just didn't fucking tell you about it. You, being sheltered in some utopian little family life, looked at us with pure naive idiocy and assumed we must be happy too solely because YOU were happy and we never thought to bog you down with the details of our misery.I'm telling you the main difference - and you can speak to literally any gen x or boomer and they'll back me up - is that people now speak about their feelings when they didn't before.Picture 100 people with their own struggles, all just keeping their shit to themselves because literally nothing in society gives the impression there's value in sharing it. They all assume other people must be alright, because that's what they all present to each other. That's the past.Now picture 100 people with their own struggles, all sharing with each other and acknowledging to one another that they feel like shit. They all know other people feel like shit, because they all share it with each other. That's the present.
You'll note the elder millennial anons in here are telling it like it is and the retards who had mommy and daddy drive them are telling it like a kid would tell it. The actual reality is not what the people who were kids tell you it was. Which is why the late 90s babies posting ITT cannot give a zoomer an accurate depiction of renting.
>>736516808Suicide rates fell all through the 90s and hit their lowest level ever recorded in the year 2000. Anyone who tries to tell that things weren't better on the whole back then is full of shit and deliberately trying to mislead you.
>>736517805>>736517854
>>736517854Yes because the USA faced unequaled economic prosperity that was not going to last no matter what. This wasn't due to Blockbuster and no smart phones.
>>736515350The actual reason is because it was an event. Something to look forward to. I remember being excited to go get a movie and a game on tuesdays with my parents, it fills me with nostalgia and joy. Information also wasnt instantly obtainable, so finding a good game you never heard of as a kid was magical. A sense of discovery.But yea, it was an event, like going to the movies. Now you have everything at your fingertips and its just mundane. Its like how the internet was way fucking cooler before smartphones made is accessible everywhere and normalfaggots came in to shit up the place.
>>736515350Fuck off, zoomer. It let's you try games without having to buy them. Some games you can beat in a weekend so you basically just saved yourself $55. Is your brain so malformed you can't understand such an easy concept?
>>736515594Demos aren't the same as getting the whole game for a few days. But yes, demo discs were fucking kino back in the day.
>>736517824Imagine trying to be a special snowflake amonst your own fucking gen
>>736518010Smartphones and social media absolutely are a huge part of why people are so fucked up and miserable now. They're the leaded gas of the current era.
CAN YOU FAGS STOP FAGGOT 3 DAY POSTING FOR RETURNING? WHO THE FUCK RETURNED SHIT IN 3 DAYS OH MY GOD I CANT COMPLETE THE GAME THOUGHTSETKYSI RETURNED MINE SOMETIMES EVEN 2 WEEKS LATER
>>736517805Lmao shut the fuck up, EVERYONE liked the 90s. My boomer dad admitted it was the best, it isnt just nostalgia
>>736518010>no goy it surely isnt that having instant access to seeing the worse of humanity and it being shoved into your face constantly for profit coulf be badFuuuuuuuuck off
>>736515350It's mostly nolstalgia for the era in general, and also the fact that availability of video games was much different back in the day. We didn't have huge Steam libraries full of games bought at bargain bin prices, and most people weren't aware of piracy, renting meant experiencing more games than you otherwise would have. And as other people in the thread have pointed out, the lack of availability and time limit on playing the game meant you just sit down and played the damn thing, no getting distracted by other games or wandering off to doomscroll.>>736518229I definitely remember my blockbuster having 7 day rentals, but not for everything.
uncs will be nostalgic over anything, don't think too hard about it
>>736515350>Despite have an entire wall dedicated to them there times where all new releases were checked out>If I remember correctly, new release movies were 2 day rentals and everything else was 4 or 5 days>That ment having to return to Blockbuster in 2 days on your way to work/from work/day off to not have a late fee>Sometimes ment cutting your 5 day game rental short cause your parents didn't want to have to drive back after just being there to return the 2 day rentals >Everything else there was overpriced as hellThere was just as much bad as good with Video Rentals. Some people say we took a step back with streaming services, but I think we just took a weird ass step sideways
it was cool because you could try every game without having to buy it, because you didnt have a job and your parents wouldnt buy you everything. you could also buy used games at the video store for super cheap when they were making room for new shit on the shelves. when the ps1 came out, you could copy the discs and pirate the games.
>>736518593FUCKING FAGGOT ZOOMER I COULD BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU IRLYOU THINK YOURE REAL TOUGH TALKING SHIT
>>736515350unironically you just had to be there. I wouldn't want renting to come back, but it was fun at the time.
>>736518814I take it this is your way of being nostalgic over your dad beating you.
>>736516923If that happened to me I would have rented a couple games and never return there.
>>736515350For most of us, it was a weekly or bi-weekly tradition that added a sense of comfort and familiarity. It was also a relatively cheap alternative to try games before buying them; that was how I found out about shit like OoT and Smash Bros.
>>736518593Nostalgic? Yes, but I like living in modern times where I have anything I could ever want.https://youtu.be/x4H8K4lIf2E
>>736518872NO, IM LITERALLY THREATENING YOU, YOU FUCKING IDIOT? ARE YOU ON (ALA A DEMON?) DO YOU NOT KNOW ANYTHING? YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT
>>736515594Demos were often one level of a game and also sometimes from early development. There’s nothing like that now, only trailers on yt
>>736518229yeah I remember it being like a week. also at some places you could buy the games minus the rental charge. so it was kind of a low stakes way of trying out games before commiting to a full purchase. if you really liked it and wanted more time with it and your parents were willing to buy it for you, you could just keep it. if you didn't like it or got all you could out of it in a week, just take it back and you're only out a few bucks. nowadays you have like a 2 hour refund window, if you can even get a refund at all.
>>736519003Least deranged millennial when their childhood is threatened
>>736515350People probably miss the ritual of going out on the weekend and browsing games and movies. Just being surrounded by their hobbies.Having everything on demand is cool, but fucking hell do I ever miss stores like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGIhcJ7nKmo
>>736516997>>736517558Just because you had a gay childhood where your parents met your interaction quota doesn't mean everyone else did, my Dad used to help pick titles out with me and play them on his day off on the weekends. One game for me, one movie for him and one movie for my sister. Getting to grab a 2 liter and a bag of Clodhoppers or the good mixed bag of Cheetos, pretzels and Sun Chips. I would never have played a Dynasty Warriors game if the drummer in my dad's cover band never suggested we rent 3, I remember same dude also gave me his Xbox copy of Morrowind and got me hooked on that.
>>736515350In short. It made gaming affordable and fun instead of expensive and stupid.
>>736518593here's the thing zoomers dont want to hear, sweat equity makes everything better, more memorable, allowing experiences to form into memories. Nobody remembers listening to a nonstop stream of music off spotify, everyone remembers buying an album and listening to it front to back over and over.
Are there any ASMR vids where someone goes to a rental store, or at least pretends? Sounds so comfy.
>>736515350Renting meant you only lost 5 bucks if a video game was shit.
>>736516002The zoom-cord didn't like this one.
>>736515350Because going to the Blockbuster is a relic of a time long past, when time still had meaning. It's a ritual: it's Friday night, your dad gets you hyped, you all drive together to the video store, you make memories. Your dad and mom pick their movie, you pick your movie and a game to boot: oh look! Your pal at the register has a dope new recommendation! Grab some candy and popcorn while you're at it, and marvel at the whole catalog, all in the context of a high-trust and monoracial society.The Jews want to erode spacetime through their transhumanist agenda. Now, none of that has any meaning. Why would you ever go out? Everything is online and is fake gay and retarded. And there's ugly immigrants and gays on the street, and you live alone.
>>736515350I have PTSLOPD after looking at that image. Ps2 had the best games but it also had the most slop of any other console
>>736519847>>736515853>>736519224The ritualization goes deeper than just renting the game, but setting it up in front of the TV, in the living room, with real people was itself a part of the ritual.
>>736519693This is 100% true. There was a book I was looking for last summer. It wasn't available as an ebook so I had to get the local library to do an interlibrary loan. Waiting for it to come in was the first time I've felt that kind of anticipation in a very long time.
>>736516997Have you considered that you might just be a soulless NPC who just goes through life on autopilot?
>>736515670Magazines are obtained from physical locations dipshit
>>736515594>a sort of taster to see if you think a game is worth your money or notThis guy figured out what a demo is all by himself. Bros I think the young generation is gonna be ok after all.
>>736515594heh you sound jelly m8
I didn't rent many games once the Playstation came out and prices dropped like a rock. I did rent a ton of movies though. With how shit streaming is currently and how it gets worse all the time, I wouldn't be surprised if those movie places made a limited comeback.
Apart from the obvious WHOA NEW GAME TO PLAY thing:1. It meant it was Friday so you had 2 days of weekend fun instead of school2. Life was better in the 90s/when anyone was a kid3. Scarcity. This is how most kids got access to most games unless your family was loaded. The rental store was your gateway to playing video games.4. Association. People remember the good parts of the past and video game memories are almost exclusively positive.
>>736515350Just a fun thing to do. You'd look forward to going out on Friday, finding a movie and a game to take home for the weekend, maybe having a sleepover with a cousin or something. Just cozy times. Pure nostalgia.
>>736515350>Single player experience takes 10-30 hours for most games >Pay $5>Clear it in a week, take it back>$55 saved and the drawback is you don't have a box collecting dust >if the game sucked you just take it back and don't have to cope about it to justify the waste>parents would not buy you 10 games for no reason unless you were a rich little fuck. but they'd rent 10 games for you no problem, just probably not all at onceIt was a better system for certain games, way better. In the 90s 'multiplayer' either did not exist for most games or was as in 'you and your brother or best friend physically sitting beside you.' it wasn't a thing on consoles until early 00s basically. Also open world stuff you can spend hundreds of hours in was not a thing back then.Nowadays everything is online.. even single player games. And lots of shit is designed for you to just play little to nothing else for years like League so a rental would not make sense anyway. The fotm stuff /v/ likes to talk about like resident evil, where it's out, people play it, then that's kind of it they're done? Games used to mostly be all that format.Maybe the analogue to renting is the free to play / trial shit that then needs to be bought into if you want to keep playing.
This is how I remember it used to look.
>>736519939W>>736521289>the 90s 'multiplayer' either did not exist for most games or was as in 'you and your brother or best friend physically sitting beside you.'Man I miss playing Twisted Metal 2 with my buddy on sleepovers. Was really fun.
>>736521415>n64 boxesSOVL
>>736515594demo discs were cooler than that because they were basically proto-magazines and they sometimes had bonus content in the best case scenario, i.e the double dash disc
>>736521991They are also a treasure trove of cut and beta content.
>>736515350>Zoomer hereYou just wouldn't get it
This is even more scummy than playing games while invisible.If you do this you're objectively a bad person.
>>736515350Born in the 80s, child through the 90s. Imagine the only access to video games was an arcade and buying a video game was $100... 20 years ago. With inflation, that is around $300. Rental stores were magic. You could go in and rent any game for $5 for 7 days, and that was the most you needed to finish a game. As a kid from a lower income background, it was incredible to be able to experience and share the same things as my peers, for a fraction of the cost. Video games never kept up with inflation, they are the cheapest they have ever been in history. Rental just became uneconomical.
>>736516997Yeah this anon is right. You all sound like old boomer faggots who make shit up about old stuff that was entirely mundane>no no your parents actually didn’t love you if they weren’t weird autistic money wasters that would spend 50$ every trip to Blockbuster on overpriced slop and shit their pants laughing at movie and game coversWhat a load
>>736515350It was the only way we had to try out a large variety of games. Getting your parents to spend $60 on one game would be a hard sell if it wasn't Christmas or your birthday, but getting them to spend $5 to stay out of their hair the weekend was fairly easy. Most of us didn't have access to reviews or anything back then, so you basically just looked at the box and decided to take a chance on anything that looked interesting. Sometimes it worked out and you found cool games you never would have tried before. And sometimes... yeah, pic related.
>>736515463OP's pic is from the early-mid 2000s, retard
it was just comfy as fuck. i had a Hollywood Video with a built in Game Crazy in walking distance from my house and i was old enough to walk there alone when i was 9 or 10 my parents pretty much allowed me to have a game rented at all times throughout the entirety of my childhood during the 5th/6th gens and i could go to and from as i pleased on my bike in one of the Whitest cities in the United Statesthe Game Crazy had kiosks with all the consoles, trade-ins, new/used games, etc, so i got a less jewish but smaller Gamestop equivalent i could permanently walk to the entire time i was a kid as a bonus
Because we got a mod chip for our ps1 that plugged into the serial port and let you play burned games, so we could rent games from blockbuster then dump them to blank CDs to own them forever
>>736515350it was a time when it was high trust society
>>736521289>Also open world stuff you can spend hundreds of hours in was not a thing back then.I spend countless hours not doing a single mission in gta 2 and driving around in the driver games, you dumb nigger.>ib4 doesn't count
>>736523574nta but they were far less common and most people didn't strictly rent games, if i liked a game i rented id ask my parents to buy it for me used or rent it again.
>>736515490It also made it possible for games with "short" playtimes like Shmups to be commercially viable. It's hard to justify spending $60 in 1990's money on a game that is theoretically over in 2 hours, but 5 dollars for a weekend? That you can manage.
>>736523209What does the ai slop art have to do with your ChatGPT childhood story?
>>736516002You forgot>Wait 3 hours for the 30 gig installation (that almost entirely consists of uncompressed audio files for a dozen languages spoken by a single country each).
>>736523814sports games were really popular to rent also, especially with the disparity between the price of lets say a new Madden 05 vs a used 04
>>736516002meanwhile in reality for now if you weren't a mongoloid and know how to research>buy console >buy game (physical)>play game
>>736523949i don't say this often but, genuinely, ingest your medication.
>>736524013I accept your concession.
It used to be 3.99 to rent one game from Blockbuster for 3 days. They doubled the price but allowed 5 days. Those two extra days were worthless because everyone and their moms rented on Fridays so you have play during the weekend. Monday and Tuesday you had school and mountains of homework so you could never play vidya. I hated the change.When they changed to a subscription service (rent one game for as long as you want for a monthly fee) it was impossible to get a game you want. It was shortly after that every rental place went out of business as redbox and netflix took over.
>>736523949>>736524079>slop>accept your concessionuh OH somebody's newfagGPT is in the thread
>>736524149lil zoomzooms brain fried at a genuine tale of a prosperous and comfy pastyou hate to see it desu
>>736515350Because my family would let me pick out a video game rental but wouldn’t always buy me an entire game unless it was a holiday. I got to try games like Paper Mario.
>>736524174>buzzword spam like it affects me in real lifeUH OHHHH
>>736523968This is why so many genre's died in the 2000's and only came back when digital storefronts like Steam and XBLA made selling games at less than $60 viable. Shmups, Single Player only FPS's, most sports games outside Madden and FIFA, etc.
>>736521415>le graded games in plastic caseshomosexual
>>736524139>Monday and Tuesday you had school and mountains of homework so you could never play vidya.intellectual disability? genuine question
>>736515350Internet wasn't common. It was difficult to just play a pirated game, as it is today. You could afford to play video games if you didn't have the money to shell out that much for a videogame that you wouldn't touch again after beating it.Hell, I wish I could rent a game like Bananza instead of having to fork over money and then just shelf it away.>just le sell itNo, faggot
>>736524139>you had school and mountains of homeworkWhy are you complaining about two extra dollars when you were not the one paying for the game rental anyway?
>>736515350We were concerned with playing the games not owning them. No wonder you don't fucking get it
>>736524214>UH-OH MELTYEVERY ONE GOT ON THE FLOOR, EVERYONE WALKED THE DINOSAUR!
>>736515350>Zoomer here, I'm asking this because I wasn't thereYou're almost 30, you were there. Faggot.
>>736524523you do know how wide a generation spans right?
>>736524543like 6 years
>>736515350People used to actually be bored instead of addicted to cellphones>>736516309well said>>736517569It's also a necessity for introspection. Almost nobody introspects actively. They do it passively, when it creeps up on you when you have nothing better to do or think about. It's why some people freak out when parted with their phones; the thoughts come rushing in, and they have no practice at it
>>736519939
I like how half of this thread is>UM WELL -MY- CHILDHOOD SUCKED SO YOU'RE ALL WRONG
>>736517076you were a kid then though. of course kids don't want to be bored. being ok with boredom is an adult thing, or was an adult thing
>>736515350>be me>raised in 90's manhattan>go to block buster>All the good shit is gone>get to stare at the giant earthbound box and wonder what the game was like>finally get a game>some megaman>game doesn't work>play some battleship instead
>>736523953reality:>wait ~20 minutes for your 30 gig game to install>all the audio in the game is small, low quality vorbis files (a lossy audio codec from 2000) because the developers used wwise with default settings>it only installs the english audio because your system language is english>you have all night to play and you have over 2TB of free space left>you remember an article you read about titanfall's audio files 10 years ago and get angry because you have no real problems to be angry at>'fucking jeet developers wasting my space on literally uncompressed files' you think without ever actually looking at the game files>most of the game's size is textures that couldn't be compressed any further without visible quality loss>when someone points this out to you, you start complaining about '4K textures' because you don't know how textures or computers work>you consider yourself an intellectual with high standards, and call other people on /v/ who bought the same game as you 'nigger cattle'>you play the game for one hour before getting bored and closing it to jack off
>>736524867who hurt you, anon?
>>736524867don't use sakura to make bad posts
>>736515350more nostalgic for the era in general.
>>736524867>you play the game for one hour before getting bored and closing it to jack offMe
>>736524714>MY CHILDHOOD SUCKED*taps the post*>>736522704
>>736516309I will always remember sitting in the dark in a thunderstorm while my mom went into Walmart, reading the Diablo manual by the extremely dim map light and even dimmer moonlight. When lightning flashed I got a better look for a fraction of a second. It was there I saw her, the rogue, seemingly drawn in a fashion that escaped and bettered all prior video game art. I think that is my favorite moment with video games. A manual that I could barely see in the darkness.
>>736515350people who couldn't afford video games could afford them by renting or stealing from those stores
The reality:>Game is usually checked out for months if it’s a new, sought after title>Get pissed off after the 5th week of Settling for something old or trying something new and it turns out to be garbage>Same goes for movies but they’d never really have anything outside of Blockbuster hits like a whole shelf for Transformers and ClickHollywood Video was better for more obscure movies but people are delusional if they want to go back to that
>>736525165You couldn't steal the games dumbass. Keep quiet if you weren't there.
>>736515350Because before console emulation became a thing in the late 90s, the only way you could play any of these games was to either pay $60 to buy them or $5 to rent them for a weekend. It was a great way to try out games to see which ones were good and worth buying.
>>736515350It's a reminder of simpler times, before proliferation of the internet, smartphones and social media changed things forever.
>>736525165kill yourself zoomie. my parents bought me tons of games and i still always had a game rented. you'd be mentally fucking retarded to miss out on renting games back then.
>>736515350it made way more sense in the 90s when:very few people had the interneteven if you had the internet it's not like there was a ton of info out there, youtube didn't exist so you couldn't just watch gameplay of gamesgames were fucking expensive (adjusted for inflation) it was good for its time, you literally had to be there
>>736525070are you trying to prove him right?
>>736515350Lots of poorfags on this board.
>>736525256>before console emulation became a thingemulation did not invent pirating console games.
>>736525314I don’t see how that proves him right maybe because I agreed with my parents that we didn’t *need* to buy up charged shitty microwave popcorn when we could make it on the stove at home and it always tastes much better
>>736525368Pirating SNES games was basically impossible because of all the enhancement chips they put in carts.
ur all old lmao
>>736525456it prevented you from pirating a moderate amount of games, but far from all of them.
>>736525428it proves him right because that posts sounds miserable and doesn't understand why people actually enjoyed this or that they were capable of having fun with their families. also don't know why you're bringing snacks into this, I know that sometimes that's a part of the nostalgia circlejerk, but I have fond memories of renting games and we never bought snacks there. we just went for the games and movies. maybe some people bought snacks there but it's not an inherent aspect of this. in fact only one or two other people in this whole thread brought up buying snacks at all.
>>736525315What's your fucking point?Paper Mario is one of my fondest gaming memories, in part because I had to play through it so much in one week while renting it.
>>736525315you didn't say this out loud when you were a kid because vocal affluentfags in school got their asses beat
>>736525498cope all you want, you missed out and you know it. we had the greatest childhood in human history. i get it though, i'm envious of those who lived in a better world to be in as an adult.
>>736525504If pirating was ever a thing, it only happened in the 3rd world. In America we either rented or bought games. Until around 1997 when emulation got good enough and the internet got fast enough to download roms.
>>736525617old lmao
>>736525628kek. i pirated games all the fucking time, and bought games, and rented games. what kind of fucking absolute braindead moron would not take advantage of every avenue available to him to play the games he wants to play?
>>736515350What most posters fail to mention about this entirely:The sense of community. You could be looking through games aisles while out with your family. Parents browsing the shelves looking for their movies while you're allowed to free roam and choose whatever game catches your attention. At the end of it, you'd all go home and have a nice weekend watching movies and playing video games for less than the cost of a movie ticket. Now every household needs to be dual income and there is no more bonding with your siblings and parents. Everyone is pissed about shit happening half the world away. There are no more nice weekends with your parents, there is no more community.
>>736515350i rented only during the 64 era.games were expensive and it was one of the few ways i could try out more new games
>>736525628what an embarrassing virtue signalling post from some 12-25 year old newfag
>>736524825My Brother was 14 years older than me so he always had the latest console. I got to own and play >NES>SEGA>SNES>N64>SEGA SATURN>PS1>ATARI JAGUAR>3DOIt was only until I was an adult did I realize that my brother was a skinhead. >MFW all my gaming experience was due to gang activity
>>736524867trvthnvke
>>736515350Try before you buy, when you want the experience but don't want to buy the whole game to keep, ability for people to spend less and experience more. For the price of one game you could rent 12 games for a week each. Parents were much more willing to drop 5 bucks for their kid to grab something and then seeing if they like it well enough or beat it in one sitting or hate it, before buying it for Christmas or a birthday. Especially since game reviews were rather sparse and a lot of people just went window shopping at the time, and even gaming magazines had some jank paid for reviews that would heap high praise on the shittiest of games half of the time, so the only way to really see was to try it for yourself. Pic related was praised as the peak at the time, and it's just a rather boring platformer, very flat, and very short, you could beat it in about 3ish hours and it didn't offer a whole lot to replay. For renting movies it was basically going to the theater, you made it an event to bring home a movie and watch it with whoever you wanted with your own snacks. There's nothing actually wrong with renting, it often affords people more for less, the problem is when the idea of buying and ownership is taken away and it's the only choice ever.
Underage b&
>>736515350You paid anywhere between 5 to 15 bucks to rent a whole game for basically a week. Games could also be finished well within that timeframe, so you were playing a lot games you wouldn’t otherwise afford to on a smaller budget, and maybe you’d even buy some of those rented games later if you liked it enough. Pretty simple concept, same with movie rentals, and it was a legit business model for decades until streaming overtook the market.
>>736515512Why does it seem like people were poorer 20-30 years ago when people are more indebted then ever today and wages haven’t gone up all that much?
>>736515350I think people are more interested in the things surrounding the renting rather than the process itself.You just get done with a week of school, go to the Game rental store and pick out a few games to waste your weekend on. For a few days you've got nothing to worry about and you're playing some hopefully fun games. If they're not fun you can at least laugh at them because at the price you rent them it's basically not a problem. Then when you bring them back on Monday you've got some things to talk to your friends about.The community inside the rental, the discussion afterward, the liberating weekend freedom of childhood. You're right you're not going to get that same feeling from just renting a game in 2026.
what was your most rented game?
It was exciting for me to go in with my friends, brothers, etc to look over the game and movie shelves to see what we wanted over the weekend. I grew up in a small town with a local rental place and it had surprisingly lax rates at the time.
The people who don't understand Blockbuster probably also can't comprehend arcades.
>>736526041Probably not my most rented game but one I remember picking up really frequently. I'm not sure why I never could find a physical copy of it. I had my own copy of a few other games I liked and rented. We were probably just too poor and I could only get games either as rentals or heavy used discounts.
>>736525970Consumer products have overall become significantly cheaper, at minimum wage you can buy a TV in basically 1/2 working days, a smaller TV in the past would take a few months of saving to buy, on a nice salary at that, costing around 12K for a TV. Things like houses, cars, gas, groceries, have become much more expensive, to the point people don't make payments on such things anymore, they have "More than before" but not enough to catch up to the speeding away car, so they have more to spend on consumer goods.So people can "buy more things" and have access to "Bigger and nicer things" but the major things like a roof over your head and food on your plate, is significantly more pricey and that causes a ton of money anxiety.
>>736526041banjo
>>736525293>my parents bought me tons of gamesGood for you.I bought my own games from mowing lawns and I was one of the few in my entire district that had a home computer. I never rented because I didn't need to. However, poor kids in my elementary and high school stole (aka never returned) from Blockbusters and mom and pop stores.How would you have felt if you didn't have breakfast today?
>>736526437You ate breakfast growing up? wtf?
>>736526437Even if you did have money renting still had a place. There were a lot of games that were great rentals, but not so much to buy. Like the SHMUPs and Sports another anon mentioned.
>>736526545>he didn't have those rainbow marshmallow cerealsngmi
>>736526582I never said it didn't have a place. I just said that people who couldn't afford video games could afford video games by stealing them from rental places. Somehow that triggered two absolutely retarded autists.
>>736526629Oh yeah that shit happened all the time. I remember a few games I rented ended up being stolen and never getting replaced.
>>736526629The trust fund baby isn't autistic; it's narcissism.
>>736515350I only ever rented a game once from a video rental shop. I rented Super Mario World, finished it over the weekend and returned it. Sure was a lot cheaper than buying it back then.I guess if I had to compare it to something contemporary, I'd compare it to Xbox Game Pass.
>>736515350Do Zoomers even go out into the world anymore?
>>736526936There's no world to go out to.
>>736526629The worst was when they rented a game, swapped the sticker with a shittier game that they owned, and then returned that. I ended up renting some shit one time and got home to find that it was actually Krusty's Funhouse.
>>736526178Yeah I have more money than I can spend but also I can never afford to move out of my parents house at the same time.
>>736527175i rented space station silicon valley twice from two different places and both times it would just crash on the DMA logo
>>736515350It's an experience. You went there and had to choose some games, and probably some movies with your mom/dad. You didn't have it all on digital, so every media you didn't know was a wonder, a gambling if you will. And then they had popcorn, candies etc. It also had this cool communial aspect for the SNES/N64 where you could play on other people's game saves.You could even rent a video game console and be btfo by Parasite Eve's CGI.It's better now, but don't tell me that renting a whole ass console for $25 isn't something that would still be cool.
>>736526041
>>736515350Because it was fun. Simple as.
>>736515350It... isn't? I don't know of anybody who looks back at Blockbuster and says "Wow, I really loved Blockbuster. I sure wish there were still more Blockbuster around today!"Mostly, it's just nostalgia and comparing it to the current subscription model. When you look at a fucking live service model and consider BLOCKBUSTER the superior alternative, then that just shows how terrible live service games currently are.
>>736525456nta but ya'll have to stop acting like pre-iphone age was the stone age, my aunt's boyfriend gifted me a stack of bootleg Dreamcast games, kids in my 7th and 8th grade classes were copying ps2 games onto blanks and emulating smash
>>736515350It's just nostalgia.The conveniences of today are preferred but people still look back on those inconvenient days fondly regardless, 'cuz it was exciting to find something to rent, there were fun memories associated with those inconveniences.
>>736527835Gen Alpha thinks pre-2013 was the stone age and people still had to make fire by rubbing sticks.
>>736527835this. when i was really young my uncle would pirate everything like Black & White, Soul Reaver, Tomb Raider, Red Alert, etc, and always burn me a copy he showed me how to do it myself shortly after sometime around ~02/03
>>736515350My parents refused to buy me N64 games because they were $45-$70 but they did let me rent pretty much any game I wanted for a dollar or so. It let me try out a ton of different games for a short while and it cost me almost nothing. As an adult I don't want to rent for obvious reasons.
>>736515350Getting a hold of vidya to play used to be a bigger deal cause eveyrthing was physical and being able to browse the shelves and see tons of games on display was something you could only experience at a game store or a rental place. Rentals specifically allowed poorfags to still be able to experience a wide range of game growing up.That magic of browsing is gone in this modern digital era where you have access to games 24/7.
>>736515350you are living in the worst time in human history. you're just unlucky, but we're all in this together.
>>736515350You could grab a game that looked interesting but not good enough to own, pay $5, beat it over the weekend while playing it with some friends, and then take it back. Then if it turned out to be good enough to own you could go buy a copy at a nearby store, or forget it until they were clearing space and selling it for $20.
>>736526629A while ago I looked for used copies of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 on eBay and they were almost all stolen from Redbox machines. Makes me wonder how dismal its actual sales were.
>>736525307It makes so much sense in every way that it feels ridiculous to have to explain it
>>736515350Most anons already mentioned the convenience of being able to try several games for cheap. But one other important thing is that renting games being legal in the US (unlike in cucked Japan) utterly pissed off Nintendo, and that's always a good thing. Fuck those bastards.
>>736515350i'm a zoomer that was there for the tail end of it. it was just an affordable way for poorfags to play the latest games.
>>736515350I'm an old millenial and I don't get it eitherfamily was poor so you think we would have loved renting but it was just frustrating because you never really got to enjoy the gamemaybe it was a rich kid thing where you only enjoyed shallow fleeting experiences
>>736529214>have to beat the whole game to enjoy itWhat ? Most games have their best moments in the first few hours.>have to beat the game to feel like you played itAutismo
>>736529214I never cared less about beating games back then, I played until I did it or gave up and that was that. No one was crying over Battletanx being left unfinished.
>>736515350>rent game >decide you like game or not>buy game or notit was a very fair system that gave the consumer an advantage.now they have even taken this small freedom away from you and expect you to pay full price up front, sight unseen. even pirating to see if you like it then buying later makes you a crimer in some people's eyes.
People just have nostalgia for when they didn't have to pay taxes. ||they never figured out tax fraud||
>>736529803>||||
>>736529579and zoomzooms will advocate against it online, for free.
Used to rent bad horror movies with momPop used to copy movies on betamaxWish I could remember it allBut all I got stuck in this membraneIs the smell of when he fucked my overweight stepmom
>>736515350You can't relate to the idea because modern entertainment makes nearly everything available to you at all times, and you can probably find some way get it for free. You didn't grow up in a time when everything was bottlenecked through physical media.
>>736515350>banned in Japan but allowed in the west>because of that western versions always had CRANKED difficulty and bullshit turned up to 11 so kids couldn't beat the game in one weekendI don't look back at it fondly at all.
>>736515350Because games cost $50-60 so you'd only get a couple of games per year that your parents would buy. Renting was much cheaper and you could get new games every week. If you grew up with piracy and emulation this might not sound like much but renting was extremely useful when all you had was trading games with friends.
>>736515724What're your personal thoughts on it?
>>736515350We didn't always have regular access to the internet, you know. You might buy any form of media, a game, a movie, a CD, whatever, purely because you liked the artist's previous work because there was no easy outlet for them to be vetted through public opinion and discourse to give you a more informed impression beforehand, then you find the new stuff sucked ass and you wasted your money. Rentals mitigated that.
