Not long after my parents surprised me with an NES in '87, we rented Life Force from our local mom-and-pop video store. The manual, included with the game, mysteriously vanished behind our bulky console TV. My mom tried returning the game without it, but the store refused. It took nearly a week of frantic searching to find the manual, and we ended up with hefty late fees. My parents, understandably frustrated, put a temporary ban on video game rentals. When they finally relented, my dad, in a misguided attempt to protect the manual, hid it. However, when it was time to return the game, he denied taking it and accused me of losing it again. The store's strict policy forced us to purchase the game for a whopping $60. My mom, furious, called it my early birthday gift. Years later, while moving, we discovered the manual hidden in a high cabinet, completely out of reach for a six-year-old. To this day, my parents have never apologized for the unfair accusation.
Don’t just “get over it”, but also don’t just “rake them over the coals” for it. If you’re not a parent yet, you won’t know how many thousands of mistakes you’ll make too. The best you can do is forgive, even if they were completely in the wrong.
I was a store manager at Blockbuster for 2-3 years. The way we got around the manual problem was when we first got a game, we read the manual, then typed in the simplest way we could (i.e., a button = jump, b button = fire) and printed the text ON the rental label of the game's box. The more complex RPG games we did the best we could, but some was always left out, but by this time, Nintedo Power magazine and the emerging internet filled in the gaps for us.
First game I ever saw internet playing guide to was Killer Instinct on SNES. My best friend Ken (rip) had a girlfriend that was in university and she printed him of hundreds of page long walk through guide for the game. The guide broke my brain how so much information about a single game could exist. This was my senior yr in HS 1995.
I remember renting NES games from a Mom & Pop store. They found a company that published these adhesive cards that would be applied to the plastic rental case for said game. These cards provided you with the extreme basics of the game (e.g., what each button does, etc.) They only provided the actual manual when they were ready to sell the game.
I believe you’re talking about the “permastruct” instructions affixed to the rental case. The ones with the super hero with the line “Here’s your instructions”
Back then renting games was all there was as well as trying them at friend’s houses when it came to getting exposure to titles. A lot of titles I know about because they were rented at some point when I was growing up. I rented Bucky o’ hare once and because of that will get that thing eventually.
I imagine the practice is still a thing. Just more rare to find now. Some libraries also let people check out games for a week or two. I don't know if all libraries does the same. But at least some libraries do.
Or if the game was too difficult and not fun. Which is what Nintendo often did to try and make people buy the game instead of rent. Which I never did, I wonder how many other people did the same.
My aunt used to work in the office at the elementary school and she would photo copy books from the library for us.. It only occurred to me when I got older how crazy that actually was
I think you miss the nostalgic of it more. Times are different now and I could care less for them. There are gaming magazines but I don't buy them anymore as well. I still play lots of games but we've grown up now and having those memories separate us from a whole different generation.
@AndSaveAsManyAsYouCan There are ups and downs to both. Having physical means someone can steal or your house catches on fire and it's gone for good. I've had my Steam games for years and can re-download them as much as I want.
I used to rent SNES and N64 games from a local video store in the mid to late 1990s, sometimes I got the original full-color manual with a game, sometimes a black and white photocopied manual, and other times no manual at all.
Yeah same my local video place gave no fucks when it came to this. It seems it was only the big stores that really had to watch out for big Nintendo lol.
Worked there during 2004 when bad santa came out on dvd. Hated it. Hated it so much that I sabotaged them by deleting the late fees of as many people as possible, this went on for a month or two. One manager had it in for me and fired me after we were working late together, with no one else in the store. Made up a story and that was that.
"I expect, therefore, to be compensated every time the thing sells." Sure thing, just that renting is not selling, so them getting jack shit is totally fine by their own wording.
The reason why rentals should be legal and something we fight for is the fact that “culture shouldn’t be kept behind a paywall” renting allowed people who couldn’t afford to perhaps buy the games and movies that allow a poorer person to experience all the different aspects of culture. I think that’s a good thing
It's also just ridiculous corporate greed. This mentslity thst they are losing money by rentals is insane. If I play a game at a friend's or relative's house, that's not a lost sale. Renting a game for a week/weekend isn't a lost sale either.
@@Bloodstar-o7 You are insane. Playing a game at a friends house instead of buying it for yourself is absolutely a lost sale. So is renting. Everyone who up voted you should be ashamed of their non-thinking devices in their heads.
If it was so lucrative the video game industry could have banded together and created their own rental store. They didn't, so obviously there wasn't that much money lost to rentals. I actually used to do what the video was talking about, which was sampling the games so I could go out and buy it if I liked it. $50 was a lot back then so as a kid it wasn't easy to just buy another game if the game you bought sucked.
I love the logic from those game companies. If our game is too easy it can be beaten in one rental period, but if we make it obnoxiously difficult and annoying, people will buy them! Instead of renting them, realizing they suck, and not playing them anymore! (And you can't rent something more than once!)
i suppose it's easier to make a game unnecessarily harder as opposed to making a game good enough people would actually want to buy it after trying it during the rental period
The Lion King game was supposed to be easyer but the devs pretty much got a memo from Disney to make it harder because they assumed if a kid can beat more than 60% of the game in one renting they won't buy the game
The trick is to ramp up the difficulty halfway through the game. If the first half of the game can hook the kid, they will want to buy it to finish it.
Renting movies and games was such a big part of my childhood, and the childhoods of people born in the 80s and 90s. I discovered some of favourite games via rental. Games have always been expensive, even more back in the day when you take inflation into account, so being able to try a game for a few days for $5 or so was great. I first played MGS as a rental as well as games as late as Dragon Age Origins. I feel the "try before you buy" mentality has really died off since the death of video stores. While I always appreciate it when developers offer demos, I feel like there is no true modern replacement for rentals.
I remember renting DOS games from West Coast Video. Now that was money loser for those programmers because we'd take the 5 inch floppy disks home and just copy them. One rent was all you needed.
Some games had passwords that required you to have the instruction manual to get past a certain point by entering a password. Some games were indeed unplayable without the manual.
@@marscaleb Star Tropics for the NES required a physical letter that was included in the game box in order to beat the game. At a point in the game, you were told to dip this letter into water to reveal a secret (a password you had to enter into the game if I remember correctly). Without this physical item, you would get stuck at this point in the game. I remember getting stuck here on two different rentals of the game thinking it was something I missed in game.
I was renting games in the mid 90's to early 2000's. It was always a nice surprise when the manual was included with the game. This was very informative!
Nintendo didn't really see how the future of their brand was being influenced by rentals. They would have never gone after the rental market otherwise. Many people don't realize that video games in 1980-1999 were pretty damn expensive. And some of you might be thinking, oh yeah they're expensive now. No... they're not. Video games frequently went for $50-70 USD in the 80s and 90s. That's $120-150 adjusted for 2024 rates. We frequently pay a fraction of that today. This meant many families simply couldn't buy new games whenever they were released. $70 for a game was out of their budget. Couple this with the fact that you didn't even know you would like the game before trying it. We didn't have youtube videos. All we had were biased game magazine (bias either because they were operated by publishers, or were incentivized to advertise by publishers), and advertisements on TV that didn't show much game footage. It was a chaotic market. And I would argue would have gone the way of the market as it did in 1983 without rentals. Now Nintendo and other publishers were correct. Someone could pay $1.50 to a rental shop. Play and beat a game during the period. And then would never purchase the title. Meaning they would lose $50. But think about that for a moment? $50 for a game that can be beaten in a weekend? Is it worth $50 (1985)? There were several games that I rented and rented them often enough that my parents or myself (once I had an income) simply purchased because it would be cheaper than renting as often as I was. Thus the publisher made money off of a rental. Of course that entails them making games good and long enough that warrant such. It raised the standard of what video games should be. Thus avoiding another market crash like in 1983. I'm sorry but while games like Super Mario Bros. 1 and 2, Castlevania, and others are classics. Video games would have quickly lost appeal on games that literally can be beaten by the casual gamer in 10-20 minutes. But this is why we started to see longer games like Super Mario Bros 3 and better RPG titles. By the time of the N64 and Playstation era, games were incredibly long by comparison. Thank rentals. Mario, Zelda, and Metroid wouldn't be where they are today without rentals. I rented Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Super Mario Bros 2 and 3, ect and ended up buying all of them. And then went on to buy future titles in the franchise because I knew they would be good. I would have never done that without rental. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom wouldn't have been possible without rental in the early days. Those of you who game on PC understand an interesting concept created by Valve through Steam. Which I believe is a natural evolution of rentals in a philosophical manner. I believe its Gabe Newell of Valve that said that there is a customer for every price point. The idea is that a game that comes out for $60 will have customers who will pay that because they believe the game is worth that and they wish to play it. Then after the game is out for a few months its price drops usually to $50 or $40. Then more people buy. Then after a few years the price drops again. More people buy. Keeping the price at $60 doesn't encourage people to 'eventually' buy the title. They simply don't buy it. You're not earning $30 more on each purchase by not lowering the price. You get nothing instead. But you could get 'something'. Something > Nothing. And the whole market isn't going to wait a year or two in order to get the game at half off. Only those who simply can't afford the full price, or those who aren't sure of the quality. The latter will likely buy future products at full price if they are impressed. The system is one of merit. As any market in media should be based on. The good games by good publishers sell, the bad ones don't. The bad one's aren't entitled to being compensated simply by the idea people should pay full price to see if its bad. That is where Howard Lincoln is incredibly wrong. Of course he was incredibly wrong on many of his decisions.
Plus rentals helped you avoid the shovelware garbage that was pushed out by the ton. Over 90% of the NES library was junk. Nintendo didn’t like this because they stood to make money in each game sold and they considered a rental as a lost sale. This circles back to your point about the cost of games. Most families aren’t buying all the games out there, especially unknown titles. So Nintendo was thinking incorrectly. It’s not a lost sale if that person was never going to buy the game to begin with. Sometimes they would buy a game they rented a few times and enjoyed a lot though so it works both ways.
@@mrmojorisin8752 Mortal Kombat went for $70 when it first released in the 1990s. You can find the advertisements in a google search from KB toys. Thankfully even back then, 3rd party games didn't stay full price for extended periods.
wow even Nintendo was petty back then suing blockbuster for renting their games when that didn't work they tried to sue them for the game manuals just like how they altered a patent so they can sue Pocketpair
Eric, you need to understand this was 1980s Nintendo. The same Nintendo that limited the number of games a third party developer could develop per year. The same Nintendo that sued developers for making games that weren't "licensed" (aka manufactured) by Nintendo. The same Nintendo that wouldn't allow cross platform publishing of games, unless it was made for other Nintendos. Yeah, this doesn't come as a surprise at all.
Yes. I remember. You would rent a game, and PRAY is was a solid one. You would find out if a game was boom or bust from friends because there was no internet with game reviews. And it was just a one night rental.
Nintendo might complain but they benefitted greatly from the rental of games. I bought a lot of games after renting them back then, and wouldn’t have bought half of them if I didn’t know it was fun from renting it.
I actually miss the old video stores. You got to go there and run into friends and family. They had movie posters you could buy after they took them down for promotions for like a dollar. There was always at least one employee that was awesome and knew everything about movies there and coming out and get some great suggestions.
It’s Nintendo’s right to petition for the law to be changed, but their hysterical overreactions (and quotes) are embarrassing. They knew what the law was when they entered the market. I’m not terribly sympathetic to their position. Sales to blockbuster are still sales, and their eventual partnering with Blockbuster was a admission they were just shooting themselves in the foot.
I didn't understand it as much as a young person, but my friend knew this back in the day, as to why they had to have blockbuster made manuals. Turns out, Nintendo was always a douchebag, and nothing has changed, except being sucessful at killing the switch emulator scene. Won't give nintendo another cent. Esp when their current system and controllers are rather crap.
They tried to argue that when you went to rent the game, it was a lost sale. However they didn’t account for three things. First almost 90% of games back in the day were shovelware crap from LJN and others. The games were broken messes that weren’t worth buying at all and Nintendo didn’t want you to know that. How many times did you rent a game and it was bad and you told your friends it was bad? Second, they are under the assumption that everyone who rented a game would buy it if they didn’t have the option to rent it. Of course that is not true. If blockbuster and others did not exist there are a lot of games that would probably have far fewer sales because they were unknown to people, people didn’t buy every single game that came out, or the game got a bad review in the magazines and people would avoid it. Blockbuster not only bought the game but people were willing to try a game for a few dollars rather than take a chance on $50 for an unknown. Third there is no telling how many times someone rented a game, loved it then begged their parents to get it for them. I know I did that and sometimes I got that game for birthday or Christmas.
I agree completely, most games I rented back in the day were games I’d never spend the money to buy but I’ll give it a shot renting and see if it surprises me.
When you said “Final Fight Guy” rather dismissively, I’m not sure you knew what that was. It’s not a random generic game name. It’s the edition of Final Fight (a great game) that has Guy instead of Cody as the second playable character. It’s still not ideal that the SNES could only accommodate two characters, as the arcade version let you play as Haggar, Cody, or Guy, but there you are.
And Blockbluster has outlasted both Netflix DVD rental and Redbox DVD rental. One Blockbuster store remains open, and it's not going away anytime soon.
I live around it. I wish it was even more popular with the “locals”. People come from lots of places to visit it though and buy merch online. They have a small museum inside too with some movie props and classic Blockbuster stuff
i remember growing up in the 80s. damn near every rental store had nes game's. were i lived blockbuster was 20 miles away. so, the nearest rental store near me was movie gallery. i did rented a few nes games from there as a kid.
Also, the last Blockbuster is located in Bend, OR. There is a documentary titled The Last Blockbuster. They thrive more on selling trinkets and other collectibles, but they still rent movies.
Yeh, GameStop stores are the same way. Literally half the store is toys, apparel, merchandise, even other things like phones and tablets and videogame-adjacent technology. It's kinda weird to see.
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@@Gotmilk0112 FunkoStop is what I call this place these days
@@Gotmilk0112 I haven't been to a GameStop in God only knows how long. If there is a game that I want, I usually hit Amazon and their prices are comparable or better.
Oh, that no manual sucked when you rented Startropics NES. Because there was a page in the manual you had to put in water to get a code to continue in the game.
Renting NES games turned me onto different genres and gameplay mechanics more than specific games. What I'm saying is rentals led to Nintendo getting every dime I could scrape together back then.
lol Redbox wasn't even cheaper, unless you watched immediately. Blockbuster was usually like $3 for a week. And if you were a day late you got charged 43 cents per day ($3 a week prorated). And Redbox was $1 a day. So if you kept it for a week it was twice as expensive
Can anyone clarify the "rules" of renting VHS tapes back in that time frame. I had a friend that worked at a Mom & Pop type video store, and he said they were "required" to buy the video tapes from specific distributor(s) and they cost like $89.95 a piece (remember that was the retail price of many movies back in the day). He said it was "illegal" for them to go to Wal*Mart and buy say a Disney movie for $24.95 and rent it out. The owner of the shop would do that sometimes, but only rent them out for like 2-3 weeks before selling them to hide the evidence, and was always paranoid of getting busted.
The VHS cassette rental distributors would offer the movies before retail release at a higher price with additional conditions in their agreement. It’s likely the owner was worried about losing access to purchase from that distributor if caught purchasing additional VHS tapes from a nearby store after the retail release of a movie to VHS rather directly from the VHS cassette rental distributor. It was a civil issue related to contractual agreements and not a result of statutory law. It wasn’t “illegal” but there was a legal reason why the rental store owner could have faced issues if caught. For example during a random audit, a secret shopper could show up and count available copies of a title on the shelf. Many stores would hide extra copies behind the desk so that they wouldn’t be able to be counted in an audit. Some audits would include renting a title in order to get the security box unlocked and look for identifying marks to determine if the cassette was one specifically produced for rental or if it is one produced for retail sale. Breaking the agreement might have led to a rental store owner being sued but that was unlikely. The biggest punishment was losing access to any future releases prior to their retail release when the competition across town still has access to those titles to rent before the retail release date.
@KeithS4789 that makes sense! As it's probably pretty hard to get the movies the opening weekend it's available on VHS and that's when people are going to want to rent it. So if that makes sense they wouldn't want to lose being able to buy tapes from that distributor
Bro going to Blockbuster on a Friday when you parents allowed you to rent a game or two... it was an EXPERIENCE! There was a local rental place too and I remember theyd always have a printed laminated sheet for the instructions. I never ever understood why that was. Thanks to you I finally do!
I remember being surprised the few times a rented game had the manual. It taught me about respecting things you are borrowing/renting or not yours altogether.
Video Stores back then had to pay HUNDREDS OF $$$ for each VHS Tape. NES games for $50 was a bargain in comparison. Back then Movie Studios charged a huge premium for new release movies to Video Stores. I recall losing a movie and I had to pay the $199 price tag for them to replace it.
I remember that any time I rented a game from Blockbuster, it was pretty much a coin flip whether the case would include the instruction manual, or only have the game (and yet, they and maybe Wherehouse were some of the only ones who included manuals at all, with Albertsons and Hollywood Video never having them). Incidentally, I never recall encountering a photocopied manual, at least not until maybe around 1999, when I rented a copy of Ocarina of Time from a small local rental store (I'm talking so local that it has the town that I live in in its name). Amusingly enough, pretty much any time I went there over the following few years, I'd see that same Ocarina of Time copy on the shelf, with the photocopied manual visible through the clear plastic case.
I rented a WWF Wrestling game, The Undertaker could shoot demons at people. The instruction manual had a notes section and someone wrote "Demons are not of Jesus"
Ah, so that’s why they switched to just making the back of the rental game case a monospaced type-up of the most important info from the manual. I remember my rental of Metal Gear Solid had Meryl’s codec frequency on there somewhere
Man, Lincoln dropping cold asf quotes about Nintendo losing money is a thousand times more hardcore than Reggie's short but infamous "taking names" speech introducing himself as president of Nintendo of America.
The year was 199X You just rented star tropics for the nes. You got to the point where in order to progress the game, you had to submerge the last page of the manual in water to reveal the frequency needed. The rental place only included a black and white copy of the manual that was never submerged.
My local rental shop before blockbuster came to town had a guy that was a big gamer and told my friend and I all the codes and tricks for the games we rented. He would even show us new titles before we picked a rental for the weekend and help us avoid bad games. Very cool guy. They then sold the games that had been rented a few times at a discount. Got a few games that way that I loved and had rented more than once
@@mrmojorisin8752 Wait was him condemning video games or was it just a segment on politicians condemning video games? If it was the latter I can agree on but if it was the former, then he was probably arguing with unfounded "evidence".
@ Can’t remember for sure, it was so long ago. But the segment may have aired before politicians got very involved with video games. My best guess is that Stossel was echoing a lot of goofy concerns that lots of people had.
People nowadays seem to recall Blockbuster Video with rose-tinted glasses. I used to work at Blockbuster Video, and believe me, the only people who actually loved Blockbuster Video back in those days were the little kids who weren't having to pay for the movie rentals or late fees. Everyone else hated how much it cost and were enraged when the new releases were nowhere to be found. Everyone hated having to rewind VHS tapes. And when DVD's took over the home video market, scratched discs were everywhere because people don't know how to take care of their own stuff, let alone stuff that didn't belong to them. And stores were overflowing with previously viewed movies which didn't sell worth a darn because they were an overpriced cash grab after that copy of the movie had already been in and out of countless homes.
4:43 John Nintendo really acting like rental companies don't provide them any revenue. Sorry, man, they bought a legitimate copy of the game. You already got paid for it.
They bought the game once for each copy they had in the stores. Nintendo argued that when someone rented the game, that was a lost sale. They just wouldn’t admit that what actually happened is people found out that 90% of the games were garbage shovelware with borderline broken controls so people weren’t rushing out to Toys R US to buy a copy to own.
Shows how long Nintendo is anti consumer. The odd thing is that music copyright is a lot looser in Japan. Going into a store and creating your own mixtape is common practice.
@@Bob_Smith19 Nintendo's public image is pretty friendly but on the business side, yeah they're ruthless and anti-consumer as hell. They also had an absolutely ridiculous (read: abusive) working relationship with game developers that forced them to purchase carts directly from Nintendo at super-inflated prices or else no official license stamp for you. Oh and you could only release a very limited number of titles per year AND none of them could be released on dates that would compete with Nintendo's own releases. Nintendo basically dug their own grave and Sony walked all over them by not requiring any of that ridiculous garbage of their developers ontop of discs being practically free to print compared to carts AND having massive storage. I'd dare say if not for them dominating the handheld market they wouldn't have made it.
My older brother had a friend that was from a rich family. He had about 30 ps1 games that wouldn’t play because he didn’t look after them all scratched . I saved some money and bought all of them for $10. Instead of spending the money at the video store for a game rental I would take a scratched disk in and have the polish it for $5 . Bam game I could play for as long as I wanted .
I might be remembering wrong, but wasn't the Sega/Blockbuster thing about not having to stock multiple copies of the same game? The cartridges were re-writable, so when you wanted to rent a game instead of them having to check if there was a copy available the clerks would write the game you wanted on the cartridge
Japan comes out with a lot of awesome stuff but as far as business goes they are really draconian with a lot of things. Big businesses in Japan can really throw their weight around. I think that is what emboldens Nintendo to be so consumer unfriendly in the rest of the world. Then you have S Korea which is basically the Republic of Samsung. I don't know what it is about Asian culture that gives rise to even more capitalism than that in the US.
The video game rental industry was an annoyance to the companies that manufactured the games for the same reason that streaming music services are a thorn in the side to the music industry, and that is the rental of a game allowed you to try it our for a fraction of the cost rather than waste money on something of poor quality that was just marketed really well. I don't know how many games I rented over the years where I 'd get it home, spend an hour or two on it, and just walk away in disgust with how awful it was (Jekyll and Hyde, I'm looking at you).
I remember renting the last copy of Halo 2 my local Blockbuster had on launch day. I called them and asked if they could hold it until I could ride my bike up there and rent it. I also fried a copy of Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense for N64 playing it for an entire day
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Ironic that some of the later prints of SNES games by Majesco use B&W photocopied manuals
I used to be a manager at Movie Gallery, and the least appealing chore was calling video game renters to try to get the manuals back....Spoiler: they never, ever admitted to having them...
Without that first right of sale law, the entire flea market and garage sale industry would be annhilated. Craigslist couldnt exist. I do feel though that the special nature of major video game rentals should have been an exception and the companies required to give nintendo at least a cut of the rental income.
now The Werefrog know why video game rentals never had instruction books. The Werefrog thought they were just lost by another renter, or the store decided to hold it back before selling the gam.
Think the lesson here is think how much money Nintendo lost, when it could hav sold expensive replacement color manuals as a compromise. Blockbuster charges missing manual fee ofsay 8 or 10. Then splits the fee with Nintendo? Manuals cost pennies on the dollar to produce. Also consumers should be glad they did incorporate common pc protection using manual to list codes needed to start the game.
Renting games back in the day determined if I would buy or not buy a game or not. Their was a lot of good games but also a lot of turds that should have been flushed at the development level. Really though, the end user cost back then was ridiculous and outrageous for the average family, so getting a new game at the drop of the hat was out of the question. $50 that would buy you a shiny new maybe good or maybe crappy Nintendo game at the time could easily rent a room out of a house for monthly rent or be about be about one fourth of the rental of an apartment. The rental market was needed for quality control on games to keep the crummy games down to a minimum and Nintendo hated that. I guess no one likes being called out. Frankly I think that the court ruling was justice served for publishing so many games that was that were ether too short or just crappy all together. And most of the time, you could not return it if you just don't like it.
Nintendo probably didn't like them renting their games because there were tons of games people would never buy if they got to try it first. Like Fester's Quest or one of the crap Simpson's games. But then there were games I ran out to buy once I got to try them like Ninja Gaiden or Battletoads.
I definitely got most of my rentals from mom & pop stores. The one we went to had full console rentals but I only ever used it for renting accessories like the 64 gameboy adapter. Buying games was out of my budget. I still remember I only ever bought Pokémon red, donkey Kong country for gbc, Mario bros deluxe and diddy Kong racing. I got real good at those and rented only when I felt like trying something new. I think I was more into pc games also but it was much easier to get a good pc game to mess around with from a fast food chain kids meal or $5bin at the store.
GameFly is still an amazing option for gamers. I still use them heavily. It's saved me from wasting money buying a bad game so many times. I gives me a great sense of freedom to try any game in their library. If I don't like it, I just send it back. I can even pay to keep a game if I want to add it to my collection. GameFly is a real savior in this age of declining game quality standards, price inflation, and increasingly anti-consumer practices from game companies. Never give up physical media! It's the best ally on the side of us consumers. Which is why greedy corporations would love to see physical media go away.
im sorry but blockbuster wasnt finding copies of games, they would have been purchasing vast quantities of games to stock their stores, so developers and nintendo WERE seeing income from that alone... not to mention the age old argument, something which I did many times in the past, people would rent a game for a few days, and if they got into it they would then BUY the game - this again is direct income that might not exist because otherwise you would only buy a game if a friend had it or if you really really wanted it. I've bought so many games because of renting and then realising the games were really good when I initially assumed they wasnt. I have this problem today now with xbox and PC, I dont buy many games anymore, not even most AAAA games, because im too scared to lose my money on something that isnt good. And game issues preventing enjoyable experiences, and that aspect has actually gotten worse over the years. But you cannot rent games anymore! So they dont get any money from me and I suspect many many other people are like me in that regard and theres plenty of games they could sell but never do. companies are so dumb man its unbelievable.
Here we are, so at the peak there were 9094 stores worldwide, so say you released a game and blockbuster went ahead and auto-ordered just 20 copies for rent for each of all their stores, that's 181,880 sales instantly. Now lets say a day later or so the game gets bad reviews (it sucks, terrible game) and so you have poor sales. Blockbuster alone has just made you a ton of sales - it's their problem now.
I never actually went to blockbuster as their rentals were misleading. You had to find the title and then the white blockbuster box on the shelf if all you had was the empty box with the Styrofoam brick inside it, it isn't available. This is misleading. It makes you go there and then get stuck there renting something else. Because the popular title you wanted wasn't available and availability was an issue plagued by all rentall places. I went to Warehouse. The Only commercial chain that has it in style: if you see the box with the tape/betamax/NES/snes/Sega titlee in the box. Guess what? It's available. Plus the warehouse like a tower records or virgin megastore but smaller and had titles for rent. Block buster had atrocious selection , mostly focused on newer titles not older titles. Warehouse had newer stuff and the classics along with some rare gems sprinkled in for good measure. Also, they had music 😊 But tbh I actually liked thee mom and pop rental places as they didn't employ the same misleading system as block buster and it was easier to talk to someone at the store about buying titles that were for rent. Blockbusted also didn't have porn 😮 I mean my God. What an awful place. Not only can I not get episodes of macgyver on betamax but I also couldnt rent hours upon hours of porn to watch in between episodes of macgyver! What was the world coming to celebrating such an awful establishment? 😢 _Hi, I'm a blockbusted customer. let's celebrate Some mediocrity_ 🎉 Ya, no thanx.
See this is why I download Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox and PC games on my computer and don't pay them shit. Now they're the ones renting out licenses for you to be able to download the digital content at the same price as hardware material. It was bad while they made no money in the renting business but now that they're the ones racking in all this money with their digital licenses there's no complaints. Meanwhile we are all just waiting for them to shut down at any moment and run away with our money.
Blockbuster helped me Pirate so many PSX and PC Games, as i could reserve a Game, so drop one off, and pick another up, go home copy it and do it all again tomorrow
Ah the good old days, do You all remember when how we thought the prices they charged for snacks in the rental stores was Highway robbery and now here we are post inflation Covid 😢 I would give anything to Rewind time.
Renting could have helped Nintendo if they had used a different strategy. $60 in 1994 in real dollars was a lot for a game, so by using rentals as the preview they could have closed the deal on the few-if-any games a family would buy. It would have been even more effective if they had focused on trying to make the early part of the game as fun/addictive as possible. By going for artificial difficulty they generally also made the games less fun. After the rental period the kids wouldn't be as interested in playing it again. Clueless parents tried their best, but a shot in the dark ends up with buying a game the kids don't like much. It isn't fun, so the kids don't play it much, so then the parents see it as a waste of money. Why drop $60 on a game that your kid will play for 30 minutes and then never touch again?
America isn’t Japan and they didn’t like that. You could rent music in Japan but couldn’t rent video games back then. Because you could in the us this created a big stink and caused a lot of games to come here altered from their original release like Castlevania 3, the greatest game ever.
Not long after my parents surprised me with an NES in '87, we rented Life Force from our local mom-and-pop video store. The manual, included with the game, mysteriously vanished behind our bulky console TV. My mom tried returning the game without it, but the store refused. It took nearly a week of frantic searching to find the manual, and we ended up with hefty late fees.
My parents, understandably frustrated, put a temporary ban on video game rentals. When they finally relented, my dad, in a misguided attempt to protect the manual, hid it. However, when it was time to return the game, he denied taking it and accused me of losing it again. The store's strict policy forced us to purchase the game for a whopping $60. My mom, furious, called it my early birthday gift.
Years later, while moving, we discovered the manual hidden in a high cabinet, completely out of reach for a six-year-old. To this day, my parents have never apologized for the unfair accusation.
Well I hope you don't let them off the hook. That is some BS!
Dude, get over it.
@@kraka2381While I do agree 100% that its a non-issue now, there was no need for you to phrase it the way you did.
Don’t just “get over it”, but also don’t just “rake them over the coals” for it. If you’re not a parent yet, you won’t know how many thousands of mistakes you’ll make too. The best you can do is forgive, even if they were completely in the wrong.
Sounds like a step-father move. I have loads of similar stories!
Kids today will never know how lit up Blockbuster was on a Friday night.
Frfr
Never ever man oh man great times today doesn't even come close to the golden years movie rental game rental and pizza makes me warm thinking about it
That was always the BEST!
I was a store manager at Blockbuster for 2-3 years. The way we got around the manual problem was when we first got a game, we read the manual, then typed in the simplest way we could (i.e., a button = jump, b button = fire) and printed the text ON the rental label of the game's box. The more complex RPG games we did the best we could, but some was always left out, but by this time, Nintedo Power magazine and the emerging internet filled in the gaps for us.
Love it. Thanks for the insight.
First game I ever saw internet playing guide to was Killer Instinct on SNES. My best friend Ken (rip) had a girlfriend that was in university and she printed him of hundreds of page long walk through guide for the game. The guide broke my brain how so much information about a single game could exist. This was my senior yr in HS 1995.
I still do that when playing a new game (X= Jump, square= reload, circle= crouch, triangle= grab) it’s a trial and error thing
I remember renting NES games from a Mom & Pop store. They found a company that published these adhesive cards that would be applied to the plastic rental case for said game. These cards provided you with the extreme basics of the game (e.g., what each button does, etc.) They only provided the actual manual when they were ready to sell the game.
I believe you’re talking about the “permastruct” instructions affixed to the rental case. The ones with the super hero with the line “Here’s your instructions”
@@NintendoGuyBri I saw those too and I live in Australia.
yes ! I remember that !!! now rhat you mentioned it ! crazy !
Back then renting games was all there was as well as trying them at friend’s houses when it came to getting exposure to titles. A lot of titles I know about because they were rented at some point when I was growing up. I rented Bucky o’ hare once and because of that will get that thing eventually.
I bought my Atari Jaguar from a Mom and Pop video store while on spring break 1994.
The kinda awesome thing about renting games and movies back then is that you could find out if they sucked before buying them.
ALL HAIL GALOOB (game genie) and RENTAL STORES for sueing Nintendo AND WINNING!!!
I imagine the practice is still a thing. Just more rare to find now.
Some libraries also let people check out games for a week or two. I don't know if all libraries does the same. But at least some libraries do.
Or if the game was too difficult and not fun. Which is what Nintendo often did to try and make people buy the game instead of rent. Which I never did, I wonder how many other people did the same.
yes!!!
@@freakishtech2310 Yes, Game rentals is still a thing. There are still SOME Rental shops, and GameFly is still a thing.
In elementary school, my friend's mom photocopied the entire Pokemon Red/Blue player's guide for me. She was such a rebel.
My aunt used to work in the office at the elementary school and she would photo copy books from the library for us.. It only occurred to me when I got older how crazy that actually was
BB should've put notes in every game box informing the public they don't have a copy of the manual due to Nintendo threatening to sue them over it.
Absolutely. Sometimes optics matter more than law.
I miss game manuals -- I also miss reading over them in the backseat of the car on the drive home as a kid.
You might be interested in the Evercade. Fully licensed carts with color manuals!
I think you miss the nostalgic of it more. Times are different now and I could care less for them. There are gaming magazines but I don't buy them anymore as well. I still play lots of games but we've grown up now and having those memories separate us from a whole different generation.
@@evgaming9390Having a physical copy means that the company can't cancel your "license" to own it.
@AndSaveAsManyAsYouCan There are ups and downs to both. Having physical means someone can steal or your house catches on fire and it's gone for good. I've had my Steam games for years and can re-download them as much as I want.
You can find them in PDF format online.
I used to rent SNES and N64 games from a local video store in the mid to late 1990s, sometimes I got the original full-color manual with a game, sometimes a black and white photocopied manual, and other times no manual at all.
Yeah same my local video place gave no fucks when it came to this. It seems it was only the big stores that really had to watch out for big Nintendo lol.
I worked at blockbuster 2000-2001. 30 hours a week max the pay was under $150 but 5 weekly free movies and 3 free game rentals was the perks.
My little brother worked at a movie theater and the pay sucked there too. But he kept that job part time just for the free movies.
Wow 150 YEN per hour??!!
Worked there during 2004 when bad santa came out on dvd. Hated it. Hated it so much that I sabotaged them by deleting the late fees of as many people as possible, this went on for a month or two. One manager had it in for me and fired me after we were working late together, with no one else in the store. Made up a story and that was that.
"I expect, therefore, to be compensated every time the thing sells." Sure thing, just that renting is not selling, so them getting jack shit is totally fine by their own wording.
The reason why rentals should be legal and something we fight for is the fact that “culture shouldn’t be kept behind a paywall” renting allowed people who couldn’t afford to perhaps buy the games and movies that allow a poorer person to experience all the different aspects of culture. I think that’s a good thing
It's also just ridiculous corporate greed. This mentslity thst they are losing money by rentals is insane. If I play a game at a friend's or relative's house, that's not a lost sale. Renting a game for a week/weekend isn't a lost sale either.
@@Bloodstar-o7 You are insane. Playing a game at a friends house instead of buying it for yourself is absolutely a lost sale. So is renting. Everyone who up voted you should be ashamed of their non-thinking devices in their heads.
If it was so lucrative the video game industry could have banded together and created their own rental store. They didn't, so obviously there wasn't that much money lost to rentals. I actually used to do what the video was talking about, which was sampling the games so I could go out and buy it if I liked it. $50 was a lot back then so as a kid it wasn't easy to just buy another game if the game you bought sucked.
@@prezidenttrump5171no, it’s NOT a lost sale. Key word: not. Read it again
Yeah these people don’t care about culture. They care about money
I love the logic from those game companies. If our game is too easy it can be beaten in one rental period, but if we make it obnoxiously difficult and annoying, people will buy them! Instead of renting them, realizing they suck, and not playing them anymore! (And you can't rent something more than once!)
How to turn a 5 minute game into a year of frustration
i suppose it's easier to make a game unnecessarily harder as opposed to making a game good enough people would actually want to buy it after trying it during the rental period
The Lion King game was supposed to be easyer but the devs pretty much got a memo from Disney to make it harder because they assumed if a kid can beat more than 60% of the game in one renting they won't buy the game
The trick is to ramp up the difficulty halfway through the game. If the first half of the game can hook the kid, they will want to buy it to finish it.
Renting movies and games was such a big part of my childhood, and the childhoods of people born in the 80s and 90s. I discovered some of favourite games via rental. Games have always been expensive, even more back in the day when you take inflation into account, so being able to try a game for a few days for $5 or so was great. I first played MGS as a rental as well as games as late as Dragon Age Origins.
I feel the "try before you buy" mentality has really died off since the death of video stores. While I always appreciate it when developers offer demos, I feel like there is no true modern replacement for rentals.
with the ability to perfectly replicate it without loss of quality would be pointless to rent.
I remember renting DOS games from West Coast Video. Now that was money loser for those programmers because we'd take the 5 inch floppy disks home and just copy them. One rent was all you needed.
Remember that in the late 90s, CD-ROMs for the computer.
Just like vhs' 😂😂 My mom had two VCRs to copy movies for us..
@@ninjamaster3453lots of people did that for PS1 and PS2 games too.
Some games had passwords that required you to have the instruction manual to get past a certain point by entering a password. Some games were indeed unplayable without the manual.
That was a super-common thing among PC games, but I never recalled seeing it from a console game. Now I'm curious, what games did this?
@@marscaleb It wasn't on Nintendo games, I think some Atari games did
@@marscaleb Star Tropics for the NES required a physical letter that was included in the game box in order to beat the game. At a point in the game, you were told to dip this letter into water to reveal a secret (a password you had to enter into the game if I remember correctly). Without this physical item, you would get stuck at this point in the game. I remember getting stuck here on two different rentals of the game thinking it was something I missed in game.
I was renting games in the mid 90's to early 2000's. It was always a nice surprise when the manual was included with the game. This was very informative!
Nintendo didn't really see how the future of their brand was being influenced by rentals. They would have never gone after the rental market otherwise. Many people don't realize that video games in 1980-1999 were pretty damn expensive. And some of you might be thinking, oh yeah they're expensive now. No... they're not. Video games frequently went for $50-70 USD in the 80s and 90s. That's $120-150 adjusted for 2024 rates. We frequently pay a fraction of that today.
This meant many families simply couldn't buy new games whenever they were released. $70 for a game was out of their budget. Couple this with the fact that you didn't even know you would like the game before trying it. We didn't have youtube videos. All we had were biased game magazine (bias either because they were operated by publishers, or were incentivized to advertise by publishers), and advertisements on TV that didn't show much game footage. It was a chaotic market. And I would argue would have gone the way of the market as it did in 1983 without rentals.
Now Nintendo and other publishers were correct. Someone could pay $1.50 to a rental shop. Play and beat a game during the period. And then would never purchase the title. Meaning they would lose $50. But think about that for a moment? $50 for a game that can be beaten in a weekend? Is it worth $50 (1985)? There were several games that I rented and rented them often enough that my parents or myself (once I had an income) simply purchased because it would be cheaper than renting as often as I was. Thus the publisher made money off of a rental. Of course that entails them making games good and long enough that warrant such. It raised the standard of what video games should be. Thus avoiding another market crash like in 1983.
I'm sorry but while games like Super Mario Bros. 1 and 2, Castlevania, and others are classics. Video games would have quickly lost appeal on games that literally can be beaten by the casual gamer in 10-20 minutes. But this is why we started to see longer games like Super Mario Bros 3 and better RPG titles. By the time of the N64 and Playstation era, games were incredibly long by comparison. Thank rentals. Mario, Zelda, and Metroid wouldn't be where they are today without rentals. I rented Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Super Mario Bros 2 and 3, ect and ended up buying all of them. And then went on to buy future titles in the franchise because I knew they would be good. I would have never done that without rental. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom wouldn't have been possible without rental in the early days.
Those of you who game on PC understand an interesting concept created by Valve through Steam. Which I believe is a natural evolution of rentals in a philosophical manner. I believe its Gabe Newell of Valve that said that there is a customer for every price point. The idea is that a game that comes out for $60 will have customers who will pay that because they believe the game is worth that and they wish to play it. Then after the game is out for a few months its price drops usually to $50 or $40. Then more people buy. Then after a few years the price drops again. More people buy. Keeping the price at $60 doesn't encourage people to 'eventually' buy the title. They simply don't buy it. You're not earning $30 more on each purchase by not lowering the price. You get nothing instead. But you could get 'something'. Something > Nothing. And the whole market isn't going to wait a year or two in order to get the game at half off. Only those who simply can't afford the full price, or those who aren't sure of the quality. The latter will likely buy future products at full price if they are impressed. The system is one of merit. As any market in media should be based on. The good games by good publishers sell, the bad ones don't. The bad one's aren't entitled to being compensated simply by the idea people should pay full price to see if its bad. That is where Howard Lincoln is incredibly wrong. Of course he was incredibly wrong on many of his decisions.
Plus rentals helped you avoid the shovelware garbage that was pushed out by the ton. Over 90% of the NES library was junk. Nintendo didn’t like this because they stood to make money in each game sold and they considered a rental as a lost sale. This circles back to your point about the cost of games. Most families aren’t buying all the games out there, especially unknown titles. So Nintendo was thinking incorrectly. It’s not a lost sale if that person was never going to buy the game to begin with. Sometimes they would buy a game they rented a few times and enjoyed a lot though so it works both ways.
You’d be hard pressed to name cartridges from the 1980s that sold for $70. However, by around 1990, they did sell for $50, which is $120 2024 dollars.
@@mrmojorisin8752 Mortal Kombat went for $70 when it first released in the 1990s. You can find the advertisements in a google search from KB toys.
Thankfully even back then, 3rd party games didn't stay full price for extended periods.
wow even Nintendo was petty back then suing blockbuster for renting their games when that didn't work they tried to sue them for the game manuals just like how they altered a patent so they can sue Pocketpair
Pocketpair isn't about patents at all
Eric, you need to understand this was 1980s Nintendo. The same Nintendo that limited the number of games a third party developer could develop per year. The same Nintendo that sued developers for making games that weren't "licensed" (aka manufactured) by Nintendo. The same Nintendo that wouldn't allow cross platform publishing of games, unless it was made for other Nintendos.
Yeah, this doesn't come as a surprise at all.
Yes. I remember. You would rent a game, and PRAY is was a solid one. You would find out if a game was boom or bust from friends because there was no internet with game reviews. And it was just a one night rental.
This is why the rental market was important for gamers, imagine buying a full-priced game to find out it's garbage, better to spend $5 than $50 lol.
Nintendo might complain but they benefitted greatly from the rental of games. I bought a lot of games after renting them back then, and wouldn’t have bought half of them if I didn’t know it was fun from renting it.
I actually miss the old video stores. You got to go there and run into friends and family. They had movie posters you could buy after they took them down for promotions for like a dollar. There was always at least one employee that was awesome and knew everything about movies there and coming out and get some great suggestions.
It’s Nintendo’s right to petition for the law to be changed, but their hysterical overreactions (and quotes) are embarrassing. They knew what the law was when they entered the market.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to their position. Sales to blockbuster are still sales, and their eventual partnering with Blockbuster was a admission they were just shooting themselves in the foot.
I didn't understand it as much as a young person, but my friend knew this back in the day, as to why they had to have blockbuster made manuals. Turns out, Nintendo was always a douchebag, and nothing has changed, except being sucessful at killing the switch emulator scene.
Won't give nintendo another cent. Esp when their current system and controllers are rather crap.
@@sprockketsHoward Lincoln should be the mascot of modern Nintendo, the absolute dirtbag.
They tried to argue that when you went to rent the game, it was a lost sale. However they didn’t account for three things. First almost 90% of games back in the day were shovelware crap from LJN and others. The games were broken messes that weren’t worth buying at all and Nintendo didn’t want you to know that. How many times did you rent a game and it was bad and you told your friends it was bad? Second, they are under the assumption that everyone who rented a game would buy it if they didn’t have the option to rent it. Of course that is not true. If blockbuster and others did not exist there are a lot of games that would probably have far fewer sales because they were unknown to people, people didn’t buy every single game that came out, or the game got a bad review in the magazines and people would avoid it. Blockbuster not only bought the game but people were willing to try a game for a few dollars rather than take a chance on $50 for an unknown. Third there is no telling how many times someone rented a game, loved it then begged their parents to get it for them. I know I did that and sometimes I got that game for birthday or Christmas.
I agree completely, most games I rented back in the day were games I’d never spend the money to buy but I’ll give it a shot renting and see if it surprises me.
So it was basically sour grapes on Nintendo's part. Can't stop the rental, so make the experience worse for the end user. Brilliant.
Prettymuch
At the end of the day, corporations often act like spoiled, bratty children. When they're told no, they throw a tantrum.
Howard Lincoln’s a scumbag and I hope he eats sour grapes for the rest of his life over this decision.
When you said “Final Fight Guy” rather dismissively, I’m not sure you knew what that was. It’s not a random generic game name. It’s the edition of Final Fight (a great game) that has Guy instead of Cody as the second playable character. It’s still not ideal that the SNES could only accommodate two characters, as the arcade version let you play as Haggar, Cody, or Guy, but there you are.
Not only that, but that version also has reduced slowdown and fixed bugs from the original release.
And Blockbluster has outlasted both Netflix DVD rental and Redbox DVD rental.
One Blockbuster store remains open, and it's not going away anytime soon.
I live around it. I wish it was even more popular with the “locals”. People come from lots of places to visit it though and buy merch online. They have a small museum inside too with some movie props and classic Blockbuster stuff
You know you are old when your childhood is a tourist attraction.
There are parents today who don't know about VHS and DVD rental
i remember growing up in the 80s. damn near every rental store had nes game's. were i lived blockbuster was 20 miles away. so, the nearest rental store near me was movie gallery. i did rented a few nes games from there as a kid.
"It's a mature and sensible thing to do. Do it anyway."
There were some rental places that would warn you that if you lost the instruction manual you would be charged for the entire game!
Also, the last Blockbuster is located in Bend, OR. There is a documentary titled The Last Blockbuster. They thrive more on selling trinkets and other collectibles, but they still rent movies.
Lol I just seen a video on the last store 👍
@@THEREDHOTWRECKthat’s not true; the manager even made a PSA to rubbish those rumours.
Yeh, GameStop stores are the same way. Literally half the store is toys, apparel, merchandise, even other things like phones and tablets and videogame-adjacent technology. It's kinda weird to see.
@@Gotmilk0112 FunkoStop is what I call this place these days
@@Gotmilk0112 I haven't been to a GameStop in God only knows how long. If there is a game that I want, I usually hit Amazon and their prices are comparable or better.
Oh, that no manual sucked when you rented Startropics NES. Because there was a page in the manual you had to put in water to get a code to continue in the game.
The code wasn't part of the manual. It was a separate piece of paper.
@@danielpowers5891 but it wasn't supplied when you rented the game. And if I remember, its said in game, to get the manual
@@alexhaladay4345yeah it was on a “letter” written to the player from the uncle you were trying to find.
Renting NES games turned me onto different genres and gameplay mechanics more than specific games. What I'm saying is rentals led to Nintendo getting every dime I could scrape together back then.
0:53 wasn't expecting to see John Stossel in a Nintendo video
Right? I said the same thing lol
lol Redbox wasn't even cheaper, unless you watched immediately. Blockbuster was usually like $3 for a week. And if you were a day late you got charged 43 cents per day ($3 a week prorated). And Redbox was $1 a day. So if you kept it for a week it was twice as expensive
Can anyone clarify the "rules" of renting VHS tapes back in that time frame. I had a friend that worked at a Mom & Pop type video store, and he said they were "required" to buy the video tapes from specific distributor(s) and they cost like $89.95 a piece (remember that was the retail price of many movies back in the day). He said it was "illegal" for them to go to Wal*Mart and buy say a Disney movie for $24.95 and rent it out. The owner of the shop would do that sometimes, but only rent them out for like 2-3 weeks before selling them to hide the evidence, and was always paranoid of getting busted.
There was a time before disney even sold home tapes
I heard something like this, but don't know.
The VHS cassette rental distributors would offer the movies before retail release at a higher price with additional conditions in their agreement.
It’s likely the owner was worried about losing access to purchase from that distributor if caught purchasing additional VHS tapes from a nearby store after the retail release of a movie to VHS rather directly from the VHS cassette rental distributor.
It was a civil issue related to contractual agreements and not a result of statutory law. It wasn’t “illegal” but there was a legal reason why the rental store owner could have faced issues if caught. For example during a random audit, a secret shopper could show up and count available copies of a title on the shelf. Many stores would hide extra copies behind the desk so that they wouldn’t be able to be counted in an audit. Some audits would include renting a title in order to get the security box unlocked and look for identifying marks to determine if the cassette was one specifically produced for rental or if it is one produced for retail sale.
Breaking the agreement might have led to a rental store owner being sued but that was unlikely. The biggest punishment was losing access to any future releases prior to their retail release when the competition across town still has access to those titles to rent before the retail release date.
@KeithS4789 that makes sense! As it's probably pretty hard to get the movies the opening weekend it's available on VHS and that's when people are going to want to rent it. So if that makes sense they wouldn't want to lose being able to buy tapes from that distributor
I remember hating the photocopied manuals. It was a mini drag not having the colorful little booklets to rifle through on the car ride home.
Bro going to Blockbuster on a Friday when you parents allowed you to rent a game or two... it was an EXPERIENCE! There was a local rental place too and I remember theyd always have a printed laminated sheet for the instructions. I never ever understood why that was. Thanks to you I finally do!
I remember being surprised the few times a rented game had the manual. It taught me about respecting things you are borrowing/renting or not yours altogether.
Video Stores back then had to pay HUNDREDS OF $$$ for each VHS Tape. NES games for $50 was a bargain in comparison. Back then Movie Studios charged a huge premium for new release movies to Video Stores. I recall losing a movie and I had to pay the $199 price tag for them to replace it.
I remember that any time I rented a game from Blockbuster, it was pretty much a coin flip whether the case would include the instruction manual, or only have the game (and yet, they and maybe Wherehouse were some of the only ones who included manuals at all, with Albertsons and Hollywood Video never having them). Incidentally, I never recall encountering a photocopied manual, at least not until maybe around 1999, when I rented a copy of Ocarina of Time from a small local rental store (I'm talking so local that it has the town that I live in in its name). Amusingly enough, pretty much any time I went there over the following few years, I'd see that same Ocarina of Time copy on the shelf, with the photocopied manual visible through the clear plastic case.
I rented a WWF Wrestling game, The Undertaker could shoot demons at people. The instruction manual had a notes section and someone wrote "Demons are not of Jesus"
Ah, so that’s why they switched to just making the back of the rental game case a monospaced type-up of the most important info from the manual. I remember my rental of Metal Gear Solid had Meryl’s codec frequency on there somewhere
Nintendo always made the money from the initial sale, if not the rental itself, so basically it was just whining that they wanted more money.
Man, Lincoln dropping cold asf quotes about Nintendo losing money is a thousand times more hardcore than Reggie's short but infamous "taking names" speech introducing himself as president of Nintendo of America.
Lincoln sucks.
The year was 199X
You just rented star tropics for the nes.
You got to the point where in order to progress the game, you had to submerge the last page of the manual in water to reveal the frequency needed.
The rental place only included a black and white copy of the manual that was never submerged.
Ha... that's funny I remember one of our local rental places had their own manuals and I'd never thought much of why.
My local rental shop before blockbuster came to town had a guy that was a big gamer and told my friend and I all the codes and tricks for the games we rented. He would even show us new titles before we picked a rental for the weekend and help us avoid bad games. Very cool guy. They then sold the games that had been rented a few times at a discount. Got a few games that way that I loved and had rented more than once
Was that John Stossel waiting in line for an NES at. 0:53? 😆
Yes, that was him-part of his segment condemning video games.
@@mrmojorisin8752 Wait was him condemning video games or was it just a segment on politicians condemning video games?
If it was the latter I can agree on but if it was the former, then he was probably arguing with unfounded "evidence".
@ Can’t remember for sure, it was so long ago. But the segment may have aired before politicians got very involved with video games. My best guess is that Stossel was echoing a lot of goofy concerns that lots of people had.
People nowadays seem to recall Blockbuster Video with rose-tinted glasses. I used to work at Blockbuster Video, and believe me, the only people who actually loved Blockbuster Video back in those days were the little kids who weren't having to pay for the movie rentals or late fees. Everyone else hated how much it cost and were enraged when the new releases were nowhere to be found. Everyone hated having to rewind VHS tapes. And when DVD's took over the home video market, scratched discs were everywhere because people don't know how to take care of their own stuff, let alone stuff that didn't belong to them. And stores were overflowing with previously viewed movies which didn't sell worth a darn because they were an overpriced cash grab after that copy of the movie had already been in and out of countless homes.
Excellent video on a unique topic. This video game history is fascinating.
I’ve never needed to read a manual to play a game.
I rented Mario Kart…loved it …so I bought it soon after
4:43 John Nintendo really acting like rental companies don't provide them any revenue. Sorry, man, they bought a legitimate copy of the game. You already got paid for it.
They bought the game once for each copy they had in the stores. Nintendo argued that when someone rented the game, that was a lost sale. They just wouldn’t admit that what actually happened is people found out that 90% of the games were garbage shovelware with borderline broken controls so people weren’t rushing out to Toys R US to buy a copy to own.
Nintendo was able to get Japan to ban video game rentals. Their failure to do so in the US resulted in this lawsuit.
Shows how long Nintendo is anti consumer. The odd thing is that music copyright is a lot looser in Japan. Going into a store and creating your own mixtape is common practice.
@@Bob_Smith19 Nintendo's public image is pretty friendly but on the business side, yeah they're ruthless and anti-consumer as hell. They also had an absolutely ridiculous (read: abusive) working relationship with game developers that forced them to purchase carts directly from Nintendo at super-inflated prices or else no official license stamp for you. Oh and you could only release a very limited number of titles per year AND none of them could be released on dates that would compete with Nintendo's own releases. Nintendo basically dug their own grave and Sony walked all over them by not requiring any of that ridiculous garbage of their developers ontop of discs being practically free to print compared to carts AND having massive storage. I'd dare say if not for them dominating the handheld market they wouldn't have made it.
The kid at 0:51 is holding the controller like an absolute maniac
11:13 The hell is Nurse Roberts doing at a blockbuster?!
Holy crap, that is her! Used to watch Scrubs frequently as a kid!
My older brother had a friend that was from a rich family.
He had about 30 ps1 games that wouldn’t play because he didn’t look after them all scratched . I saved some money and bought all of them for $10. Instead of spending the money at the video store for a game rental I would take a scratched disk in and have the polish it for $5 . Bam game I could play for as long as I wanted .
I might be remembering wrong, but wasn't the Sega/Blockbuster thing about not having to stock multiple copies of the same game? The cartridges were re-writable, so when you wanted to rent a game instead of them having to check if there was a copy available the clerks would write the game you wanted on the cartridge
Fun fact- Bend, Oregon is home to the very last Blockbuster.
Nowadays, you can borrow games from your local library and sometimes they have games that have been just released.
Kids read instruction manuals in the '80s? I was being a kid wrong apparently.
Great informative video. 👍🏻
Japan comes out with a lot of awesome stuff but as far as business goes they are really draconian with a lot of things. Big businesses in Japan can really throw their weight around. I think that is what emboldens Nintendo to be so consumer unfriendly in the rest of the world.
Then you have S Korea which is basically the Republic of Samsung. I don't know what it is about Asian culture that gives rise to even more capitalism than that in the US.
The video game rental industry was an annoyance to the companies that manufactured the games for the same reason that streaming music services are a thorn in the side to the music industry, and that is the rental of a game allowed you to try it our for a fraction of the cost rather than waste money on something of poor quality that was just marketed really well. I don't know how many games I rented over the years where I 'd get it home, spend an hour or two on it, and just walk away in disgust with how awful it was (Jekyll and Hyde, I'm looking at you).
in a lot of places you can go to your local library and borrow games for free now. definitely a whole lot cheaper than the old days.
Used to love renting games. I spend hours to beat them in the short rental period to avoid having to buy them.
I remember renting the last copy of Halo 2 my local Blockbuster had on launch day. I called them and asked if they could hold it until I could ride my bike up there and rent it. I also fried a copy of Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense for N64 playing it for an entire day
Ironic that some of the later prints of SNES games by Majesco use B&W photocopied manuals
I remember renting an n64 and mario 64 from blockbuster before we could even buy one. The good old days!
Redbox rented video games, so the EULA thing didn't seem to stop rentals at all.
I'm surprised no one tried for a royalty system, where Ninty or whoever got a cut every time the game was rented.
I used to be a manager at Movie Gallery, and the least appealing chore was calling video game renters to try to get the manuals back....Spoiler: they never, ever admitted to having them...
Nintendo sued my grandma last week for 7.5 million dollars, I still like Nintendo but that's kind of harsh man
For what??
Without that first right of sale law, the entire flea market and garage sale industry would be annhilated. Craigslist couldnt exist. I do feel though that the special nature of major video game rentals should have been an exception and the companies required to give nintendo at least a cut of the rental income.
now The Werefrog know why video game rentals never had instruction books. The Werefrog thought they were just lost by another renter, or the store decided to hold it back before selling the gam.
🎶 What a difference! Blockbuster Video! 🎶
One new blockbuster a day opening is nothing compared to how quickly they shuttered
Think the lesson here is think how much money Nintendo lost, when it could hav sold expensive replacement color manuals as a compromise. Blockbuster charges missing manual fee ofsay 8 or 10. Then splits the fee with Nintendo? Manuals cost pennies on the dollar to produce. Also consumers should be glad they did incorporate common pc protection using manual to list codes needed to start the game.
Renting games back in the day determined if I would buy or not buy a game or not. Their was a lot of good games but also a lot of turds that should have been flushed at the development level. Really though, the end user cost back then was ridiculous and outrageous for the average family, so getting a new game at the drop of the hat was out of the question. $50 that would buy you a shiny new maybe good or maybe crappy Nintendo game at the time could easily rent a room out of a house for monthly rent or be about be about one fourth of the rental of an apartment. The rental market was needed for quality control on games to keep the crummy games down to a minimum and Nintendo hated that. I guess no one likes being called out. Frankly I think that the court ruling was justice served for publishing so many games that was that were ether too short or just crappy all together. And most of the time, you could not return it if you just don't like it.
Nintendo probably didn't like them renting their games because there were tons of games people would never buy if they got to try it first. Like Fester's Quest or one of the crap Simpson's games. But then there were games I ran out to buy once I got to try them like Ninja Gaiden or Battletoads.
I definitely got most of my rentals from mom & pop stores. The one we went to had full console rentals but I only ever used it for renting accessories like the 64 gameboy adapter. Buying games was out of my budget. I still remember I only ever bought Pokémon red, donkey Kong country for gbc, Mario bros deluxe and diddy Kong racing. I got real good at those and rented only when I felt like trying something new. I think I was more into pc games also but it was much easier to get a good pc game to mess around with from a fast food chain kids meal or $5bin at the store.
my local mom n pop were kind enough to photocopy the manual
Same, was renting from about 92-95 from the local video store and got photocopied manuals. No one was going to bother the one-offs
GameFly is still an amazing option for gamers. I still use them heavily. It's saved me from wasting money buying a bad game so many times. I gives me a great sense of freedom to try any game in their library. If I don't like it, I just send it back. I can even pay to keep a game if I want to add it to my collection. GameFly is a real savior in this age of declining game quality standards, price inflation, and increasingly anti-consumer practices from game companies. Never give up physical media! It's the best ally on the side of us consumers. Which is why greedy corporations would love to see physical media go away.
ALL HAIL GALOOB (GAME GENIE) and RENTAL STORES for sueing Nintendo AND WINNING!!!
Nintendo still suing people for weird reasons today.
You not understanding doesn't constitute it being weird.
Video game rental isn't dead. It morphed into the respective company's websites. Now each company has control of their games.
Never read the instructions, I always figured it out!
im sorry but blockbuster wasnt finding copies of games, they would have been purchasing vast quantities of games to stock their stores, so developers and nintendo WERE seeing income from that alone... not to mention the age old argument, something which I did many times in the past, people would rent a game for a few days, and if they got into it they would then BUY the game - this again is direct income that might not exist because otherwise you would only buy a game if a friend had it or if you really really wanted it. I've bought so many games because of renting and then realising the games were really good when I initially assumed they wasnt.
I have this problem today now with xbox and PC, I dont buy many games anymore, not even most AAAA games, because im too scared to lose my money on something that isnt good. And game issues preventing enjoyable experiences, and that aspect has actually gotten worse over the years. But you cannot rent games anymore! So they dont get any money from me and I suspect many many other people are like me in that regard and theres plenty of games they could sell but never do.
companies are so dumb man its unbelievable.
Here we are, so at the peak there were 9094 stores worldwide, so say you released a game and blockbuster went ahead and auto-ordered just 20 copies for rent for each of all their stores, that's 181,880 sales instantly. Now lets say a day later or so the game gets bad reviews (it sucks, terrible game) and so you have poor sales. Blockbuster alone has just made you a ton of sales - it's their problem now.
Did Nintendo not know about libraries?
did you People Know That There was a Place Called' Blockbuster Music...
Every game I rented went back so late it would have been more economical buying the actual game
I never actually went to blockbuster as their rentals were misleading. You had to find the title and then the white blockbuster box on the shelf if all you had was the empty box with the Styrofoam brick inside it, it isn't available. This is misleading. It makes you go there and then get stuck there renting something else. Because the popular title you wanted wasn't available and availability was an issue plagued by all rentall places.
I went to Warehouse. The Only commercial chain that has it in style: if you see the box with the tape/betamax/NES/snes/Sega titlee in the box. Guess what? It's available.
Plus the warehouse like a tower records or virgin megastore but smaller and had titles for rent.
Block buster had atrocious selection , mostly focused on newer titles not older titles. Warehouse had newer stuff and the classics along with some rare gems sprinkled in for good measure. Also, they had music 😊
But tbh I actually liked thee mom and pop rental places as they didn't employ the same misleading system as block buster and it was easier to talk to someone at the store about buying titles that were for rent.
Blockbusted also didn't have porn
😮 I mean my God. What an awful place.
Not only can I not get episodes of macgyver on betamax but I also couldnt rent hours upon hours of porn to watch in between episodes of macgyver! What was the world coming to celebrating such an awful establishment? 😢
_Hi, I'm a blockbusted customer. let's celebrate Some mediocrity_ 🎉
Ya, no thanx.
See this is why I download Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox and PC games on my computer and don't pay them shit. Now they're the ones renting out licenses for you to be able to download the digital content at the same price as hardware material. It was bad while they made no money in the renting business but now that they're the ones racking in all this money with their digital licenses there's no complaints. Meanwhile we are all just waiting for them to shut down at any moment and run away with our money.
The instruction manual lawsuit is so petty
Blockbuster helped me Pirate so many PSX and PC Games, as i could reserve a Game, so drop one off, and pick another up, go home copy it and do it all again tomorrow
Stores like Blockbuster are the reason why video games were made intentionally harder to get consumers to purchase games rather than rent them.
Ah the good old days, do
You all remember when how we thought the prices they charged for snacks in the rental stores was Highway robbery and now here we are post inflation Covid 😢 I would give anything to
Rewind time.
Good video.
Renting could have helped Nintendo if they had used a different strategy. $60 in 1994 in real dollars was a lot for a game, so by using rentals as the preview they could have closed the deal on the few-if-any games a family would buy. It would have been even more effective if they had focused on trying to make the early part of the game as fun/addictive as possible. By going for artificial difficulty they generally also made the games less fun. After the rental period the kids wouldn't be as interested in playing it again. Clueless parents tried their best, but a shot in the dark ends up with buying a game the kids don't like much. It isn't fun, so the kids don't play it much, so then the parents see it as a waste of money. Why drop $60 on a game that your kid will play for 30 minutes and then never touch again?
America isn’t Japan and they didn’t like that. You could rent music in Japan but couldn’t rent video games back then. Because you could in the us this created a big stink and caused a lot of games to come here altered from their original release like Castlevania 3, the greatest game ever.
So, renting a game in the 90s, dumping the rom to a computer was more legal than photocopying the Instructions Booklet!?