One of my favourite rental stories was renting Paper Mario on the N64 when it came out and nearly beating it over a 3 day weekend. Putting in over 20 hours nonstop playing. Made it to the last battle and...couldn't do it. Had to return it. Was heartbroken. Tried renting it again but got a different cart. 4 years later I'm in the same rental place looking through the old games they're selling and there, in the massive loose pile of N64 games, is Paper Mario. Remembering how close I got and the fact the game was still rad as Hell I bought it with my Summer job money, got home, dusted off the N64 and set it up and on the save screen: "Donovan" I then beat my old save file and closed this neat gaming chapter. Thank you to everyone in my hometown who played that cart and kept that save alive.
I had a similar experience with Mario RPG lol, the bitch was with any cartridge based RPG you needed to beat it before it was time to return it or you're probably starting over even if you rent it again.
Nice story. I guess good for me back then when I was renting games I wasn't really into RPGs so I never had that issue. Glad when I got older though a friend got me into RPGs, to this day my favorite genre of game. 💖
As a Japanese guy who grew up in North America, I was blown away when I found out that there weren't any game rentals in Japan. The weird thing is that they are completely OK with music CD rentals.
I bet you get Eigo Jouzu'd a lot. More seriously though, Japan has very extreme copyright laws and they are very protective of video games in particular. I can see how that would be the case. No idea about the music CD rentals though, that's actually pretty interesting.
No game rentals in Japan? Hmm I wonder if there is any connection with ‘mastering’ a game being more common in Japan than the States (at least a contributing factor). We all know that feeling of having just a few games and so you’re determined to milk it for all its worth but with the possibility of just renting a new game every week or so there is less of an incentive to ‘get gud’ with what you had. Worst case scenario you just go outside and just pick a better game next weekend but if you’re stuck with it…
How long have you been out of Japan? On the topic of music, I had a classmate that was a Japanese exchange student back in 1998. He had this tiny device that played music. I had just made the leap to a cd Walkman (though I still used cassettes) and thought I was doing pretty well. Apparently in Japan they were on to the new shit already, as he was rocking an MP3 player all the way back then. If there were strict copyright laws, and cd rental stores, I wonder how a person with an MP3 player in the early days got their music?
So many memories of camping Blockbuster. I'd go there and ask "hey, are there any copies of Donkey Kong Country coming back today?". And if they said yes i'd pace around the store looking at movies, playing the video game kiosk, and picking out candy. My Blockbuster used to take the check-ins and put them side by side on the counter for an employee to grab them and put them back. The feeling of finding the game you wanted in that pile was crazy.,
I got to play some choice titles by grabbing them off the side! Mega Man X and Chrono Trigger come to mind. Going for DKC was pretty much a guaranteed fail at my Blockbuster for quite a while!
When you rented games back then, even all the way up to the GameCube/PS2/Xbox generation, you were laser-focused on that game for the duration of the rental. Console gamers did not have massive backlogs back then, they did not have the luxury of trying out a digital game in a subscription service or from a cheap sale for 10 minutes and moving on, games were a much more precious commodity back then. If a game was really terrible, your only option was you or your parents driving back to the video store and exchanging it for a different game, otherwise you were focused on beating or getting the most out of that game during the time you had it.
@@GreenTeaViewer idk that didnt worked for me with an awful spiderman game, intried to enjoy that pile of garbage But quickly i knew theres was no way for me, changed for megaman x2 the same day lol
@@diegosotomiranda4107 The good old MMX series. They have never failed me back then. Whenever I've tried a new game from our local video store, I HAD to bring also one of the MMX games with me to ensure my weekend's fun. I've wornout those cartridges so much. xD
Preach. I didn't even know what a "backlog" was until I got a job at GameStop in '04. The variety and low cost of a lot of stuff is awesome, but it's too easy to flit about from one to the next.
My friend and I had coined the term "Weekend Ruiner", for games that we rented for the weekend that turned out to be awful. The biggest Weekend Ruiner for me was probably Ultraman for the SNES. I had no manual, no online guides, no Nintendo Power to help me out, and NONE of it made any sense. And of course, my parents wouldn't rent another game for me until next week. I'd never felt so screwed over in my adolescent life.
Funny story, one game that had me HYPED to hell was Rise of the Robots. Seeing the screenshots of the pre rendered graphics was like looking into the future. So the game finally came out and my Dad rented it for me along with Ranma 1/2. Ranma 1/2 just looked so goofy in comparison, with its talking animals and overly huge "Japanese animation" eyes (the term anime hadnt quite come to North America yet). Well, Rise of the Robots ended up being one of the worst games ever and Ranma was a surprisingly fun fighter! Rise was my "weekend ruiner" while Ranma was my "weekend savior."
Mine was a Mickey Mouse game for the NES. I can't remember the exact title but the game didn't work anytime I wasted a weekend trying. It was massively glitchy. My dad even took it apart one weekend to see if he could do anything with it but just ended up leaving it open and exposed on the kitchen table until it had to be returned lol. Never again after that.
I remember at my rental store, there was a save file named ANSON on the first slot of Link to the Past that was already near the end of the game. Like you I treated it with respect and occasionally used it to see some of the cool stuff later in the game, but I left it alone. So did other renters and ANSON'S file stayed put through the months I rented it every other weekend or so. Here's to you ANSON, I hope you're around still enjoying Legend of Zelda games to this day.
I had a similar thing with somebody named TAY getting lots of high scores at the local convenience store arcade. Me and my cousin used to play those games all the time, and we would wonder what sort of great man this legendary TAY was. I even made up a lie one night that I met him, I told my cousin he came in and blasted through a couple of games wearing sunglasses the entire time, lol!
Oh, you always need to check the ex-rental bin for old games too while you were there. You'd often find a game that cost as much as it would to rent two games in them! Usually ther were games they buy way to many copies of too, so some pretty decent ones! But, I was naughty and owned a Super Wild Card as a kid for my SNES, I'd rent games from Blockbuster, copy them to floppy disks, then return them, usually before the time was up too :P
The used "ex-rental" bin is how I got Star Tropics. Luckily, someone wrote "747" in the back of the photocopied manual so I could play the damn thing when I rented it over and over again (one of my favorites) Whomever bothered to print out and fold/staple that whole thing as well as provide me with the necessary copyright protection was an angel. When I eventually owned it, the box and original manual was even in brilliant shape because they just sat on the Blockbuster shelves. But imagine, as a child, getting to play this masterpiece of a videogame once ever few weekends for a couple days for however long and finally getting to own it yourself. What a thrill.
In the late 90s my family would use a "buy 2, get 1" deal to rent 3 Playstation games. My dad would rip all 3 onto discs and we'd return them the next day. I ended up pirating their entire available library. You were way ahead of the game with a Super Wild Card!
I remember they would put the boxes on the shelf and that's what got me to rent Earthbound. That great big box drew me in and then it turned out to be a hidden gem.
This isn't about SNES but it is about rentals, and I still love this story to this day. Back in 97 or 98, I kept hearing about FFVII over and over and over again. From friends, from school, from magazines, commercials, posters, etc. And I saw Cloud with the Buster Sword on his back, and just had to try it out. So I asked my mom to go rent it for me on her way home from work. So she brought Final Fantasy home, I looked at it, and it was Final Fantasy Tactics. I was so upset I didn't even touch it the entire first night. I mean, obviously, it wasn't the one I had heard about. Cloud wasn't on the front with his giant sword... It wasn't multiple disks... It was Final Fantasy, but it wasn't VII... The next day, bored out of my mind, I put it into the Ps1, and died over and over and over again, on the very first tutorial fight. I just didn't understand, I couldn't grasp it, it was not what I was asking for. Now, 25 years later. From that day to this one, Final Fantasy Tactics is still my favorite video game of all time. I am playing, as I type this, a modded version of the game on my cellphone. Currently fighting to help Beowulf find Reis. I have never found a game that makes me feel the way FFT makes me feel. I know the game like the back of my hand, I have held world speed run records on it, and I can talk about it endlessly with people who love it as much as I do. Recently, I got my son into playing it, trying to pass it down so that others can have the same love for it that I do. I'm an artist and writer, writing my own concept story and class ideas for a spiritual sequel, it is huge part of my life. When I was grounded as a kid, I didn't lose my Playstation. I lost Final Fantasy Tactics. This isn't about SNES, but it is about rentals, and how a rental can truly lead to something great, even if you're not sure about it when you first slip it into the console. Sometimes the cover doesn't have spikey hair and a big sword, but what is in the game proves more fantastic than you could ever imagine.
People who think FF7 is the most dark and messed-up story ever _really_ need to take a serious look at Tactics. It's like the Albigensian Crusade meets Hellraiser.
Renting games was a huge part of my childhood, and renting the console itself as well until I finaly got my own NES when I was 7. Here in Sweden most games you bought in stores had no Swedish translation on the boxes and in some cases not in the manual either. Rental boxes however where huge plastic VHS-style clamshell boxes that not only had bigger versions of the regular boxart but also Swedish text on the box and Swedish instructions printed on the inside. The best part was that when a new console came out they would often sell of their old rental games super cheap to make room for new ones. I still have a few from my local video store in my collection.
Wow, it never occurred to me why US versions of that era are typically harder than the JPN versions. Rigged rentals makes sense as an explanation (but sucks big time for playability). Thanks for the great vid Snesdrunk!
@@undergrounddojokeyboardcag701 ehh not even close, difficulty based on old arcade and snes/Best era doesnt traslate to 3d at all, o know plenty of people that are really good at "old" hard games and suck at dark souls or any challenging 3d game, and others that roll over dark souls and cant pass More than a couple of levels on megaman or contra
@@diegosotomiranda4107 It absolutely does but for arguments sake, the PSX had games that were also significantly harder than most games you see now. See games like Dark Souls is nothing more than recognizing patterns and hand eye coordination. So yes, having to spend six hours in an old megaman, just on one part, so you can learn how to avoid two enemies shooting at you while also jumping on a platform that is one pixel in size, yes, what you learn from this absolutely translates to modern games. Games being "3D" does not matter. But again, pretending it does, we still also had the PSX and games like Tenchu (3d), Colony Wars (3d), etc. etc. etc. And as a side note, its also been demonstrated through peer reviewed studies, that those old games are actually significantly better for developing hand eye coordination than modern games (actually, the last study i remember was ps2 era i believe, possibly 3, but i really think 2, but point still stands). Look at how the remake of Crash Banditcoot was perceived by modern/younger gamers, versus older people who played Crash without issue and quickly moved on to more challenging games on the PSX.
Dude, this is fascinating. I never noticed or knew about “rigged rentals” but it makes total sense, and you make a clear point. I’m blown away, thank you!
My favorite game to rent back in the day was Super Mario RPG. I'd always hope that my save file would be intact from my last rental. Managed to finish the whole game over two rentals once!
I admit when I rented Mario RPG back in the day I didn’t understand it at first. I was used to Mario being a sidescroller and it was my first RPG. Eventually when I bought it I figured it out and loved it!!
@@kabukimanindahouse Oh I'm well aware, but I was a little kid with no job, and my mom was willing to rent games for me, but not buy. I did buy it eventually, years later. The game taught me how to read, so it's special.
@@kabukimanindahouse i disagree i mean rentals were what 10 bucks maybe new games were around 50 to 60 so renting it twice is 20 bucks still 30 dollers cheaper and most parents are cool with that then spending 60 on a new game
I remember renting the whole SNES for the weekend, $40 I believe. Just until we saved up enough to get one. Top Gear, and Mario Allstars. Sure do miss those times.
I love the nostalgic feeling I get from retro games. I know that I’m remembering it more fondly than it really was, but man the 90s were an awesome time to be a kid.
Battletoads on the NES. I remember Nintendo Power hyping this game up, and, to be fair, the first two levels were a ton of fun! Then you get to the Turbo Tunnel...
Ilusion of Gaia was the first RPG I ever rented. It changed completely my logic for renting games. NExt came Chrono Trigger. And that game, boy, literally changed my life.
@@mugsofmirth8101 after Illusion of Gaia, I started searching for games with more story to rent. That's when I got into JRPGs, and it was all I rented (does this word exists?) for quite some time. As for Chrono Trigger, I found that game so awesome that it defined my whole aesthetics and music tastes. I guess; honestly, I think it was something more than that. I loved that game so much, that I started to search some of its beauty on the streets, the trees, everything that was around me. I think some of it is still with me now.
@@vsoco4921 I sometimes wonder what Chrono Trigger would be like were it an action RPG rather than turn based. I too have great memories of playing both Illusion of Gaia and Chrono Trigger, both had great music and aesthetics. I think I enjoyed Illusion of Gaia a bit more than Chrono Trigger but my favorite turn based RPG for SNES was Final Fantasy 3/6. Have you ever played Phantasty Star IV ?
When I was a little kid, my friend had the game Little Nemo: The Dream Master on NES, and I absolutely loved to play it. When I moved away, no one I knew had the game, and I didn't have my own copy, so I had to go and rent it. Went to Blockbuster and picked up a copy, put it into my NES... only to be greeted by... a game that was definitely not Little Nemo! The box said Little Nemo, the cartridge had the Little Nemo label... but... somebody had actually opened it up and swapped the chips! Instead of Little Nemo, the chip inside the cartridge was actually... Deadly Towers! For those of you not in the know, that game is a notoriously garbage NES game. I didn't really understand what the problem was at the time though, why it was the wrong game, so I didn't tell my mom about it, and when we took the game back, I didn't tell any employees either. So a few weeks later, I went back to the store... and stupidly tried to rent Little Nemo again... but it was still the Deadly Towers copy! And because I was apparently a pretty dumb kid, I ended up re-renting the same swapped copy like 4 or 5 times, hoping that I would get the correct copy of the game each time... to no avail. Eventually I had enough sense to stop trying to rent Little Nemo from that Blockbuster, but it sure took me a while!
as a kid i found a box behind a blockbuster filled with games that were swapped chips like that. guess all u needed was a special screw driver. best of the bunch was chrono trigger game replaced with Lagoon.
Something that really amazed me was how many people straight up stole the games they rented. One time my older brother had an accident and was hospitalized like a week or so and he had rented the game the weekend before so we had the game until he came back, because my parents were where more concerned about him of course so I didn't even mention the rented game. I was really worried about we going to be up the ass with the late fees because I was too little and didn't even know where he rented the games, so I couldn't return it myself. But after he goes out of hospital I told him about the game and he returned it and surprisingly they didn't even overcharged us, they was just glad they got the game back at all
@@johnjoe3386 Wow! This reminds me of how tough it was back then to find RPG titles to buy here in Brazil. It wasn't a popular genre here at all. CT, SoM and Lufia II were all recommendations from a friend, who had many imported games or borrowed from his British cousins. Thanks to him for introducing me to my fav genre I've never new before. xD
I did It with dbz butouden 3 cause i rented on Vacations visiting my grandma and then my mother got ill and entered the hospital, so went back the same day to our city and i forgot i had the game in my backpack, didnt bother after that lol
I rented Civilisation for the SNES from a place that only rented and sold games, no movies. I rented a lot from them and one day they asked me when in going to return Civilisation. I was like ??????. I was convinced i had returned it already since i hadn't seen it in months and had a vague memory of bringing it back to the store. Then years later we were moving and i found it buried in the back of my closet under a bunch of comic books. But by then that place had already closed. I suspect my mom had "cleaned my room" by her definition of picking up in one go anything that seemed "messy" to her and chucking it out of sight into the closet.
I have so many memories of game rentals. My parents probably rented me 90% of the NES and eventually SNES games in stock at my local video store and Blockbuster. A couple of memories stick out to me. I rented Final Fantasy IV (II in the US) when I was 8, and there was a save file at the start of the last dungeon with most chests opened and the party easily capable of defeating Zeromus. All the party members' names were just average American names, like Jamie and David, which tickled me because they most likely did what I did at that age and named all the party members after my friends. I recall renting StarTropics for the NES near the same age, and I made a ton of progress...until a certain part where you need a code to activate a submarine, which is discovered by taking a page of the instruction manual and dipping it in water IRL. This local video store only had the cartridges available, and I had gotten in trouble in the past for calling the Nintendo game help line too much, lol...So I had to scramble around school asking everyone if they knew the code or had a copy of the manual. Finally found a friend of a friend who had written it down. I also kept a rental of Star Fox 64 for a MONTH so I could get all the medals. Another thing my parents weren't happy about. Ahhh, memories
When Metal Gear Solid came out, the local video stores had blank cases with the game name and nothing else or if you rented from Hollywood video they had the bare minimum of instructions on the back. So when it came time to contact Meryl either you had to know it from a strategy guide or magazine otherwise you'd be going through every single frequency till you found it.
@@marioreyes7971 Oh yeah, I forgot about that codec number! I bought the game right away so I didn't have that problem. I really like games that have little things like that, though. I guess the internet and datamining can ruin a lot of the exploration and wonder in modern times, so I try to avoid spoilers for games that are full of secrets. That sense of discovery is one of the most fulfilling things to me. Sorry, middle-aged game enthusiast rambling over, haha
I always picture the game Zoop when I recall video game rentals. No one was rushing to rent that so it was always on the shelf for each console with its distinct striped box.
I remember renting Yoshi’s Safari when I was 6 years old being super confused to why the game wasn’t working only to then realize years later that it required the super scope. Games like that should’ve came with a warning.
My Dad bought me Metal Combat for Christmas, not knowing we needed the Super Scope. My dumbass decided to open it anyway. Turns out we couldn't return it, so I gave it to a friend who gave it to another friend who I met later on and told me "hey I have your game!" He ended up loving it so I guess it was a win.
Oh man, I forgot about those xeroxed manuals! Always hated stores that did that routine. Often, while my dad was looking for a movie to rent I would just ask the guy at the counter if I could read the manual of this-or-that game. They were confused, but always let me do it. It was a fun way to learn more about the game than I could from the box alone.
I was really sad when Blockbuster stopped including manuals with the games (or maybe it was less that they stopped and more that people just kept not returning the manual). At some point I noticed some games had little slips in the back side of the plastic enclosure that would have manual-like text. Like I rented Street Fighter Alpha 2 and the backside had a terse movelist! I'm guessing this was not Blockbuster policy but rather some employee being real nice. Dunno if anyone else ever saw something like that.
I nearly forgot about Star Tropics and its dipped letter mechanic for a hot minute, but one rental I saw had the continue code written where the staple was for the letter. But also, another way to know the code was to see a finished save file ending which also shows it off. I've seen both from renting Star Tropics
Being a kid in the early 2000s on Brazil means I have experience with rentals, although a limited one. And being honest, I really don't miss gaming rentals in the slightest. What I do miss are playable demos, if that came back to the AAA industry I'd be really happy. Brazil also had PS3 game rentals for a short while in the 2010s, because games here can go up to a third of the minimum wage. These were popular but died real quick, because most people had a jailbroken PS3, which meant that they could rent games and just dump them to their HDDs.
Early 2000 was all about buying pirate PS games. They were too cheap for any one to ever consider rentals. There's nothing like early 90ties, in terms of rental for games. Even rich boys I've knew they had preference for rentals. It was a real thrill.
One aspect of brazilian videogame culture that isn't as common anywhere else was renting the TIME to play games in the store itself. Like, massive places with 10+ TVs and consoles lines up where you would pay and play whatever the store had available. Consoles themselves are very expensive in Brazil, even to this day. So for many kids those rental stores were the only way we could have a gaming experience. Those shops survived through the PS2 era, but as soon as consoles started having individual profiles and internal HD, it would become problematic for the shops to manage them, because every regular player wanted their own profile, because games also stated to pad content for extended play time, and no one wanted to restart in another console, and we didn't had the portability of memory cards to continue in any other console.
It's cool to hear somebody else talk about being polite about other people's save files. I remember renting final fantasy 2(4) on super Nintendo and a guy managed to get the characters to level 99 and it blew my 10 year old mind.
I remember one video store the clerk would check LTTP, or Final Fantasy, etc and go through and erase files. But yeah it was hard to rent RPG's and popular games people would keep em till they beat them! SNES RPG's back then were expensive!
@@marioreyes7971 they really were. I'm kicking myself now because my video store sold all their SNES when ps1 came out and I could have picked up earthbound, ff 4, Chrono trigger, etc for cheap but I was a kid and spent my money on dumb stuff.
I was too young to figure out the Mario RPG sunken ship password. Next time I rented the game there was a save file at Bowsers Castle, I played on it (without saving) and one of the rooms quized me "what was the sunked ship password?" And I saw the answer was Pearls. That was a magical moment. Thank you to the guy with the save file named "BOSS". xD
My brother and I managed to guess the password on our own, though our first guess was "corals" for some reason. So on a whim I tried "pearls" instead, and wouldn't you know it, that did the trick.
Hah, the anecdote about renting RPGs is so spot on, and one of the most memorable quirks that came with renting games. I also respected those save files like they were my own, and always hoped I could rent the same cartridge the next weekend to continue my own save.
I remember renting NES games from the local spot when I was a boy. TMNT was a favorite, even though it was so damn hard! We would make it to the water section, and the intensity was so real because we only had a day or 2 to beat it. I rented it many times before beating that part and beating it felt like beating the game. Once a kid in the neighborhood traded me a Final Fantasy cart with map for some bike handlebars (used to build bmx back then). I never played any rpg before and was not very happy with the trade. I just couldnt figure out how to beat the first dungeon! My mom eventually saw the game and was suspicious… turns out it was a rental the kid had never returned for months! We returned the game but I kept the map because I thought it was cool and that punk still had my handlebars. Those were the great days of gaming
These methods of screwing over people who rented games didn't seem to work. I don't remember a single person buying a game because they couldn't beat it when they rented it. It was just punishment for kids who didn't realize they were being punished by the game developer. It was kind of malicious on their part, actually.
That's why I'm wondering if this was actually about the rental market or if it's just developers thinking "game must be hard in order for them to get their money's worth". The issue is that a lot of this difficulty is in the form of memorization and not in the form of skill
@@zkdr6278 I'm sure it was a combination of both. I think the letter in Star Tropics was clearly to punish renters because it was a North American release that put a hard stop on progression if you rented. There's definitely an argument for other games though and I think with a lot of them we just will never be able to prove intent, but there was definitely a combination of bad design and punishing renters.
@@cinnamonnoir2487 Yeah you've pretty much summed up why both command economy communism, and woke consumer capitalism suck in the same sentence. When you're putting on pressure on people to do a thing in a market in any other way other than a sale, it's probably really shitty behavior.
Great video! Renting games was basically Russian roulette. When I was really little I rented _Kid Icarus_ on the NES and never made it past the first level. I don't think I ever beat any game during the rental period. Many 8 and 16 bit games were short (maybe barring RPGs), but challenging. Though, I also had very fond rental moments. I remember wanting to rent an SNES game, but it was slim pickings. I stumbled on _Tetris Attack_ and knew nothing about it, but always enjoyed puzzle games. To this day, it still is one of my all-time favorite puzzle games! I didn't even want to give the game back to the rental store! 😅
I remember my first experience with Mario RPG was renting it with a friend. We spent an hour on an existing save file trying to figure out how to unlock Geno before realizing we already had him and could just select him in the party menu!
Renting was a life saver. I did own an SNES but my parents didn't make much money and couldn't afford to buy me all the game I wanted. Lion King was brutal. I beat it finally after a long 5 day rental. Renting helped me discover obscure games like Congos Caper and Spankys Quest.
The SNES Online for switch reminds me of what it was like renting games at my old video store. "Oh all the good games are out lets see what this game is."
This whole thing takes me back. My brother & I rented Herzog Zwei for Genesis on a whim as one of those "nothing else looks good" type nights of renting. No instruction manual at all, but there were enough bits & pieces there to keep us interested and rent it more than once just to figure it out. By our third rental, we had doped out how to play, and found it was a very early entry in the RTS genre. It's still one of our favorite games from the 16 bit era.
In the mid-90’s, on Friday afternoons, I’d walk two blocks from my middle school to meet my mom at our local Blockbuster. If my weekly progress report from school was graded as “Checkmark Plus, or better” then I would be allowed to get a video game rental, which was a three-day rental period at the time. While browsing the taller-than-me shelves at Blockbuster, I remember immediately being drawn to the SNES game Earthbound because of its oversized box. I must have been the first person to rent it at my local Blockbuster too, because they also loaned me the official Nintendo Earthbound players guide, complete with scratch-and-sniff cards. I rented Earthbound from Blockbuster at least ten times in 1995 and 1996, and sometimes I’d return it on a Sunday night and then ask my Mom if she could re-rent it on Monday so that I could continue my game. I am glad to get to share this small slice of life and thanks to SNESDrunk for providing such a great forum. :)
You brought up a ton of childhood memories with this video. I remember going to my local blockbuster and renting games i never heard of and seeing if they were any good. The one game you have shown a lot of love to was Ken Griffey Jr presents Major League Baseball. I remember renting that game and seeing a few kids I went to school withs names as some of the players. So I would be the manager and have them get hit by a pitch. I actually rented Ken Griffey so much that my parents just bought it for me for my birthday one year. It was such a fun and magical time in my childhood its to.bad kids now days can't experience that. Great video
I always found figuring out what the game was, to be the hardest part. The box art and the game play couldnt be further apart. It got better as I got older and leaned to check the back of the box look at game play shots (if they had them) but when I was young and didn't know this, there was a lot of crappy rentals
That happened to me when i was searching for a new game outside the regulars i rented (Kirby, megaman, sf, mk, etc) and i saw Mario and the Time machine, as a 6yrs old o saw Marios time machine and o thought It would be the most épic Mario game i Would play (judging by the cover), i was thinking of going to space and all that s*It for that cover, imagine my reaction when i started to play that crap lol
My neighbor got Phalanx when we were kids. We had no idea what that game was going to be when his mom gave it to him. Seeing that boxart the first time will always stick with me. lol
like Kendo Rage is actually a really fun and charming game with a cute and really funny art style that really charmed me and became one of my favorite games. But it was a luck of the draw rental that I wasn't particularly excited for at first, because the box art is trash.
One of the reasons I loved first party Nintendo games back then is they often provided in game explanations of the various mechanics. So you didn’t need the manual.
The Adventures of Bayou Billy for NES. My aunt owned this game so I only played it when I got to visit her. It was years later I found out how much harder the US version was just because of this rental situation.
That game was crap either way, but it would have been less tedious crap if they hadn't doubled the damage for all the enemies. Making games harder didn't necessarily ensure that you'd buy them out of frustration... it just meant you never played them beyond that single rental.
@@jessragan6714 correct! And there was no way for us to know how difficult a game was until we actually played it. The "easy" games that I did own I played over and over again because they were that fun.
I was 21 when the SNES came out. I rented sometimes, but I would usually trade in games at the local game store, or trade with a friend. Never had a huge collection at any one time, but I played most of the good games and more than a few of the bad ones. Still my favorite system
I just miss renting games in general. Going to the store and basing your choice purely off the box art and info on the back alone. It was risky but usually worked out. Those were the days. Plus you had an incentive to try and finish it as quickly as possible before you had to bring it back in a few days!
Nah, as a nostálgic feeling i agree, But im glad i dont have to go yo a videoclub and dealing with all the crap before playing the damn game, and god forbid you try to finish an rpg with that rental system, better to Buy the game instead of renting It for weeks until you finish It, and the other thing that sucked was the límited stock, ofc good games had More demand so It was pretty common to go a friday expecting renting a cool game for the weekend just to find out It wasnt in stock cause every copy was already rented so you have to confirmo with the leftovers...i would hate to revive that bs xD
Man, the little corner stores that had rentals were the best. It was always a treat to go into a blockbuster or a movie gallery and see the massive selection…but if you wanted a chance at renting chrono trigger or breath of fire you were waaaay better off going to the little convenience stores. They might only have 2 copies or something, but the chances of the game being there was way higher. I bought a lot of my collection from places like that when they stopped renting. I wish I had bought so much more
I don't know if it counts as a Rigged Rental but one of my worst rental memories is Crash Test Dummies for the SNES. I loved the break apart toys and thought the game would be fun. Still haven't really made it far into the 2nd stage hahaha.
I would say one of the worst experiences is getting to the rental store right before it closes renting your game and getting home just to find out it doesn’t work. Then you have school the next morning and have to wait nearly 24hrs to get a different game because they only have one copy.
I have the Contra collection and didn't realize the Japanese version of Hard Corps was easier. That's great to know, I'm going to have to play that version now.
It's a bit easy imo. You can play it any way you want but if I were you I'd set lives to 1 (or 2, at least). You have unlimited continues so I think that would give it enough challenge to be enjoyable.
Renting is such an interesting way of playing games. In Japan, of course, it was not possible, so you either had to borrow it from a friend, chip in with some other people or just buy it yourself - and that changed how gaming is perceived there, too. It's a shame, seeing how many games from that period of time are 'really' short and are perfect rentals.
My favorite Zelda ever is LttP... And I hated it when I first rented it! I'm brazilian and I didn't understand english when I was 8, so I couldn't understand what Zelda told me to do to get into the castle. I tried booting someone's save, and the game was fun to mess around, but again I didn't know what to do to make progress, and talk to NPC's didn't help. Only after playing OoT, and taking several english classes, was I able to beat it.
Along with the save files, I liked the instruction manuals that had sections at the end for “notes” and you’d get passwords or tips from prior renters. It felt like being a little part of a community way before the internet.
At my local store, there was a copy of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest that always froze about halfway through, but I always rented it to see if maybe somehow it was fixed. When I saw my save on the cart I knew I wasted my money again... so ultimately I went and bought the game. Twenty years later I finished it "any way I could"...
OMG I got Mystic Quest as a gift growing up (because is was the only RPG for $20 or less and my cousin picked it out for me with my Grandma) and I never had a freeze like that. Do you think it could have been a dirty cart that you aware of back then? That sucks dude, I remember being a kid and renting PS1 games too scratched to get past certain parts of games without freezing. Sometimes you could open the system, take the disc out and clean it with cloth or spin the disc and it would fix it by some miracle.
Almost 30 years later.. I can't forget that Spider-Man X-Men SNES game I rented. I was super excited to get to play as Gambit... but I couldn't even get past the first level as Spider-Man. To this day, I still have no idea what a person has to do to get past level 1. I was such a pissed off kid, spending 3 days trying to fight out what to do.
Omg i rented that s*ht too just for how cool looked the cover and i already loved Spiderman and xmen animated series so i was expecting having a blast with that, imagine my deception in the first level was like wtf Is this, It looks like a bad NES game and the Gameplay couldnt ve More genéric and stale for that time, i got done in the Wolverine level and went back to the store to change that crap for megaman x2
Aquí en Argentina, al menos en el lugar donde crecí, no existía la costumbre de alquilar juegos en los videoclubes. De hecho, casi no había oferta ni variedad para alquilar. Los juegos y las consolas que comprábamos no eran originales, sino copias o imitaciones "piratas". Aquí todos teníamos el "Family Game" (copia de la Famicom japonesa) y después alguna imitación de la SEGA genesis/megadrive (yo tenía una llamada "SUPER SENGA" 😅). No teníamos acceso a los juegos originales, por lo que jamás conocimos lo que era un manual de instrucciones. Creo que por este motivo nos perdimos muchos juegos buenos que no sabíamos cómo jugar. Y ni hablar de aquellos que estaban en japonés (como el "Súper Campeones" -Captain Tsubasa- de NES), teníamos que deducir o adivinar qué significaba cada cosa. Aun así, era lo que había y fuimos felices 😊.
A couple odd differences in difficulty were Mega Man 2 and Lost Levels in Japan. MM2 only had a "difficult" difficulty in Japan, but had Easy as the default elsewhere. And Lost Levels originally wasn't even released in the US out of fear it would be too difficult.
I too experienced some pretty extreme highs and lows with game rental. On one end, Secret of Evermore was a godsend to a kid who wanted more Secret of Mana. On the flip side, Aiydin Chronicles (N64) was not only crappy ugly nonsense, but it unprompted ate all the space on my Memory Pak, including saving over my lv.98 character in Gauntlet Legends. Eff that game.
The worst part about renting a bad game wasn't is sucking, it was actually trying to convince your folks to drive you back to the video store to exchange it out. I was always risky with my first choice because I knew I USUALLY had one free re-roll if mom wasn't in a bad mood, but the second time I always hedged my bets and went with something that looked safe.
You were lucky, there was no chance in hell mine would entertain the idea of going back to the store to exchange it ^^ (They were still very good parents, forced me to do any research I could before renting, although usually I fell for the latest kids movie tie-in game)
The only reason our two rental places would let you exchange titles, was if there was something wrong with the actual game, noy because you didn't like it.
Sega channel was the greatest thing ever back in the 90s. My childhood friend had it so beating games like aladdin and lion king weren’t so bad, i dont remember lion king being hard but that may be because i played a ton of it.
I tried to rent that game several times but it was never available at my Blockbuster. Seems everyone else was out making the same poor decision you did.
I grew up in a small town in the UK. 'Video shops' for movie rentals were usually small, independent businesses in the 16-bit days. Most didn't have game rentals and if they did, they weren't usually new titles. My local video shop started game rentals as a short lived experiment around this time. That's how I got playing Sim City on SNES around 1994. Large Blockbuster stores slowly established in the UK through the 90s. They also took over the small video shops in a lot of areas. Their business model included trading games.
I felt the same way about other people's saved files. Left them there as an homage to those renters before me. Tried not to save over and loved getting to see some save files with tons of time invested in them
One of the dudes working at Blockbuster: "This kid has rented like, everything we have." Talking about me one day. The difficulty was often the fact that developers were still learning and had no real way to collect feedback from players. It sure wasn't like it is now.
Years later, learning about the court battles to prevent video game renting, I wonder how things would have turned out for me personally. If I hadn't been able to rent games my video game experience would have been very shallow. I get the point of renting somehow cutting into the profits of developers but I wonder how many kids like myself wouldn't' have gotten a taste for gaming because my single parent wouldn't have been able to afford any new games. currently I buy almost every game that releases that I'm even a bit interested in, but this amount of money, as a child in the 80s into the 90s wouldn't have been possible.
Yeah I'd go on a limb and state that had rentals not been allowed then gaming would not have been something I did as a kid, and I probably wouldn't be playing video games today. I was a bit more fortunate growing up, but still, and people forget, that some games would cost as much as nearly $90 to purchase. Sports games were always priced higher as well. So the only way I got to experience the latest sports games were through rentals. And how many times did you rent a game to take a chance and find out it was awesome or garbage? Either, way it was a great experience!
I rented so many games when I was a kid. It was a weekend treat when my dad would either come home with something random on a Friday or say, "C'mon, Matt, let's go get a game!" My subscription to Nintendo Power and those rentals is how I figured out where to invest my allowance/birthday money. It also created some awesome weekend memories. I always loved it when other renters wrote passwords in the back of the manuals for others to use. I also remember beating a couple of games because somebody had left a save file at the end. I beat Soulblazer and Yoshi's Island that way.
Of course people would steal the instructions too, so sometimes you were SOL without them. And sometimes Blockbuster would print info and instructions on the back of their boxes. I remember my brother wanted to rent Death and Return of Superman, but week after week it was rented out. It turned out the game was never coming back, and he was looking forward to it. I recall Mk2 for SNES had 20 copies and only one left, on the first week of release. If a game was really good or anticipated theyd have lots of copies. Or sometimes a game would suck so bad we'd call and ask if we could exchange a game (FUCK YOU ZOOP) for something else.
If you rented Metal Gear Solid more often than not you wouldn't get the see Meryl's Frequency, as it was on the back of the cd case. So you either had to know someone who had the game, or hope it was written on the back of the rental case otherwise you'd go through every single frequency to find her!
I'm glad you mention the phenomenon of renting a game with save slots, and discovering game-saves that are way further in a game than you'd ever made it. Crystalis on NES was the epitome of that for myself, I could never beat it in a single rental weekend, so it wasn't until I rented it with a gamesave in the final area that I was able to finally see how it all ends.
12 seconds ago, wow! I love your stuff. I’ve discovered so many great games through you. It’s interesting to know more about gaming back then, we take a lot for granted today!
I’m from very small rural areas. Our movie stores were always locally owned places. When I was in grade school, the local grocery store rented games for $2 a night. Place next town over was much larger, and I bought a ton of N64 and Dreamcast games from there when they closed down. Eventually, that town got a Family Video, and it was there for a long time. You know how that ended though.
We lived on the edge of town and had a rental place at the end of my street...maybe 3-4 minutes ride on my bike....and that was my first experience with DKC2. I rented that enough to finish the game and I still wanted to buy a copy of it to play again. I with I had been able to buy that copy of the game before that place went out of business. On the other side, I didn't know anything about cleaning NES games so periodically I'd get an NES title that I couldn't even get to work because it needed the pins cleaned.
Hey SNES drunk, great video! Also, Video Update was my main "go-to" place to rent videogames AND movies back in the 90's to early 2000's. Sadly, the Video Update near me closed in late 2001 and I remember being so sad when that happened (it was even more depressing that the building has been nothing more but a completely empty space ever since then). Fortunately, a new Blockbuster Video opened just down the street from there during the Spring of 2002 and I started renting videogames and movies from there. Man, I miss those days of walking into a video rental store and observing all of the various videotapes/DVDs and videogames on the shelves and deciding which ones I wanted to rent. Don't get me wrong, I still love Netflix, Steam, and other online movie and video game services like those, but there was just something extra special about going to the video rental store and checking them out from there. It just had a certain charm to it.
My local Video Update is now a Domino’s Pizza. In fact they moved into the location it’s in a few months before a Blockbuster opened a quarter mile away, and shut down nine months later. Oops.
I remember renting nes games as a kid. Id be so excited to find something i hadnt played before......only to have it not work at home. So id do all those tricks we used to do on those old nes cartridges (blow into the bottom, bang it on the knee, toggle the power on/off).
The infamous "SELECT + UP" in Batman Forever to use the grappling hook comes to mind here. You can't even finish the first level without knowing this usual bottom combination.
Nice topic, I remember some of the licensed games that I had rented for the SNES being "rigged rentals"... Home Alone 2, Addams Family etc. Nothing that Game Genie couldn't solve though! :) On a similar note, one summer I had a friend's PS1 that he lent me while he went on vacation for a couple of weeks, and during that time I rented Driver from my local video store. I couldn't make it past the tutorial stage lol.
Oh man - I love this. I was just a wee bit young during the mid-late 90s for SNES but I do remember going to the Local pawn shop that my grandfather worked at and I got to borrow a game for the weekend which lead to some of the most magical gaming experiences. I'll still never forget the first time I played Mario Kart 64, Blast Corps, the N64 wrestling games ect
I remember renting one game in my life, M.U.S.C.L.E. Wrestling for NES. I still have it because the store went out of business 3 days after I rented it lol.
when i became an adult it was surprising finding out people considered Lion King for the snes extremely hard. It's one of those cases when you were a kid back then and you only had one game and that was it, and you played it over and over again until you end up getting used to the difficulty and you don't notice anymore how hard the game can be. That was also the case for the super star wars trilogy.
The stress of your mom not letting you re rent a game immediately ... you finally get back a week later, get the game home, and PRAY TO GOD your save is still on the cartridge!
So many fond memories of renting games in the 80's and early 90's. I used to live within walking distance of a place called Power Games. The owner was kinda like a friendly, skater version of Comic Book Guy from the Simpson. There was a Crystal Pepsi machine out front that I would frequent even if I wasn't renting a game. All rentals were either $1 or $2 for at least 3 days (maybe 5 days?). Probably my worst rental memory was renting Taboo for NES. One specific good memory I have was renting a 3DO for like $40 and beating Out of This World, which was one of my favorites on PC and SNES, and being blown away by the cinematic ending.
I remember the lack of instruction manuals being a sore spot for me at the big rental places. Luckily, a lot of small time rental places would have the instruction manuals with the games. It's why my brother and I would always prefer going to the small stores instead of the Block Buster's for games. They might not have the wide selection, but at least you knew you were getting some guidance in how to play the game you were spending your allowance on. Plus, that's how I discovered Chrono Trigger. A small rental place by my grandparent's house had it, and I rented that game every time I went to visit them. Had my progress saved over frequently, which was frustrating. However, like you I enjoyed taking a peak at other save files.
absolute wave of nostalgia here... friday evenings, after school, begging my parents to take us to the local video rental shop so we could rent our NES games and then SNES post 1991. My local rental shop used to have a $20 charge if you somehow lost the instruction manual, used to rent the games in these hard see-through plastic cases along with the manual and/or maps if the game came with them. My local shop had a copy of Ogre Battle for the SNES which I rented the shit out of throughout the summer 1995.. at one point I asked them if I could just buy it off of them, think it was around 1998 or 1999 as the N64 and Playstation were all the rage even thought they still had SNES games for rent (they did say yes and got it for like $20, with the box, manual and the extra item/monster fold outs.)
Ironically, I rented Lion King and got to Scar by the end of the 2 days. I remember being stuck on that section you described here for an awfully long time as well. I believe there's a section where you need to jump straight up to grab a hippo or giraffe and I didn't realize it.
I remember reading that a developer of the Lion King admitted that the tails of the hippo's are in fact rigged. The timing is off and the window for grabbing onto the tail is also fluctuating intentionally.
My mom went grocery shopping for the week every Friday and would stop at Video Etc., our local rental store beforehand. When it wasn't summer I'd make her a list of what games to look for but would always tell her to prioritize anything ANYTHING that was a new release that happened to be in. I played almost every NES and SNES game ever released in the US this way. It was awesome.
[Off Topic] The first game you featured in the beginning of this video gave me the most violent nostalgia whiplash in recent memory! I haven’t thought of The Illusions of Gaia in nearly 30 years! One of my dad’s friends back in the 90s was a licensed Nintendo repair man for our local area and every birthday and xmas he would gift me a fat stack of SNES games. They were all winners but some of the highlights were Gaia, Super Metroid, DKC trilogy. Man I was a lucky little brat lol. Anyway, when it came to video game rentals for whatever reason I remember the absolute let-down piles of crap more than the any of the good ones. One specific game come to mind. Automobilie Lamborghini for the N64. Oh my god. My parents were trying sooo hard to get me to rent anything else because apparently I would hardly play any of the racing games rentals I picked (they were absolutely right). Admittedly I only really wanted it because I bought into the horrible ad campaign/tv commercials for the game which consisted of a horrible Italian stereotype voice actor repeating the title over and over. My cousin and I literally played it for fifteen minutes before we got bored and shut it off. My parents were piiiiiissed!
The SNES game I rented the most was Donkey Kong Country 2. Partly because it was fun and part because of that awesome music; in which playing the game was the only common way to hear it back then. I rented it so much I coulda bought it with all the money I spent on the rentals. I eventually did years later anyway.
You absolutely hit the nail on the head. Many times I'd rush to the video game rental section at my local Albertson's while my mom was at the checkout, hoping that the copy of Contra3, MegamanX or Joe & Mac was there to rent, only to be disappointed to find "Warlock" & "Specter" 🤦♂️
What a great topic. I hope this becomes like a series or something like it, as you may analyze the things we've been through while growing up as a gamer in the late 80s and 90s. Rental stores never provided manuals where I live but I could rely on gaming magazines, that's how I managed to perform special moves and powers when I got Spawn for a try. And it was a difficult game nonetheless.
I have fond memories going to Video 94 in Canoga Park or my local video store in Granada Hills as a kid to rent SNES or Genesis games based on the box art. You never really knew what you were going to get, but as a kid I loved everything! Simpler times.
![Is Rygar [NES] Worth Playing Today? - SNESdrunk](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/lNDBRIc9yBM/mqdefault.jpg)
One of my favourite rental stories was renting Paper Mario on the N64 when it came out and nearly beating it over a 3 day weekend. Putting in over 20 hours nonstop playing. Made it to the last battle and...couldn't do it. Had to return it. Was heartbroken. Tried renting it again but got a different cart.
4 years later I'm in the same rental place looking through the old games they're selling and there, in the massive loose pile of N64 games, is Paper Mario. Remembering how close I got and the fact the game was still rad as Hell I bought it with my Summer job money, got home, dusted off the N64 and set it up and on the save screen:
"Donovan"
I then beat my old save file and closed this neat gaming chapter.
Thank you to everyone in my hometown who played that cart and kept that save alive.
Wow
Amazing story. And the original paper Mario is my favorite RPG. So good
Such an amazing story it sounds scripted! That must’ve been an amazing feeling
I had a similar experience with Mario RPG lol, the bitch was with any cartridge based RPG you needed to beat it before it was time to return it or you're probably starting over even if you rent it again.
Nice story. I guess good for me back then when I was renting games I wasn't really into RPGs so I never had that issue. Glad when I got older though a friend got me into RPGs, to this day my favorite genre of game. 💖
As a Japanese guy who grew up in North America, I was blown away when I found out that there weren't any game rentals in Japan. The weird thing is that they are completely OK with music CD rentals.
I bet you get Eigo Jouzu'd a lot.
More seriously though, Japan has very extreme copyright laws and they are very protective of video games in particular. I can see how that would be the case. No idea about the music CD rentals though, that's actually pretty interesting.
No game rentals in Japan? Hmm I wonder if there is any connection with ‘mastering’ a game being more common in Japan than the States (at least a contributing factor). We all know that feeling of having just a few games and so you’re determined to milk it for all its worth but with the possibility of just renting a new game every week or so there is less of an incentive to ‘get gud’ with what you had. Worst case scenario you just go outside and just pick a better game next weekend but if you’re stuck with it…
How long have you been out of Japan?
On the topic of music, I had a classmate that was a Japanese exchange student back in 1998. He had this tiny device that played music. I had just made the leap to a cd Walkman (though I still used cassettes) and thought I was doing pretty well. Apparently in Japan they were on to the new shit already, as he was rocking an MP3 player all the way back then.
If there were strict copyright laws, and cd rental stores, I wonder how a person with an MP3 player in the early days got their music?
But Japan has a huge second hand resale market.
You buy the game.
Clear it.
Sell it.
レンタルは要らない。
@@maverick_loneshark that's a really good point! But couldn't that be said about VHS, DVD, BR, CD markets??
So many memories of camping Blockbuster. I'd go there and ask "hey, are there any copies of Donkey Kong Country coming back today?". And if they said yes i'd pace around the store looking at movies, playing the video game kiosk, and picking out candy.
My Blockbuster used to take the check-ins and put them side by side on the counter for an employee to grab them and put them back. The feeling of finding the game you wanted in that pile was crazy.,
I remember that pile for videos. I loved it.
I got to play some choice titles by grabbing them off the side! Mega Man X and Chrono Trigger come to mind. Going for DKC was pretty much a guaranteed fail at my Blockbuster for quite a while!
I remember waiting so long to play Donkey Kong Country, but when I finally did, it was such a great game. Also, the whole triolgy is great.
Yep me too
faaaaack yeah
When you rented games back then, even all the way up to the GameCube/PS2/Xbox generation, you were laser-focused on that game for the duration of the rental.
Console gamers did not have massive backlogs back then, they did not have the luxury of trying out a digital game in a subscription service or from a cheap sale for 10 minutes and moving on, games were a much more precious commodity back then.
If a game was really terrible, your only option was you or your parents driving back to the video store and exchanging it for a different game, otherwise you were focused on beating or getting the most out of that game during the time you had it.
Exactly, good or bad, that was your game for the weekend and you played the heck out of it
That basically was it! Your rental that you may have spent $3-$5 was the priority for that weekend!
@@GreenTeaViewer idk that didnt worked for me with an awful spiderman game, intried to enjoy that pile of garbage But quickly i knew theres was no way for me, changed for megaman x2 the same day lol
@@diegosotomiranda4107 The good old MMX series. They have never failed me back then. Whenever I've tried a new game from our local video store, I HAD to bring also one of the MMX games with me to ensure my weekend's fun. I've wornout those cartridges so much. xD
Preach. I didn't even know what a "backlog" was until I got a job at GameStop in '04. The variety and low cost of a lot of stuff is awesome, but it's too easy to flit about from one to the next.
My friend and I had coined the term "Weekend Ruiner", for games that we rented for the weekend that turned out to be awful.
The biggest Weekend Ruiner for me was probably Ultraman for the SNES. I had no manual, no online guides, no Nintendo Power to help me out, and NONE of it made any sense. And of course, my parents wouldn't rent another game for me until next week. I'd never felt so screwed over in my adolescent life.
Funny story, one game that had me HYPED to hell was Rise of the Robots. Seeing the screenshots of the pre rendered graphics was like looking into the future. So the game finally came out and my Dad rented it for me along with Ranma 1/2. Ranma 1/2 just looked so goofy in comparison, with its talking animals and overly huge "Japanese animation" eyes (the term anime hadnt quite come to North America yet).
Well, Rise of the Robots ended up being one of the worst games ever and Ranma was a surprisingly fun fighter! Rise was my "weekend ruiner" while Ranma was my "weekend savior."
Mine was a Mickey Mouse game for the NES. I can't remember the exact title but the game didn't work anytime I wasted a weekend trying. It was massively glitchy. My dad even took it apart one weekend to see if he could do anything with it but just ended up leaving it open and exposed on the kitchen table until it had to be returned lol. Never again after that.
I remember at my rental store, there was a save file named ANSON on the first slot of Link to the Past that was already near the end of the game.
Like you I treated it with respect and occasionally used it to see some of the cool stuff later in the game, but I left it alone. So did other renters and ANSON'S file stayed put through the months I rented it every other weekend or so.
Here's to you ANSON, I hope you're around still enjoying Legend of Zelda games to this day.
There was honor in those days…
dickheads in australia always deleted saves.
I had a similar thing with somebody named TAY getting lots of high scores at the local convenience store arcade. Me and my cousin used to play those games all the time, and we would wonder what sort of great man this legendary TAY was. I even made up a lie one night that I met him, I told my cousin he came in and blasted through a couple of games wearing sunglasses the entire time, lol!
@@FiggsNeughton thank you for that! That was a neat story!
My rental game saves never made it from one weekend to the next.
Oh, you always need to check the ex-rental bin for old games too while you were there. You'd often find a game that cost as much as it would to rent two games in them! Usually ther were games they buy way to many copies of too, so some pretty decent ones!
But, I was naughty and owned a Super Wild Card as a kid for my SNES, I'd rent games from Blockbuster, copy them to floppy disks, then return them, usually before the time was up too :P
The used "ex-rental" bin is how I got Star Tropics. Luckily, someone wrote "747" in the back of the photocopied manual so I could play the damn thing when I rented it over and over again (one of my favorites)
Whomever bothered to print out and fold/staple that whole thing as well as provide me with the necessary copyright protection was an angel. When I eventually owned it, the box and original manual was even in brilliant shape because they just sat on the Blockbuster shelves.
But imagine, as a child, getting to play this masterpiece of a videogame once ever few weekends for a couple days for however long and finally getting to own it yourself. What a thrill.
Everyone loves Larry Bundy Jr! Lets get a snesdrunk cameo on IM GUNNA TAKE YOU FOR A RIDE *WIKI WIKI*
In the late 90s my family would use a "buy 2, get 1" deal to rent 3 Playstation games. My dad would rip all 3 onto discs and we'd return them the next day. I ended up pirating their entire available library. You were way ahead of the game with a Super Wild Card!
We like fat Larry... Bring back fat Larry!
Seriously... Go eat a donut or ten
I remember they would put the boxes on the shelf and that's what got me to rent Earthbound. That great big box drew me in and then it turned out to be a hidden gem.
This isn't about SNES but it is about rentals, and I still love this story to this day.
Back in 97 or 98, I kept hearing about FFVII over and over and over again. From friends, from school, from magazines, commercials, posters, etc. And I saw Cloud with the Buster Sword on his back, and just had to try it out. So I asked my mom to go rent it for me on her way home from work. So she brought Final Fantasy home, I looked at it, and it was Final Fantasy Tactics.
I was so upset I didn't even touch it the entire first night. I mean, obviously, it wasn't the one I had heard about. Cloud wasn't on the front with his giant sword... It wasn't multiple disks... It was Final Fantasy, but it wasn't VII...
The next day, bored out of my mind, I put it into the Ps1, and died over and over and over again, on the very first tutorial fight. I just didn't understand, I couldn't grasp it, it was not what I was asking for.
Now, 25 years later. From that day to this one, Final Fantasy Tactics is still my favorite video game of all time. I am playing, as I type this, a modded version of the game on my cellphone. Currently fighting to help Beowulf find Reis. I have never found a game that makes me feel the way FFT makes me feel. I know the game like the back of my hand, I have held world speed run records on it, and I can talk about it endlessly with people who love it as much as I do.
Recently, I got my son into playing it, trying to pass it down so that others can have the same love for it that I do. I'm an artist and writer, writing my own concept story and class ideas for a spiritual sequel, it is huge part of my life. When I was grounded as a kid, I didn't lose my Playstation. I lost Final Fantasy Tactics.
This isn't about SNES, but it is about rentals, and how a rental can truly lead to something great, even if you're not sure about it when you first slip it into the console. Sometimes the cover doesn't have spikey hair and a big sword, but what is in the game proves more fantastic than you could ever imagine.
People who think FF7 is the most dark and messed-up story ever _really_ need to take a serious look at Tactics. It's like the Albigensian Crusade meets Hellraiser.
@Dawn Razor ...Teenagers in the 90s.
Renting games was a huge part of my childhood, and renting the console itself as well until I finaly got my own NES when I was 7. Here in Sweden most games you bought in stores had no Swedish translation on the boxes and in some cases not in the manual either. Rental boxes however where huge plastic VHS-style clamshell boxes that not only had bigger versions of the regular boxart but also Swedish text on the box and Swedish instructions printed on the inside. The best part was that when a new console came out they would often sell of their old rental games super cheap to make room for new ones. I still have a few from my local video store in my collection.
Wow, it never occurred to me why US versions of that era are typically harder than the JPN versions. Rigged rentals makes sense as an explanation (but sucks big time for playability). Thanks for the great vid Snesdrunk!
Its what made us beasts at gaming.
Its why we look at people talking about how hard Dark Souls is and we're just like... "what? that's not that hard"
@@undergrounddojokeyboardcag701 ehh not even close, difficulty based on old arcade and snes/Best era doesnt traslate to 3d at all, o know plenty of people that are really good at "old" hard games and suck at dark souls or any challenging 3d game, and others that roll over dark souls and cant pass More than a couple of levels on megaman or contra
@@diegosotomiranda4107 It absolutely does but for arguments sake, the PSX had games that were also significantly harder than most games you see now.
See games like Dark Souls is nothing more than recognizing patterns and hand eye coordination. So yes, having to spend six hours in an old megaman, just on one part, so you can learn how to avoid two enemies shooting at you while also jumping on a platform that is one pixel in size, yes, what you learn from this absolutely translates to modern games. Games being "3D" does not matter. But again, pretending it does, we still also had the PSX and games like Tenchu (3d), Colony Wars (3d), etc. etc. etc. And as a side note, its also been demonstrated through peer reviewed studies, that those old games are actually significantly better for developing hand eye coordination than modern games (actually, the last study i remember was ps2 era i believe, possibly 3, but i really think 2, but point still stands).
Look at how the remake of Crash Banditcoot was perceived by modern/younger gamers, versus older people who played Crash without issue and quickly moved on to more challenging games on the PSX.
Perhaps this explains 7th Saga...
It depends on the developer though. Konami usually made their games harder for the US market, but Capcom usually made them easier.
Dude, this is fascinating. I never noticed or knew about “rigged rentals” but it makes total sense, and you make a clear point. I’m blown away, thank you!
I totally remember having to rent certain games more than once to complete 😂
My favorite game to rent back in the day was Super Mario RPG. I'd always hope that my save file would be intact from my last rental.
Managed to finish the whole game over two rentals once!
at that point you could've just bought it though
I admit when I rented Mario RPG back in the day I didn’t understand it at first. I was used to Mario being a sidescroller and it was my first RPG.
Eventually when I bought it I figured it out and loved it!!
@@kabukimanindahouse Oh I'm well aware, but I was a little kid with no job, and my mom was willing to rent games for me, but not buy.
I did buy it eventually, years later. The game taught me how to read, so it's special.
Still a God-tier game. I got my kids to love it too. Hopefully we can see Geno and Mallow return one day.
@@kabukimanindahouse i disagree i mean rentals were what 10 bucks maybe new games were around 50 to 60 so renting it twice is 20 bucks still 30 dollers cheaper and most parents are cool with that then spending 60 on a new game
I remember renting the whole SNES for the weekend, $40 I believe. Just until we saved up enough to get one.
Top Gear, and Mario Allstars.
Sure do miss those times.
I love the nostalgic feeling I get from retro games. I know that I’m remembering it more fondly than it really was, but man the 90s were an awesome time to be a kid.
Battletoads on the NES. I remember Nintendo Power hyping this game up, and, to be fair, the first two levels were a ton of fun! Then you get to the Turbo Tunnel...
Battletoads later came out in Japan and that version is easier. They took the "rigged rental" stuff out, haha
yeah, but that was universally hard. To my knowledge there's no difference between the US region and other regions of the game.
Then you go to the log level after that… 😂 I finally got to that part a while ago and it made the turbo tunnel a cake walk.
Even with a Game Genie giving you infinite lives and health that game is hard to beat. Insta-death lies around every corner
@@joshjohnson3442 That tunnel can only be beat by memorizing the pattern.
Ilusion of Gaia was the first RPG I ever rented. It changed completely my logic for renting games.
NExt came Chrono Trigger. And that game, boy, literally changed my life.
Chrono Trigger is one of the few things my younger brother and I really bonded over. Especially the music.
Changed your logic how? Changed your life how?
@@mugsofmirth8101 after Illusion of Gaia, I started searching for games with more story to rent. That's when I got into JRPGs, and it was all I rented (does this word exists?) for quite some time.
As for Chrono Trigger, I found that game so awesome that it defined my whole aesthetics and music tastes. I guess; honestly, I think it was something more than that. I loved that game so much, that I started to search some of its beauty on the streets, the trees, everything that was around me.
I think some of it is still with me now.
@@vsoco4921 I sometimes wonder what Chrono Trigger would be like were it an action RPG rather than turn based. I too have great memories of playing both Illusion of Gaia and Chrono Trigger, both had great music and aesthetics. I think I enjoyed Illusion of Gaia a bit more than Chrono Trigger but my favorite turn based RPG for SNES was Final Fantasy 3/6. Have you ever played Phantasty Star IV ?
@@mugsofmirth8101 never played any Phantasy Star. Do you think IV is the best way to start?
When I was a little kid, my friend had the game Little Nemo: The Dream Master on NES, and I absolutely loved to play it. When I moved away, no one I knew had the game, and I didn't have my own copy, so I had to go and rent it. Went to Blockbuster and picked up a copy, put it into my NES... only to be greeted by... a game that was definitely not Little Nemo! The box said Little Nemo, the cartridge had the Little Nemo label... but... somebody had actually opened it up and swapped the chips! Instead of Little Nemo, the chip inside the cartridge was actually... Deadly Towers! For those of you not in the know, that game is a notoriously garbage NES game. I didn't really understand what the problem was at the time though, why it was the wrong game, so I didn't tell my mom about it, and when we took the game back, I didn't tell any employees either. So a few weeks later, I went back to the store... and stupidly tried to rent Little Nemo again... but it was still the Deadly Towers copy! And because I was apparently a pretty dumb kid, I ended up re-renting the same swapped copy like 4 or 5 times, hoping that I would get the correct copy of the game each time... to no avail. Eventually I had enough sense to stop trying to rent Little Nemo from that Blockbuster, but it sure took me a while!
:'(
I remember renting Deadly Towers as a kid and trying to figure out what why bouncing balls were supposed to be threat.
Oh no! I felt bad for you at the end of the story. That must have really sucked ending up with the wrong game each time
@cool guy from 2007 Oof.
as a kid i found a box behind a blockbuster filled with games that were swapped chips like that. guess all u needed was a special screw driver. best of the bunch was chrono trigger game replaced with Lagoon.
Something that really amazed me was how many people straight up stole the games they rented. One time my older brother had an accident and was hospitalized like a week or so and he had rented the game the weekend before so we had the game until he came back, because my parents were where more concerned about him of course so I didn't even mention the rented game. I was really worried about we going to be up the ass with the late fees because I was too little and didn't even know where he rented the games, so I couldn't return it myself. But after he goes out of hospital I told him about the game and he returned it and surprisingly they didn't even overcharged us, they was just glad they got the game back at all
I remember my mom returning a game manual we found at our house weeks later and the clerk was like "we never get these back, thank you".
@@johnjoe3386 Wow! This reminds me of how tough it was back then to find RPG titles to buy here in Brazil. It wasn't a popular genre here at all. CT, SoM and Lufia II were all recommendations from a friend, who had many imported games or borrowed from his British cousins. Thanks to him for introducing me to my fav genre I've never new before. xD
I did It with dbz butouden 3 cause i rented on Vacations visiting my grandma and then my mother got ill and entered the hospital, so went back the same day to our city and i forgot i had the game in my backpack, didnt bother after that lol
I remember someone actually stole Mario Sunshine from Movie Gallery since the rental case was see thru and there wasn't a disc inside it.
I rented Civilisation for the SNES from a place that only rented and sold games, no movies. I rented a lot from them and one day they asked me when in going to return Civilisation. I was like ??????. I was convinced i had returned it already since i hadn't seen it in months and had a vague memory of bringing it back to the store. Then years later we were moving and i found it buried in the back of my closet under a bunch of comic books. But by then that place had already closed. I suspect my mom had "cleaned my room" by her definition of picking up in one go anything that seemed "messy" to her and chucking it out of sight into the closet.
I have so many memories of game rentals. My parents probably rented me 90% of the NES and eventually SNES games in stock at my local video store and Blockbuster.
A couple of memories stick out to me. I rented Final Fantasy IV (II in the US) when I was 8, and there was a save file at the start of the last dungeon with most chests opened and the party easily capable of defeating Zeromus. All the party members' names were just average American names, like Jamie and David, which tickled me because they most likely did what I did at that age and named all the party members after my friends.
I recall renting StarTropics for the NES near the same age, and I made a ton of progress...until a certain part where you need a code to activate a submarine, which is discovered by taking a page of the instruction manual and dipping it in water IRL. This local video store only had the cartridges available, and I had gotten in trouble in the past for calling the Nintendo game help line too much, lol...So I had to scramble around school asking everyone if they knew the code or had a copy of the manual. Finally found a friend of a friend who had written it down.
I also kept a rental of Star Fox 64 for a MONTH so I could get all the medals. Another thing my parents weren't happy about. Ahhh, memories
When Metal Gear Solid came out, the local video stores had blank cases with the game name and nothing else or if you rented from Hollywood video they had the bare minimum of instructions on the back. So when it came time to contact Meryl either you had to know it from a strategy guide or magazine otherwise you'd be going through every single frequency till you found it.
@@marioreyes7971 Oh yeah, I forgot about that codec number! I bought the game right away so I didn't have that problem.
I really like games that have little things like that, though. I guess the internet and datamining can ruin a lot of the exploration and wonder in modern times, so I try to avoid spoilers for games that are full of secrets. That sense of discovery is one of the most fulfilling things to me. Sorry, middle-aged game enthusiast rambling over, haha
I always picture the game Zoop when I recall video game rentals. No one was rushing to rent that so it was always on the shelf for each console with its distinct striped box.
I love that game!
I remember renting Yoshi’s Safari when I was 6 years old being super confused to why the game wasn’t working only to then realize years later that it required the super scope. Games like that should’ve came with a warning.
My Dad bought me Metal Combat for Christmas, not knowing we needed the Super Scope. My dumbass decided to open it anyway. Turns out we couldn't return it, so I gave it to a friend who gave it to another friend who I met later on and told me "hey I have your game!" He ended up loving it so I guess it was a win.
Oh man, I forgot about those xeroxed manuals! Always hated stores that did that routine. Often, while my dad was looking for a movie to rent I would just ask the guy at the counter if I could read the manual of this-or-that game. They were confused, but always let me do it. It was a fun way to learn more about the game than I could from the box alone.
Hello friend,
You would enjoy SNESdrunk videos lol
My favorite Canadian!
So weird seeing JJ pop up in SNES Drunk.
worlds collide!
I was really sad when Blockbuster stopped including manuals with the games (or maybe it was less that they stopped and more that people just kept not returning the manual). At some point I noticed some games had little slips in the back side of the plastic enclosure that would have manual-like text. Like I rented Street Fighter Alpha 2 and the backside had a terse movelist! I'm guessing this was not Blockbuster policy but rather some employee being real nice. Dunno if anyone else ever saw something like that.
I nearly forgot about Star Tropics and its dipped letter mechanic for a hot minute, but one rental I saw had the continue code written where the staple was for the letter. But also, another way to know the code was to see a finished save file ending which also shows it off. I've seen both from renting Star Tropics
Being a kid in the early 2000s on Brazil means I have experience with rentals, although a limited one. And being honest, I really don't miss gaming rentals in the slightest. What I do miss are playable demos, if that came back to the AAA industry I'd be really happy.
Brazil also had PS3 game rentals for a short while in the 2010s, because games here can go up to a third of the minimum wage. These were popular but died real quick, because most people had a jailbroken PS3, which meant that they could rent games and just dump them to their HDDs.
i remeber this too
Early 2000 was all about buying pirate PS games. They were too cheap for any one to ever consider rentals. There's nothing like early 90ties, in terms of rental for games. Even rich boys I've knew they had preference for rentals. It was a real thrill.
I use to LOVE gaming magazines that would have disks loaded with demos for PS1 or PC. They provided many hours of (mostly free) entertainment.
I feel sorry for your country
One aspect of brazilian videogame culture that isn't as common anywhere else was renting the TIME to play games in the store itself. Like, massive places with 10+ TVs and consoles lines up where you would pay and play whatever the store had available.
Consoles themselves are very expensive in Brazil, even to this day. So for many kids those rental stores were the only way we could have a gaming experience.
Those shops survived through the PS2 era, but as soon as consoles started having individual profiles and internal HD, it would become problematic for the shops to manage them, because every regular player wanted their own profile, because games also stated to pad content for extended play time, and no one wanted to restart in another console, and we didn't had the portability of memory cards to continue in any other console.
It's cool to hear somebody else talk about being polite about other people's save files. I remember renting final fantasy 2(4) on super Nintendo and a guy managed to get the characters to level 99 and it blew my 10 year old mind.
Same. Man it was weird finishing the game and only figuring out the plot when I eventually got a copy.
I remember one video store the clerk would check LTTP, or Final Fantasy, etc and go through and erase files. But yeah it was hard to rent RPG's and popular games people would keep em till they beat them! SNES RPG's back then were expensive!
@@marioreyes7971 they really were. I'm kicking myself now because my video store sold all their SNES when ps1 came out and I could have picked up earthbound, ff 4, Chrono trigger, etc for cheap but I was a kid and spent my money on dumb stuff.
I was too young to figure out the Mario RPG sunken ship password. Next time I rented the game there was a save file at Bowsers Castle, I played on it (without saving) and one of the rooms quized me "what was the sunked ship password?" And I saw the answer was Pearls. That was a magical moment. Thank you to the guy with the save file named "BOSS". xD
My brother and I managed to guess the password on our own, though our first guess was "corals" for some reason. So on a whim I tried "pearls" instead, and wouldn't you know it, that did the trick.
I remember renting SNES games back in the day. There was about a 9/10 chance that whatever random game you picked would be an unfair platformer.
Or a mediocre/crap fighting game or beat - em - up.
Hah, the anecdote about renting RPGs is so spot on, and one of the most memorable quirks that came with renting games. I also respected those save files like they were my own, and always hoped I could rent the same cartridge the next weekend to continue my own save.
I remember renting NES games from the local spot when I was a boy. TMNT was a favorite, even though it was so damn hard! We would make it to the water section, and the intensity was so real because we only had a day or 2 to beat it. I rented it many times before beating that part and beating it felt like beating the game.
Once a kid in the neighborhood traded me a Final Fantasy cart with map for some bike handlebars (used to build bmx back then). I never played any rpg before and was not very happy with the trade. I just couldnt figure out how to beat the first dungeon! My mom eventually saw the game and was suspicious… turns out it was a rental the kid had never returned for months! We returned the game but I kept the map because I thought it was cool and that punk still had my handlebars. Those were the great days of gaming
These methods of screwing over people who rented games didn't seem to work. I don't remember a single person buying a game because they couldn't beat it when they rented it. It was just punishment for kids who didn't realize they were being punished by the game developer. It was kind of malicious on their part, actually.
Most attempts to pressure people into buying things don't work, when you think about it.
That's why I'm wondering if this was actually about the rental market or if it's just developers thinking "game must be hard in order for them to get their money's worth". The issue is that a lot of this difficulty is in the form of memorization and not in the form of skill
@@zkdr6278 I'm sure it was a combination of both. I think the letter in Star Tropics was clearly to punish renters because it was a North American release that put a hard stop on progression if you rented. There's definitely an argument for other games though and I think with a lot of them we just will never be able to prove intent, but there was definitely a combination of bad design and punishing renters.
@@cinnamonnoir2487 Yeah you've pretty much summed up why both command economy communism, and woke consumer capitalism suck in the same sentence. When you're putting on pressure on people to do a thing in a market in any other way other than a sale, it's probably really shitty behavior.
Great video! Renting games was basically Russian roulette. When I was really little I rented _Kid Icarus_ on the NES and never made it past the first level. I don't think I ever beat any game during the rental period. Many 8 and 16 bit games were short (maybe barring RPGs), but challenging.
Though, I also had very fond rental moments. I remember wanting to rent an SNES game, but it was slim pickings. I stumbled on _Tetris Attack_ and knew nothing about it, but always enjoyed puzzle games. To this day, it still is one of my all-time favorite puzzle games! I didn't even want to give the game back to the rental store! 😅
I remember my first experience with Mario RPG was renting it with a friend. We spent an hour on an existing save file trying to figure out how to unlock Geno before realizing we already had him and could just select him in the party menu!
Renting was a life saver. I did own an SNES but my parents didn't make much money and couldn't afford to buy me all the game I wanted.
Lion King was brutal. I beat it finally after a long 5 day rental. Renting helped me discover obscure games like Congos Caper and Spankys Quest.
The SNES Online for switch reminds me of what it was like renting games at my old video store. "Oh all the good games are out lets see what this game is."
This whole thing takes me back. My brother & I rented Herzog Zwei for Genesis on a whim as one of those "nothing else looks good" type nights of renting. No instruction manual at all, but there were enough bits & pieces there to keep us interested and rent it more than once just to figure it out. By our third rental, we had doped out how to play, and found it was a very early entry in the RTS genre. It's still one of our favorite games from the 16 bit era.
In the mid-90’s, on Friday afternoons, I’d walk two blocks from my middle school to meet my mom at our local Blockbuster.
If my weekly progress report from school was graded as “Checkmark Plus, or better” then I would be allowed to get a video game rental, which was a three-day rental period at the time.
While browsing the taller-than-me shelves at Blockbuster, I remember immediately being drawn to the SNES game Earthbound because of its oversized box.
I must have been the first person to rent it at my local Blockbuster too, because they also loaned me the official Nintendo Earthbound players guide, complete with scratch-and-sniff cards.
I rented Earthbound from Blockbuster at least ten times in 1995 and 1996, and sometimes I’d return it on a Sunday night and then ask my Mom if she could re-rent it on Monday so that I could continue my game.
I am glad to get to share this small slice of life and thanks to SNESDrunk for providing such a great forum. :)
Huge props to Illusion of Gaia right off the bat. That game gets me right in the emotionals
You brought up a ton of childhood memories with this video. I remember going to my local blockbuster and renting games i never heard of and seeing if they were any good. The one game you have shown a lot of love to was Ken Griffey Jr presents Major League Baseball. I remember renting that game and seeing a few kids I went to school withs names as some of the players. So I would be the manager and have them get hit by a pitch. I actually rented Ken Griffey so much that my parents just bought it for me for my birthday one year. It was such a fun and magical time in my childhood its to.bad kids now days can't experience that. Great video
Awesome game
The original was better than the sequel if I recall correctly
I always found figuring out what the game was, to be the hardest part. The box art and the game play couldnt be further apart. It got better as I got older and leaned to check the back of the box look at game play shots (if they had them) but when I was young and didn't know this, there was a lot of crappy rentals
That happened to me when i was searching for a new game outside the regulars i rented (Kirby, megaman, sf, mk, etc) and i saw Mario and the Time machine, as a 6yrs old o saw Marios time machine and o thought It would be the most épic Mario game i Would play (judging by the cover), i was thinking of going to space and all that s*It for that cover, imagine my reaction when i started to play that crap lol
My neighbor got Phalanx when we were kids. We had no idea what that game was going to be when his mom gave it to him. Seeing that boxart the first time will always stick with me. lol
like Kendo Rage is actually a really fun and charming game with a cute and really funny art style that really charmed me and became one of my favorite games. But it was a luck of the draw rental that I wasn't particularly excited for at first, because the box art is trash.
The clerks sometimes were helpful there was a few times where I was spared from renting crap because they pretty much told me the game sucked.
One of the reasons I loved first party Nintendo games back then is they often provided in game explanations of the various mechanics. So you didn’t need the manual.
The Adventures of Bayou Billy for NES. My aunt owned this game so I only played it when I got to visit her. It was years later I found out how much harder the US version was just because of this rental situation.
Definitely one of the hardest games on NES.
That game was crap either way, but it would have been less tedious crap if they hadn't doubled the damage for all the enemies. Making games harder didn't necessarily ensure that you'd buy them out of frustration... it just meant you never played them beyond that single rental.
@@jessragan6714 correct! And there was no way for us to know how difficult a game was until we actually played it. The "easy" games that I did own I played over and over again because they were that fun.
I was 21 when the SNES came out. I rented sometimes, but I would usually trade in games at the local game store, or trade with a friend. Never had a huge collection at any one time, but I played most of the good games and more than a few of the bad ones. Still my favorite system
I just miss renting games in general. Going to the store and basing your choice purely off the box art and info on the back alone. It was risky but usually worked out. Those were the days. Plus you had an incentive to try and finish it as quickly as possible before you had to bring it back in a few days!
Nah, as a nostálgic feeling i agree, But im glad i dont have to go yo a videoclub and dealing with all the crap before playing the damn game, and god forbid you try to finish an rpg with that rental system, better to Buy the game instead of renting It for weeks until you finish It, and the other thing that sucked was the límited stock, ofc good games had More demand so It was pretty common to go a friday expecting renting a cool game for the weekend just to find out It wasnt in stock cause every copy was already rented so you have to confirmo with the leftovers...i would hate to revive that bs xD
Man, the little corner stores that had rentals were the best. It was always a treat to go into a blockbuster or a movie gallery and see the massive selection…but if you wanted a chance at renting chrono trigger or breath of fire you were waaaay better off going to the little convenience stores. They might only have 2 copies or something, but the chances of the game being there was way higher. I bought a lot of my collection from places like that when they stopped renting. I wish I had bought so much more
I don't know if it counts as a Rigged Rental but one of my worst rental memories is Crash Test Dummies for the SNES. I loved the break apart toys and thought the game would be fun. Still haven't really made it far into the 2nd stage hahaha.
I owned a copy of that game and while I wouldn't call it good, I'm not sure why it gets so much hate. Never beat it but did get pretty far.
I would say one of the worst experiences is getting to the rental store right before it closes renting your game and getting home just to find out it doesn’t work. Then you have school the next morning and have to wait nearly 24hrs to get a different game because they only have one copy.
I have the Contra collection and didn't realize the Japanese version of Hard Corps was easier. That's great to know, I'm going to have to play that version now.
It's a bit easy imo. You can play it any way you want but if I were you I'd set lives to 1 (or 2, at least). You have unlimited continues so I think that would give it enough challenge to be enjoyable.
Renting is such an interesting way of playing games. In Japan, of course, it was not possible, so you either had to borrow it from a friend, chip in with some other people or just buy it yourself - and that changed how gaming is perceived there, too. It's a shame, seeing how many games from that period of time are 'really' short and are perfect rentals.
My favorite Zelda ever is LttP... And I hated it when I first rented it! I'm brazilian and I didn't understand english when I was 8, so I couldn't understand what Zelda told me to do to get into the castle. I tried booting someone's save, and the game was fun to mess around, but again I didn't know what to do to make progress, and talk to NPC's didn't help. Only after playing OoT, and taking several english classes, was I able to beat it.
Along with the save files, I liked the instruction manuals that had sections at the end for “notes” and you’d get passwords or tips from prior renters. It felt like being a little part of a community way before the internet.
It was an experience that can never be recreated again for me. I loved going to Blockbuster and seeing all the cool boxart. Long live SNES.
Great video Drunk!
I would love to see more videos like this! Keep helping us explore 16-bit gaming roots!
I did not know Nintendo tried to stop video game rentals. The more I learn about Nintendo the sadder I get. Still they make good stuff. :)
At my local store, there was a copy of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest that always froze about halfway through, but I always rented it to see if maybe somehow it was fixed. When I saw my save on the cart I knew I wasted my money again... so ultimately I went and bought the game. Twenty years later I finished it "any way I could"...
OMG I got Mystic Quest as a gift growing up (because is was the only RPG for $20 or less and my cousin picked it out for me with my Grandma) and I never had a freeze like that. Do you think it could have been a dirty cart that you aware of back then? That sucks dude, I remember being a kid and renting PS1 games too scratched to get past certain parts of games without freezing. Sometimes you could open the system, take the disc out and clean it with cloth or spin the disc and it would fix it by some miracle.
Almost 30 years later.. I can't forget that Spider-Man X-Men SNES game I rented. I was super excited to get to play as Gambit... but I couldn't even get past the first level as Spider-Man. To this day, I still have no idea what a person has to do to get past level 1. I was such a pissed off kid, spending 3 days trying to fight out what to do.
The way Gambit threw his cards! Lol as a kid I was like what's wrong Gambit? New style? Lol I actually liked playing that game.
Omg i rented that s*ht too just for how cool looked the cover and i already loved Spiderman and xmen animated series so i was expecting having a blast with that, imagine my deception in the first level was like wtf Is this, It looks like a bad NES game and the Gameplay couldnt ve More genéric and stale for that time, i got done in the Wolverine level and went back to the store to change that crap for megaman x2
Aquí en Argentina, al menos en el lugar donde crecí, no existía la costumbre de alquilar juegos en los videoclubes. De hecho, casi no había oferta ni variedad para alquilar. Los juegos y las consolas que comprábamos no eran originales, sino copias o imitaciones "piratas". Aquí todos teníamos el "Family Game" (copia de la Famicom japonesa) y después alguna imitación de la SEGA genesis/megadrive (yo tenía una llamada "SUPER SENGA" 😅). No teníamos acceso a los juegos originales, por lo que jamás conocimos lo que era un manual de instrucciones. Creo que por este motivo nos perdimos muchos juegos buenos que no sabíamos cómo jugar. Y ni hablar de aquellos que estaban en japonés (como el "Súper Campeones" -Captain Tsubasa- de NES), teníamos que deducir o adivinar qué significaba cada cosa. Aun así, era lo que había y fuimos felices 😊.
So many SNES memories in the 90s
A couple odd differences in difficulty were Mega Man 2 and Lost Levels in Japan. MM2 only had a "difficult" difficulty in Japan, but had Easy as the default elsewhere. And Lost Levels originally wasn't even released in the US out of fear it would be too difficult.
I too experienced some pretty extreme highs and lows with game rental. On one end, Secret of Evermore was a godsend to a kid who wanted more Secret of Mana. On the flip side, Aiydin Chronicles (N64) was not only crappy ugly nonsense, but it unprompted ate all the space on my Memory Pak, including saving over my lv.98 character in Gauntlet Legends. Eff that game.
That sucks but you reminded me how Gauntlet Legends was so lit
Seeing those store closing signs just goes to show how quickly rental stores were on the way out!
The worst part about renting a bad game wasn't is sucking, it was actually trying to convince your folks to drive you back to the video store to exchange it out. I was always risky with my first choice because I knew I USUALLY had one free re-roll if mom wasn't in a bad mood, but the second time I always hedged my bets and went with something that looked safe.
I would never dare do that. For starters I usually rented on Saturdays and on Sundays the Video Club was closed.
You were lucky, there was no chance in hell mine would entertain the idea of going back to the store to exchange it ^^
(They were still very good parents, forced me to do any research I could before renting, although usually I fell for the latest kids movie tie-in game)
The only reason our two rental places would let you exchange titles, was if there was something wrong with the actual game, noy because you didn't like it.
Sega channel was the greatest thing ever back in the 90s. My childhood friend had it so beating games like aladdin and lion king weren’t so bad, i dont remember lion king being hard but that may be because i played a ton of it.
As someone who got into the gaming in the mid 2000's (when renting games was dying out) I found this video really interesting.
The gaming
As someone.
This late in the channels life and you’re still capable of banging out one of your best. Damn right, MN for life
Renting Mario is Missing taught me many life lessons. ( Never judge a game based on its cover)
I tried to rent that game several times but it was never available at my Blockbuster. Seems everyone else was out making the same poor decision you did.
I guess that's _one_ way of succeeding at edutainment.
I grew up in a small town in the UK. 'Video shops' for movie rentals were usually small, independent businesses in the 16-bit days. Most didn't have game rentals and if they did, they weren't usually new titles. My local video shop started game rentals as a short lived experiment around this time. That's how I got playing Sim City on SNES around 1994.
Large Blockbuster stores slowly established in the UK through the 90s. They also took over the small video shops in a lot of areas. Their business model included trading games.
I felt the same way about other people's saved files. Left them there as an homage to those renters before me. Tried not to save over and loved getting to see some save files with tons of time invested in them
One of the dudes working at Blockbuster: "This kid has rented like, everything we have."
Talking about me one day.
The difficulty was often the fact that developers were still learning and had no real way to collect feedback from players. It sure wasn't like it is now.
Years later, learning about the court battles to prevent video game renting, I wonder how things would have turned out for me personally. If I hadn't been able to rent games my video game experience would have been very shallow. I get the point of renting somehow cutting into the profits of developers but I wonder how many kids like myself wouldn't' have gotten a taste for gaming because my single parent wouldn't have been able to afford any new games. currently I buy almost every game that releases that I'm even a bit interested in, but this amount of money, as a child in the 80s into the 90s wouldn't have been possible.
Yeah I'd go on a limb and state that had rentals not been allowed then gaming would not have been something I did as a kid, and I probably wouldn't be playing video games today. I was a bit more fortunate growing up, but still, and people forget, that some games would cost as much as nearly $90 to purchase. Sports games were always priced higher as well. So the only way I got to experience the latest sports games were through rentals. And how many times did you rent a game to take a chance and find out it was awesome or garbage? Either, way it was a great experience!
I'll tell you one thing, you would probably be a Sega gamer because they embraced the idea of rentals.
I rented so many games when I was a kid. It was a weekend treat when my dad would either come home with something random on a Friday or say, "C'mon, Matt, let's go get a game!" My subscription to Nintendo Power and those rentals is how I figured out where to invest my allowance/birthday money. It also created some awesome weekend memories. I always loved it when other renters wrote passwords in the back of the manuals for others to use. I also remember beating a couple of games because somebody had left a save file at the end. I beat Soulblazer and Yoshi's Island that way.
Of course people would steal the instructions too, so sometimes you were SOL without them. And sometimes Blockbuster would print info and instructions on the back of their boxes. I remember my brother wanted to rent Death and Return of Superman, but week after week it was rented out. It turned out the game was never coming back, and he was looking forward to it.
I recall Mk2 for SNES had 20 copies and only one left, on the first week of release. If a game was really good or anticipated theyd have lots of copies. Or sometimes a game would suck so bad we'd call and ask if we could exchange a game (FUCK YOU ZOOP) for something else.
If you rented Metal Gear Solid more often than not you wouldn't get the see Meryl's Frequency, as it was on the back of the cd case. So you either had to know someone who had the game, or hope it was written on the back of the rental case otherwise you'd go through every single frequency to find her!
This was a fantastic video! Such a realistic trip down nostalgia lane. Such a fan of your content, dude. Keep it up! One of my favorite youtubers!
Making Tuesdays and Thursdays great again!
I'm glad you mention the phenomenon of renting a game with save slots, and discovering game-saves that are way further in a game than you'd ever made it. Crystalis on NES was the epitome of that for myself, I could never beat it in a single rental weekend, so it wasn't until I rented it with a gamesave in the final area that I was able to finally see how it all ends.
12 seconds ago, wow! I love your stuff. I’ve discovered so many great games through you. It’s interesting to know more about gaming back then, we take a lot for granted today!
I’m from very small rural areas.
Our movie stores were always locally owned places.
When I was in grade school, the local grocery store rented games for $2 a night.
Place next town over was much larger, and I bought a ton of N64 and Dreamcast games from there when they closed down.
Eventually, that town got a Family Video, and it was there for a long time. You know how that ended though.
We lived on the edge of town and had a rental place at the end of my street...maybe 3-4 minutes ride on my bike....and that was my first experience with DKC2. I rented that enough to finish the game and I still wanted to buy a copy of it to play again. I with I had been able to buy that copy of the game before that place went out of business.
On the other side, I didn't know anything about cleaning NES games so periodically I'd get an NES title that I couldn't even get to work because it needed the pins cleaned.
Hey SNES drunk, great video! Also, Video Update was my main "go-to" place to rent videogames AND movies back in the 90's to early 2000's. Sadly, the Video Update near me closed in late 2001 and I remember being so sad when that happened (it was even more depressing that the building has been nothing more but a completely empty space ever since then). Fortunately, a new Blockbuster Video opened just down the street from there during the Spring of 2002 and I started renting videogames and movies from there. Man, I miss those days of walking into a video rental store and observing all of the various videotapes/DVDs and videogames on the shelves and deciding which ones I wanted to rent. Don't get me wrong, I still love Netflix, Steam, and other online movie and video game services like those, but there was just something extra special about going to the video rental store and checking them out from there. It just had a certain charm to it.
My local Video Update is now a Domino’s Pizza. In fact they moved into the location it’s in a few months before a Blockbuster opened a quarter mile away, and shut down nine months later. Oops.
I remember renting nes games as a kid. Id be so excited to find something i hadnt played before......only to have it not work at home. So id do all those tricks we used to do on those old nes cartridges (blow into the bottom, bang it on the knee, toggle the power on/off).
The infamous "SELECT + UP" in Batman Forever to use the grappling hook comes to mind here. You can't even finish the first level without knowing this usual bottom combination.
Amazing memories, and I always loved renting games with my best friend! So much fun 😌
Great video and work!
Nice topic, I remember some of the licensed games that I had rented for the SNES being "rigged rentals"... Home Alone 2, Addams Family etc. Nothing that Game Genie couldn't solve though! :)
On a similar note, one summer I had a friend's PS1 that he lent me while he went on vacation for a couple of weeks, and during that time I rented Driver from my local video store. I couldn't make it past the tutorial stage lol.
Oh man - I love this. I was just a wee bit young during the mid-late 90s for SNES but I do remember going to the Local pawn shop that my grandfather worked at and I got to borrow a game for the weekend which lead to some of the most magical gaming experiences. I'll still never forget the first time I played Mario Kart 64, Blast Corps, the N64 wrestling games ect
I remember renting one game in my life, M.U.S.C.L.E. Wrestling for NES.
I still have it because the store went out of business 3 days after I rented it lol.
when i became an adult it was surprising finding out people considered Lion King for the snes extremely hard. It's one of those cases when you were a kid back then and you only had one game and that was it, and you played it over and over again until you end up getting used to the difficulty and you don't notice anymore how hard the game can be. That was also the case for the super star wars trilogy.
It also had a level skip code which didn't hurt.
The stress of your mom not letting you re rent a game immediately ... you finally get back a week later, get the game home, and PRAY TO GOD your save is still on the cartridge!
So many fond memories of renting games in the 80's and early 90's. I used to live within walking distance of a place called Power Games. The owner was kinda like a friendly, skater version of Comic Book Guy from the Simpson. There was a Crystal Pepsi machine out front that I would frequent even if I wasn't renting a game. All rentals were either $1 or $2 for at least 3 days (maybe 5 days?).
Probably my worst rental memory was renting Taboo for NES. One specific good memory I have was renting a 3DO for like $40 and beating Out of This World, which was one of my favorites on PC and SNES, and being blown away by the cinematic ending.
I remember the lack of instruction manuals being a sore spot for me at the big rental places. Luckily, a lot of small time rental places would have the instruction manuals with the games. It's why my brother and I would always prefer going to the small stores instead of the Block Buster's for games. They might not have the wide selection, but at least you knew you were getting some guidance in how to play the game you were spending your allowance on. Plus, that's how I discovered Chrono Trigger. A small rental place by my grandparent's house had it, and I rented that game every time I went to visit them. Had my progress saved over frequently, which was frustrating. However, like you I enjoyed taking a peak at other save files.
absolute wave of nostalgia here... friday evenings, after school, begging my parents to take us to the local video rental shop so we could rent our NES games and then SNES post 1991. My local rental shop used to have a $20 charge if you somehow lost the instruction manual, used to rent the games in these hard see-through plastic cases along with the manual and/or maps if the game came with them.
My local shop had a copy of Ogre Battle for the SNES which I rented the shit out of throughout the summer 1995.. at one point I asked them if I could just buy it off of them, think it was around 1998 or 1999 as the N64 and Playstation were all the rage even thought they still had SNES games for rent (they did say yes and got it for like $20, with the box, manual and the extra item/monster fold outs.)
Yay!
A Birthday SNES Drunk video. Completely aware that it's just a coincidence but it's still something to enjoy on my birthday today
😄👍
Ironically, I rented Lion King and got to Scar by the end of the 2 days. I remember being stuck on that section you described here for an awfully long time as well. I believe there's a section where you need to jump straight up to grab a hippo or giraffe and I didn't realize it.
I remember reading that a developer of the Lion King admitted that the tails of the hippo's are in fact rigged. The timing is off and the window for grabbing onto the tail is also fluctuating intentionally.
Nice shout out to South St. Paul! Didn't know you were from MN as I am too. Respect
I totally relate to not wanting to delete other people's save files when renting. They worked hard on that! I can't just throw it away!
My mom went grocery shopping for the week every Friday and would stop at Video Etc., our local rental store beforehand. When it wasn't summer I'd make her a list of what games to look for but would always tell her to prioritize anything ANYTHING that was a new release that happened to be in. I played almost every NES and SNES game ever released in the US this way. It was awesome.
[Off Topic] The first game you featured in the beginning of this video gave me the most violent nostalgia whiplash in recent memory! I haven’t thought of The Illusions of Gaia in nearly 30 years! One of my dad’s friends back in the 90s was a licensed Nintendo repair man for our local area and every birthday and xmas he would gift me a fat stack of SNES games. They were all winners but some of the highlights were Gaia, Super Metroid, DKC trilogy. Man I was a lucky little brat lol.
Anyway, when it came to video game rentals for whatever reason I remember the absolute let-down piles of crap more than the any of the good ones. One specific game come to mind. Automobilie Lamborghini for the N64. Oh my god. My parents were trying sooo hard to get me to rent anything else because apparently I would hardly play any of the racing games rentals I picked (they were absolutely right). Admittedly I only really wanted it because I bought into the horrible ad campaign/tv commercials for the game which consisted of a horrible Italian stereotype voice actor repeating the title over and over. My cousin and I literally played it for fifteen minutes before we got bored and shut it off. My parents were piiiiiissed!
The SNES game I rented the most was Donkey Kong Country 2. Partly because it was fun and part because of that awesome music; in which playing the game was the only common way to hear it back then.
I rented it so much I coulda bought it with all the money I spent on the rentals. I eventually did years later anyway.
You absolutely hit the nail on the head. Many times I'd rush to the video game rental section at my local Albertson's while my mom was at the checkout, hoping that the copy of Contra3, MegamanX or Joe & Mac was there to rent, only to be disappointed to find "Warlock" & "Specter" 🤦♂️
What a great topic. I hope this becomes like a series or something like it, as you may analyze the things we've been through while growing up as a gamer in the late 80s and 90s. Rental stores never provided manuals where I live but I could rely on gaming magazines, that's how I managed to perform special moves and powers when I got Spawn for a try. And it was a difficult game nonetheless.
I have fond memories going to Video 94 in Canoga Park or my local video store in Granada Hills as a kid to rent SNES or Genesis games based on the box art. You never really knew what you were going to get, but as a kid I loved everything! Simpler times.