A question for Americans. I grew up in a country where we had

Every time I went the games I wanted were rented (likely just never returned by some asshole.) A couple times I was that asshole. I destroyed a rental copy of Megaman Legends and my parents had to pay for it. By the time the original Xbox came out I started renting games and copying them. It was far easier than trying to download them off the internet in those days, even if I could get games they were usually only the latest ones so I'd raid the local rental shop.

Video stores usually had a bunch of games for consoles I didn't own, so there was always the issue of staying in the section of games you could actually play. It was all about the box art most of the time, because purchases were too expensive to buy based on that, but a rental was no big deal if it turned out shit. I mostly remember what the NES sections were like. Seemingly every rental kiosk has Excitebike, Mega Man 2 and 4, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 & 2, Renegade, and Blaster Master. At grocery stores rentals usually lasted 2 days, or 3 if you rented on Friday. Games game in plastic cases which may have contained the instruction manual, but seemingly more often had a sticker with general controls, cheats, and hints on what to do if you got stuck at a pretty common spot.

ITALY here.

There were chain rental stores like blockbuster but also a lot of private ones, they had games from snes up to ps2 since they closed basically in the last 5 years or so here.

BUT once the ps1 came out, everyone here was burning cd for modified ps1 so renting game faded a bit.

I lived in a town of 3000 people and we had 2 rental stores, both privately owned and not chains. $3-4.50 to rent a game, $3-5 to rent a movie. I don't remember there being a 5 day rental, but some had a 2 day rental sticker on it. I heard a lot of people kept movies longer than they should and that was a constant battle with customers. Games were mostly NES and SNES, as Genesis wasn't very popular locally. I remember Zelda was rented quite a bit (the box wasn't on the shelf, they only had 1 copy).

Regarding renting vs buying, it came down to each game. Was it a game that I'd want to play for months, or was it something to play in one afternoon with a friend. SNES games were $48-65 and renting was far cheaper, so one would have to rent a game a few times to make it worth buying. Many of the games didn't have save feature, so (for me at least) that made it less likely to be bought. When I'd go over to a friends house and we'd rent a game, we'd split the cost so it was even cheaper. And honestly, many of the games sucked so you didn't want to drop $50+ on something that wasn't going to be completely awesome. Sometimes I'd rent a game if I thought I wanted to buy it.

>>3719057
Mom and Pop stores were great for finding rental games you usually wouldn't find anywhere else. Chain stores would have a distributor handling things, so their selections were usually pretty similar, but locally owned ones had a lot of great stuff in them.

>>3719057
Thanks, great answer.

> Mega Man 2 and 4
But no 3? Interesting. Weir how they had old games like Excitebike and Renegade together with MM4.

Did you own SNES or Genesis?

>>3719160
Yes, it was very weird 3 was such a pain to find. Never once saw 1 as a rental either.

I eventually owned a Super NES, and rented a Genesis Console once. Super NES seemed like it always had a copy of Zelda, Final Fantasy II, Pilot Wings, and F-Zero. I was renting less during that era though, mostly because I was old enough to get a part time job, although I did play through most of the Enix and Square releases as rentals because games were running 80$ at the time and the secondhand market didn't really take off until 5th gen.

>>3719178
>Zelda, Final Fantasy II, Pilot Wings, and F-Zero
It's like they have a thing for launch titles, don't they. Interesting.

> although I did play through most of the Enix and Square releases as rentals because games were running 80$ at the time and the secondhand market didn't really take off until 5th gen.
So, they cost more than the average games, is this correct? Like $15–30 difference? But I hear they also had better booklets and stuff, correct?

>>3719028
Renting was a big part of the gaming culture here in America. As a kid, you generally relied on your parents for video games, which cost about $50 new from a store. Middle-class parents would usually only buy their kids games for their birthday or for Christmas, and you might only get one on each occasion due to the expense.

In contrast, renting a game was much cheaper, $5 or $6. It was common for families to go to Blockbuster every Friday or every other Friday and rent two movies, one to watch later that night and another to watch Saturday night, and if you had been a good kid your parents would let you pick out a game to rent (sometimes two if the store had a special!)

The shelves at Blockbuster would be laid out with plastic clamshell cases, in the front there'd be one displaying the game's front and back covers and behind it would be blank rental cases with the game's name printed on the side and front. Once you decided what you wanted, you'd take one of these blank cases to the front counter and an employee would get the game for you out of a drawer. If there were no blank cases behind the display case, then they were out of stock and you'd have to pick something else out. When your rental period was over, you'd put the game back in the case and drive back to the store, there'd be a slot in the front window for you to drop the rental cases in that led behind the counter where an employee would sort through periodically.

The majority of the games I played as a kid were rented in this fashion. I was renting PS3 games from the local Blockbuster for $8 a game in 2010, shortly before moving out for college. When I moved back home afterward it had been shut down.

While I love RPGs, I rarely rented them because of how unlikely it was to beat them during the rental period. There were two games, Radiata Stories and Dragon Quest VIII that I rented and kept past that period and ended up buying (pretty cheaply) when the store offered to just sell it to me.

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>Hardly ever rented, sometimes walked around them just for the fun of looking at video tapes
>Bad Taste tape was proudly displayed at the front end of the aisle
>Once rented a whole bunch of Jackie Chan films like Gorgeous

Like others have pointed out renting video games was a thing in the UK too but I only ever did it once I think

>It was Time Commando of all games

>>3719028
>I've heard that some devs deliberately made games harder to prevent them from being beaten on rental, is this true or just a joke?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kILeyo1iv0A
If you go to 18:25 one of the devs for the Lion King game explains that Disney enforced this practice for their games, this resulted in the monkey puzzle's "artificial" difficulty

>>3719089
This. I grew up in a relatively small town and there was a mom and pop rental place that was totally rad. The owners had a separate room set up with pool tables, a few arcade games, and a bunch of televisions with different consoles hooked up to each one. It was the best place to go after school to kill time. They went out of business right before I moved away, but I was able to purchase a complete Virtual Boy with a few games for around $25. Good times.

>>3719197
Personally, that was about the time I was figuring out that Square and Enix meant good quality. I still would have rented because even 50$ was outside my budget as a kid. It was just a glaring price that stuck with me as a matter of "this shit is getting expensive", especially when I was used to 20-40$ NES games.

I don't know that their booklets or anything were that much better. Posters and such were pretty standard at the time. Might have been an issue of batteries and hardware, but I still don't know. I was just happy prices dropped tremendously when I was in to PlayStation.

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System rentals as well!

>>3719293
I once rented just an N64 Expansion Pak from Movie Gallery just to play all the tracks on Rush 2049.

>>3719293
There was one place that rentes the Sega Génesis here in Mexicali since NOBODY have it.

>>3719239
> TFW artificial difficulty meme was not a meme after all

>>3719247
This makes me sad we didn't get any of this. Then again, I'm from Russia, so there was no hope anyway.

>>3719293
I wonder if these systems worn out quickly.

>>3719028
I've got some fond memories of game rental from back in the day.

My hometown is pretty small (2k people total), but one of the local drive in groceries kept a stock of movies and games to rent. When I was young, it was NES and eventually SNES games, and later on moved on to N64 games (No SEGA or PSX games since SEGA wasn't as popular and renting PSX discs was seen as too big of risk for something so fragile.). At the time, it was $3 per night, and my mother would take me every Friday to rent a game for a day, sometimes two if I really, really liked it.

I remember renting games that weren't very good (I'd always feel guilty like I had wasted mom's money when I'd get one, play it for a bit, and then stop because it was something bland like a SCHMUP or something particularly weak), but then I remember renting a few like the Megamans that were pretty awesome. That was the only series I actually asked to drive to the town over so I could rent the next in line (It wasn't super far, but no parent really wants to drive 15 or so miles to rent a nintendo game for their kid, only to have to turn around drive back before 7 the next day.). Eventually though, because my mother liked to rent movies to watch as well and she had exhausted anything worth watching in the store, we started making the drive every Friday after work together to get something from a place with more movies/games (Which opened up the PSX's library as well, which in turn caused me to keep asking for a Playstation for Christmas. I'm sure that was expensive at the time for my poorer family).

Throughout the years, the price of game rentals actually went down, but the time you had to rent went up. Stores eventually made policies that games had to be rented for a minimum of 3 days for $5 (Unless it was new, then it was $5 for one night only), and eventually all games were 5 to 7 day rentals for a flat $8 by the time the PS2 hit.

>>3719471
Some of the more interesting aspects of rental were the fact for cartridges, you never knew who's save would be on the cart, nor if other renters would respect your saves or not. For FFIV, I particularly remember feeling crushed when I had rented it again the next weekend to find my save halfway through the game had been deleted, but others remained intact. This caused me to rethink my saving process from "Which slot do I save in to be least likely to get deleted?" to "Save a copy in every slot, fuck others, make sure my save is protected," which caused others to start doing the same. When memory cards rolled around though, this became a thing of the past, and instead I'd wind up with saved games on memory cards that I couldn't bring myself to delete in case I played them again, but would clutter up the 15 or so slots given.

There was also the uncommon but occasional cartridge/disc swap: People would return different games than what they rented and keep the other, only for future renters to wind up renting the wrong game. Thankfully this was rare and virtually eliminated once barcode stickers were placed on everything.

Really, I think what killed the rental industry more than current/last gen practices was the simple drop in price of video games coupled with the mass availability of games as a whole. It seemed like back then, every console was on the cutting edge of things, so you felt left out if you were stuck playing NES when SNES was out (I know I did since I was a few years behind the curve, but it led to me getting later released titles like Kirby's Adventure and Megaman 5 and 6 when they were new). Now, it's not a super big deal if you're a kid and still playing a hand me down PS3 since the PS4 doesn't have as big of library as its predecessor yet, and each game is much more expensive than the rock bottom prices of the previous gen, especially with the introduction of online distribution.

>>3719492
>It seemed like back then, every console was on the cutting edge of things, so you felt left out if you were stuck playing NES when SNES was out (I know I did since I was a few years behind the curve, but it led to me getting later released titles like Kirby's Adventure and Megaman 5 and 6 when they were new)

Brother, i been renting games since 1991, mostly locals, but i do remember renting from Macro Videocentro and i rented mostly NES games cause i didn't have a SNES until 94, i was probably one of the few people still renting NES games those years, and thanks to that i also enjoyed Kirby's Adventure, Megamans 5 & 6, among many others.

I rented on many places on Mexicali.

OP here, thanks for your replies. I forgot to say that if you simply have personal stories/anecdotes connected to rentals I would appreciate them.

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>>3719293
>that weekend when dad rented an N64 and Diddy Kong Racing

>>3720184
>Some of the more interesting aspects of rental were the fact for cartridges, you never knew who's save would be on the cart, nor if other renters would respect your saves or not. For FFIV, I particularly remember feeling crushed when I had rented it again the next weekend to find my save halfway through the game had been deleted, but others remained intact. This caused me to rethink my saving process from "Which slot do I save in to be least likely to get deleted?" to "Save a copy in every slot, fuck others, make sure my save is protected," which caused others to start doing the same. When memory cards rolled around though, this became a thing of the past, and instead I'd wind up with saved games on memory cards that I couldn't bring myself to delete in case I played them again, but would clutter up the 15 or so slots given.
trippy as fuck because this exact thing happened to me