Poll of the Day > did you ever make it a blockbuster night?

(+) Yeah! (+)

getting really drunk

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Yes and those were some happy times. Going to blockbuster on a Friday after being picked up from school, choosing an N64 game for the weekend and/or a movie for that night...good times.

People look back fondly on the blockbuster days, but they were awful. Registration took an hour. Late fees were exhoribant. The selection wasn't as extensive as you get through streaming services. We romanticize it, but it sucked. I bet in ten years people will romanticize Gamestop.

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BADoglick posted...

People look back fondly on the blockbuster days, but they were awful. Registration took an hour. Late fees were exhoribant. The selection wasn't as extensive as you get through streaming services. We romanticize it, but it sucked. I bet in ten years people will romanticize Gamestop.

I never had to register because I only went with my parents, and it's only something you have to do once. Also don't return things late? Not that difficult.

It's kind of ridiculous to compare a brick and mortar shop that only carried popular/recent physical media with limited space to something like a streaming service where you're not constrained by storage limits.

It was just a fun experience in the 90s and early 2000s that I feel nostalgic for. Obviously if someone were to try to open a Blockbuster now it would fail quicky because it's not convenient anymore.

BADoglick posted...

People look back fondly on the blockbuster days, but they were awful.

This. I worked for them for four years. They were a shit company and racist af.

They categorized their stores based on race, every week wed get the layout for advertising in the store and thered be differences in placement based on whether your store was considered a primary, african american, or hispanic store. Then another time the CEO was doing his weekly message to managers and he mentioned some Kevin Hart movie coming out that week called First Sunday or something like that, and then he Kinda rolled his eyes and said we all know who will be renting that movie

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BADoglick posted...

People look back fondly on the blockbuster days, but they were awful. Registration took an hour. Late fees were exhoribant. The selection wasn't as extensive as you get through streaming services. We romanticize it, but it sucked. I bet in ten years people will romanticize Gamestop.

by the end of Blockbusters run, they had this awesome account package where you could have 1 or 2 movies out at a time, for as long as you wanted, and if you wanted to rent a new one, youd bring back the movie you have and just switch them.

i didnt even need a card or anything. Theyd scan the movie I was returning, scan the new movie I wanted to rent in its place, and leave. And Id get to keep them as long as I wanted to.

also as for your streaming argument: we didnt have streaming / digital renting back then. We didnt know back then how good streaming would be, and Blockbuster was the best way we had at the time. Clearly streaming is better, which is why it killed Blockbuster, but that doesnt mean Blockbuster wasnt an awesome thing at the time

and it was certainly fucking romantic. Do you know how awesome it is to stand in a store being surrounded by hundreds of movies? It was wonderful

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We never had a blockbuster in my town
The biggest movie rental place was called Gone Hollywood.

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In a sense. We rented (VCR and all) from a locally-owned establishment.

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Yea, the local store in my town had limited space (and over half of it was porn movies, which I didn't realize until long after the store closed and I was old enough to figure it out...). So if we wanted something to rent besides the same 5 movies, we went to Blockbuster.

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Fairly often. We even had "Hollywood Video" nights.

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i do kinda miss renting games, though

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I remember renting an N64 from Blockbuster when it first came out, along with Mario 64, Pilot Wings and Star Wars Shadows of the Empire. My friends and I played it non stop for the entire weekend lol

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KJ StErOiDs posted...

In a sense. We rented (VCR and all) from a locally-owned establishment.

Same.

And then it got closed due to tax evasion.

Yes, but more often a Global Video night

I miss it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLN9Fh-kkK0&t=9s

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Hell yeah, loved renting movies! The city I used to live in still had one that the wife and I were go to every other week and grab some popcorn and some movies.

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My favorite part about going to the video stores were bumping into friends that you knew there and you could talk about movies.

i wish I lived next to the place Quentin Tarantino worked at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WUMZ6CPL9hk

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It was pretty fun as a kid from browsing movies and picking something out to going home and watching 2-3 movies in a row as a family on the pull out couch with food and popcorn. My dad was a huge movie buff so we did that pretty often. I wouldn't take it over streaming, but I still have nice memories from using it.

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in middle school i was able to rent r rated movies without my parents knowing from the local place and i thought that was really cool

Yes, when I first moved out, I lived basically across the street from one. My girlfriend and I didnt have cable TV at the time, and Blockbuster had a 7 movies for 7 dollars for 7 days deal (Non new releases only), but It was a big store so there was rows and rows of older movies to watch.

I am pretty sure that is where my love of movies came from, we would rent a new set of 7 movies almost every week.

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The local video store had better memories. Free popcorn, old movies got moved to the basement so they had this huge selection. Critters is still one of my favourites from what I discovered down there.

Blockbuster days were fine too. I was around 16 and was friends with the manager. We had gone to the same high school, he was that cool slightly older dude you looked up to. We always would shoot shit about movies and he would have recommendations.

My family must have spent a lot on rentals. But we didnt go to theatres very often so trade off I guess. At least the library was free lol. I borrowed the animated Hobbit movie so many times Im surprised the tape didnt get damaged at some point.


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Yeah. That was a staple of the nineties. We used to hide games we wanted behind other boxes (if it was the last one) if we had to come back later/couldnt pick it up for any reason.

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