Current Events > Somewhere along the way, game rentals stopped being a thing

(+) Yeah! (+)

Growing up my Dad would take us to rent a video game once a week at a game rental place. I got to pick what we rented for that weekend. I learned my own flavor of games I enjoyed and it also trained a discerning eye for spotting a good game from a bad game.

Somewhere between then and now this doesn't seem to be a thing at all anymore.

Back then they'd include the instruction manual. Was so wild to rent Dune on Genesis and have someone else put all the level passwords into the notes section of the manual.

Or to rent Shining Force 2 and see someone else's save file in it with a character I'd never even seen before.

Those were the days.

The death of Blockbuster was pretty much the signal of the end of it being super mainstream, but theres still stuff like Redbox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ep8lkKxgKc

I think there are still online rental services that mail games to you. Blockbuster was just the only major brick and mortar game rental store, and they went under because of Netflix.

Gamefly in the US is still a thing at least.

There was also the solid 5 years of the "online pass" Era thar didn't do much to help. The practice died, but the damage remained.