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Renting a video game
April 29th, 2020
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Nostalgia struck. I'm back in a childhood home giddy with
excitement over the Nintendo Entertainment System which stealthily
arrived as the last present opened at Christmas. My parents sprung
for the unit that came with two game cartridges, not just one:
Super Mario Bros. & Duck Hunt on one cartridge, and Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles on the other. It's visceral. I can smell the box.
Feel the plastic.
Games then were expensive. I suppose they're still expensive, but
I don't buy so many. A game like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cost
about $50 in the late 80s. With some napkin math, that's around
$80-85 today. Pricey, as I said. We didn't get new ones often.
Years--and many garage sales--later, I have 57 games in my
collection. As a kid, I had around 20 at the most.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting games were worth this much
back then, but it's what we had. There's games I've got that
aren't worth a dime. The Adventures of Dino Rikki comes to mind.
What a piece of trash! Still, it cost a fortune and I had no way
of knowing if it was going to be terrible. Maybe a friend had it
and could warn me. Maybe it would get a mention in Nintendo Power
magazine. Otherwise, you're shopping by box art.
That was until the video rental stores got in on the action. It
was a brilliant outgrowth from home video. For a dollar or two you
could take home a game for a few days. Sure, you weren't likely to
master it or beat it, and your save game was gone when it was
returned. Even so, what an incredible tool to avoid wasting big
money on flops.
I vividly remember renting Life Force [0] from the Video Stop.
What a brilliant game that was. I loved the gameplay and the
sprites. There was one that looked like an uncooked chicken
crawling on the ground. Awesome. I believe that eventually many of
those sprites, sound effects, and much of the gameplay code would
get revisited in The Guardian Legend, my favorite NES game of all
time.
HTML [0] Life Force
That rental was awesome and eventually I'd get my own copy of the
game. Others... well [1], I own some of those anyway.
HTML [1] Not so awesome NES games
I don't really have a big reason for sharing this. It just came to
my mind and was worth a smile. Hope it gave you one too.