The Heart of Baldness
NES Series Entry: II
Rental Soup
By Just a Bald Guy
So back in the day (which my brother pointed out would have been 1987/88 and not the early 90s as I errantly said in my previous article existed stores which rented physical media. This started with VHS tapes and existed as such for years. Eventually though they saw a chance to satisfy gamers’ desires AND make more money, and thus started renting NES games. The NES games were likely found in a small section of an existing store renting VHS tapes. The stores tended to have generic names like “Video Gallery” or “Movie Shoppe” and were typically adorned with posters of the latest and greatest blockbuster. Even grocery stores like Albertson’s rented out games though, so it really did seem to be everywhere.
(80's kids can smell this image.)
[editors note: YahooSilverman.com is not responsible for olfactory hallucinations]
With technology being what it was (or maybe, what it wasn’t yet?), stores had unique systems to rent these games. My favorite was a local one about two blocks from my house. As soon as you entered the store, the sweet older lady behind the counter would recognize you and open her meticulous box of index cards to find your account. It was all handwritten-on index cards in pencil. Yeah, think on that a bit.
You’d walk up and down shelves, trying to decide the best use of your $1.25. Game boxes were on the shelves with a small, laminated stub of paper (usually no bigger than an index card) beneath them. You could pick up and read boxes, but with no internet or even mobile/cell phones to phone a friend, you were really risking it if you wanted to try something you hadn’t heard of before. Shooting from the hip, based on just the box art and what you’ve heard discussed about the game at the school cafeteria tables? That was the era. If you were lucky, a fellow kid would be present to advise you on your options and you could reciprocate in kind. Meanwhile, your mom waited in the idling car outside, so you were on a timer.
When you finally bet your weekend’s enjoyment on the title of your choosing, you’d bring the card up to the counter. The lady would disappear into the back and return with your game. She’d write it down and put it into a plastic shell case. If you were incredibly fortunate (or just rented an extremely unpopular game), you’d also get the instruction manual.
(Exhibit A: A typical example of the game, plastic case, and portion of the manual.)
Back in the car, all that was left was to listen to your mom complain about the time you took while you frantically read the manual to be prepared. Getting home my brother and I would immediately run upstairs to the NES and jump right into the action. We’d play the game as much as we could as it was due back before closing the next day. If we were late, it was a $1 late fee and meant our dad would yell at us.
( Thanks Joe Biden. source )
Some kids (freakin’ Matt) had loving parents who would rent them a movie and a game, or even two games. Can you believe it? TWO NES GAMES!
The actual physical copy of the game you got was interesting too. I once rented Shadowgate (one of my all-time NES favorites) and it had three saves from the previous gamer. One infamously was saved about 30 seconds before the last torch ran out. If your last torch burned out, you died, and it was game over. We (me, my brother, our friend, his friend, anyone we had on hand) tried to make the most of that as it was saved moderately far into the game. Others may have no saves.
Occasionally, you’d find codes written in the manual by other gamers, an early “pay it forward” aspect. One example I can remember seeing someone’s mom renting Contra one evening and the clerk (also a mom in her 40s or so) was telling her there is some code but she only knew part of it. I proudly told them so they could write it down then go home explaining how a nice young man in a tattered Dukes of Hazzard shirt saved his weekend by blessing him with the Konami Code.
Eventually shops advanced to computers, and things sped up drastically. Your seven-digit phone number was your account number, and your parents had to sign off for you to rent by ratings (we bypassed this when I was 18 so my brother could check out R-rated movies on my account). Some places rented controllers and peripherals, like a NES Satellite or Game Genie. Eventually resale shops were everywhere. Town Plaza Mall (our “dirt mall” if you’re a Mallrats fan) had one store called The Nintendo Trader before they were threatened with lawsuit before turning into Video Game Trader.
(Back in the day, those odd glassed-in rooms in the center above were small shops such as The Nintendo Video Game Trader. )
The Video Game Trader had a giant selection of games and ranked them in tiers, from S (the cream of the crop and most coveted titles) down to E (presumably for “Elway’s Quarterback, John” at the dregs of the bottom level games). If you traded in a game, you could get one of the tiers below. Bringing in a B game meant you could walk out with a C game. It was brilliant, and she’d print up spreadsheets weekly of the current game. We’d pour over those lists, finding good ones (the aforementioned Shadowgate) and some busts (looking at you, Stinger). You could also rent systems there, which is where I first rented my SNES and Super Mario World. You could pay money to book 30 minutes on a game in store too, which was a unique event.
Eventually the craze blossomed to a viable business model, adapting as other games and systems entered the market. The first time I played a SNES tape was at The Video Game Trader. And if you’re curious about the term “tape” in this instance, I’ll try to explain. Although they were not tapes per se so many kids (and their older parents) called the games different terms (tapes, cartridges, carts) it just became something that stuck for some of us old timers with onions on our belts. What really blew our minds though was when you could play a vidya game on them newfangled CDs…
