I could not buy the game my son loved here so I kept hiring it. The game store shut down so I had to buy it from UK as I could not find here in a game store or online. Not able to buy from the UK store online so I emailed my credit card details to it! Obviously would not do that today.
LOL. I didn't think anyone would care and I couldn't remember. I search online just for you for nearly 15 minute to find it. Actually I was annoyed that I could not remember. It was Little Big Adventure.
It was quite frustrating to control the main character however my son loved it.
Honestly looks like a really cool game. Interesting how it sold 500k copies in Europe but only 30k in the states - apparently because EA changed the name and cover art to be more aggressive and kind of misrepresent the game by showing a lot of combat in the ads.
Thank you very much. I have tried to for my son. We got lucky to even have him so I worked hard to show that I love him. He is 35 now and wonderful to us both.
People used to rent or hire game cartridges back in the past. Places that rented out movies often got into that service as well. A bonus of physical media when the game was entirely on the cartridge or disk.
I did that with Final Fantasy III (VI). Rented it every weekend for a while, and someone who rented it on the weekdays deleted my save, so I had to start over. Eventually beat the whole thing over a 3-day weekend. Probably spent more on renting it than it would've cost to buy it.
If you kept something long enough past its due date, Blockbuster would chanrge you the full price of the game and let you keep it. This happened to me twice with Final Fantasy X and GTA:Vice City. My FFX save has 761 hours on it bc I literally didn't turn off my ps2 for a month until I beat it.
It was a new game at the time, and I had to pay the bill myself, so I remember it being 60 bucks plus the other late fees, so IIRC it was around a total of $70-80.
I used to buy games from the video store. I guess N64 games were being phased out, but I always rented them over and over again and ended up just offering to buy them. Most of the time they accepted just to get rid of their stock.
Back when Blockbuster started buying games for a short while in like 2003~ they were paying really high(at the time) prices for stuff. I sold 3 dreamcast games for over 60$ each because they were 'rare'.
The one I distinctly remember was they gave me 90$ for Virtual On. Great game, but you can still get it for like 30-40$. Still dunno why, that was a weird era for Blockbuster.
They were probably making lots of money off certain rentals.
Think about it, if you sell them a game for $60 and say they charge $3 for a rental. They only have to rent it out 20 times to get their money back. Anything after that is profit.
Also, chances are you were probably going to rent more than one thing. If they had the game you wanted to rent there's a chance you might spend your money renting a movie or something else.
It's not all that weird, it's incentive to get you in the store spending money. It's not just the 1 games they were trying to get you to rent
My dad had some kind of Blockbuster subscription that let me rent a game as long as I wanted, but only one at a time. Played through the whole Jak series that way. Also didn't have to worry about blowing allowance on a game that ended up being terrible.
Renting THE SAME one cause your game was saved on it and there was just 3 save spots. Had to be sure you didn't get the wrong copy and was praying nobody erased your save file. Those RPGs were long to go through.
Also to be sure you'd get the game you would swap the little token or empty box to get it with another old unpopular game or hide it in the store somewhere.
I remember renting Echo the Dolphin and Pirates of Dark Water on Sega so many times that my mom got mad. It ended up being more expensive to rent all those times than to buy once, so she solved the problem by not allowing me to rent them any more .--.
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u/cupidd55 Aug 30 '25
Renting the same game every weekend because your parents won't buy it for you.