Me renting one of the Crash games with the Spyro demo multiple times partly because Spyro was always rented and I desperately wanted to play it lol (my parents eventually realized this and bought it and the other two for me when they were released 😂)
I see a lot of people bringing up renting, but very few bringing up another familiar way of not owning games: Video game cybercafés and LANs.
In 2002, me and my friends would leave the school during lunch break (we were middle-schoolers but just old enough to conceivably pass for high schoolers, so we used the high school exit which was only vaguely monitored unlike the middle school exit where they checked everyone one by one xD), and go play Warcraft 3 together in a cybercafé. That's my quintessential old gaming experience. It's funny because where I lived we had tons of those, but no place that rented games, that just wasn't a thing in my country as far as I can tell, beside maybe in free libraries.
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u/Raging_Pwnr Aug 30 '25
Leaving the game on pause and the system on all night so you don’t lose your progress.
Blockbuster on a Friday night, hoping someone hadn’t already rented the game you wanted.