Page 23 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #43 FREE Edition

was typical of games at the time. You’re sentenced to drive the streets of Kemo, a city turned into a prison thanks to the wonders of Omnicorp. Players drive their cab in first- person perspective from the driver’s seat, picking up their fares; every so often, the fares involve loose story missions involving corporate subterfuge. In a Death Race- inspired twist, pedestrians could also be run over, and your taxi was outfitted with armor and guns. It’s not quite an open world where you explore the entire city, however. Complete enough missions, and you’ll advance to the next section of the city.
The most fun part of the game involved pressing the F10 key over and over again, which allowed
your avatar to shout “Up yours!”
As a 12-year-old, this was a lot of fun. My friends and I spent more time laughing at this feature than playing the actual game, which was a bit too challenging for us.
In the U.S., Quarantine would later get a port to the 3DO. In Japan, Quarantine would also get ports for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Somewhat surprisingly, Quarantine got a PC-only sequel with Quarantine II: Road Warrior (1995) a mere year after the original.
Given that this was the early
days of PC gaming, many of the computer games Blockbuster Video had available for rent lacked copy protection. There certainly weren’t registration keys you had to type in to install software on one device unless you were installing something like Microsoft Office. Some of these titles even allowed
a full install to the hard drive. If you knew a few things, you could bypass the check for the CD and get a new game on your computer more often than not for the price of a rental.
My local Blockbuster didn’t have computer games on the shelf for more than a few months. They
must have rented poorly. The idea of renting computer games from
a Blockbuster Video isn’t a bad one, but the potential problems were immense. Maybe customers got them confused for PlayStation or Dreamcast games? I can’t imagine the number of customers complaining to the poor staff at Blockbuster that the computer game they rented wouldn’t work on their desktop at home.
Although computer games being rented at Blockbuster Video had
a short window, it was during a unique time in gaming history. Such a concept would seem even more ludicrous today than it was
at the time; it was an interesting experience to live through. Had computer game rentals somehow become more of a thing, one wonders how it could have changed the market for retro PC gaming today.
NOVEMBER 2024 • WWW.OLDSCHOOLGAMER.COM
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