Page 27 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #43 FREE Edition

John Riggs - @johnblueriggs - Youtuber and Retro Gaming Personality
I love finding old video games that still have rental stickers on them, but in my area, finding any that have my hometown of Yakima, WA sticker from one of the local video stores is even better.
I was at Renton City Retro in Renton, WA, earlier this year when I was going through some NES games at one of the local vendor’s tables. One of the games I came across was a copy of King’s Quest
V for NES. It was a game I loved
to rent growing up but didn’t have my own copy, so I pulled it out of the box. To my surprise, it still
had a rental sticker on it from
Crazy Mike’s Video in Yakima, WA. This was my favorite video store growing up, just down the street from my house. Jeremy Weaver,
the guy behind the table, put two and two together for me to point
out that I probably rented this. He was right! That store only had one copy of this game, so all the times I rented this game growing up, it was this exact copy. I couldn’t pull my wallet out faster, and now it’s in my permanent collection.
Michael Thomasson - Author and Old School Gamer Contributing Writer
In the fall of ’83, I convinced our local video rental
store, Video Supreme, into renting ColecoVision titles. They decided
to rent Atari VCS titles, too. While I can’t quantify it, I may have started the video game rental industry. If not, we were certainly one of the earliest, as I never saw another group rent video games until after Nintendo invaded America two years later in the fall of ’85 or spring of ’86. Video Supreme later hired me to be a software analyst and sent me to the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago for years. I was the youngest person on the show floor.
While attending Purdue University, my friend Wei and I would rent
a Neo Geo and two carts over the weekend every few weeks. It was the only place I knew that rented SNK’s dream machine, and it was cheaper to rent and play like mad than to continuously drop quarters into Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown, King of the Monsters, Cyber-Lip, and my personal favorite, ‘Nam 1975.
Brian Lesyk - Old School Gamer Contributing Writer
In the mid- to late- ’80s, the dominance of the NES was indisputable, and its
library of games was absolutely humongous when compared
to those of the prior console generation. Of course, every kid
in my neighborhood and I felt compelled to play every single one of them. As fortune would have
it, a mom-and-pop video rental store in our area made the bold move to include video games as part of their lineup. This obviously provided a much-needed alternative to outright owning every game we hankered to play. It also afforded
us the opportunity to test-drive these games prior to committing
to future purchases. As pre-
teens with meager allowances
and without jobs, we salivated at the possibilities. Long before the internet and rampant industry media coverage, the only thing
we had to go by when considering which games to play was word
of mouth, cool-sounding names,
or box art. Let’s just say that this method had about a 50% success rate in retrospect.
Now, on the surface, NES cart renting seemed like a great idea, but it wasn’t without its drawbacks. For one thing, very few rentable NES titles were accompanied
by their instruction booklets. I assume this was due to renters
not returning them with the game cartridge after use. The other more prevalent problem was that NES games were finicky sometimes
and would cease to work properly
if not handled correctly or cleaned regularly. Naturally, the would-be renter would be unaware of this until they brought the game back home and attempted to play it.
On one such occasion, I distinctly remember my best friend’s mom driving us back and forth to the rental shop no fewer than three times before finally choosing a game that actually worked! But hey,
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