Famicom Dojo Podcast: Rent It Now From Your Grocery Store

by Sean "TheOrange" Corse, filed in Famicom Dojo Podcast, Podcasts on Jul.13, 2012

Things were very different before Game Fly, Netflix, and Red Box. Heck, even before the now-mostly-defunct Blockbuster, the best place to rent video games was from the local grocery store. Do you remember those weird plastic slip cases that VHS tapes would sometimes come in, or the clear plastic shells for NES carts with a badly xeroxed copy of the box cover inside? Of course you do. Sean and Vinnk wonder if game rental is a good way to distinguish between what is a video game console and what is just a computer. Or maybe there’s no distinction? Which consoles are really PCs in disguise… or vice versa? Maybe there just aren’t any answers, but at Famicom Dojo we’ll definitely try to find them! Also, more listener voicemails!

Direct Link: Famicom Dojo Podcast 54: Rent It Now From Your Grocery Store

Leave your own voicemail at 608-492-1923, or just share your thoughts in the show notes at FamicomDojo.TV:
http://famicomdojo.tv/podcast/54

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Tags: Apple II, Commodore 64, Microsoft, NES, Nintendo, Xbox

Connor

I’m going to leave a voicemail about this, but I’ll add a comment too.
I get a solid 90% of my game information off of the internet. The other 10% is usually word of mouth.
I also occasionally rent games from the Redbox machine.

http://www.famicomdojo.tv/ Sean “TheOrange” Corse

Voicemail received! 😉

Adam Lowrey

Vink wanted to correct you that Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 both came out for the MSX on cart. If anyone really cares both games were MSX2/2+. Both games are sitting on my bookself next my MSX2 copy of Vampire Killer and Silent Mobius for my FM Towns Marty(my only FM Towns game). God my collection is so geeky.

Vinnk

Yup.. did a search, should have done that before the podcast, and you are correct, there is a rom cart. I’d only seen it on disk before. And about your collection… this is Famicom Dojo so Geeky=Cool, no need to be ashamed. I will try to add a correction to the next podcast we record.

Daniel hathcock

I remember the days of my old video store. It was called Dixie Video. What a fantasy land for me. The video store seemed endless, but in 1988, I know there couldn’t have been very many things available. I was a little late to the party. I got my NES at Christmas in ’88.

We used to rent things like Dangermouse, and Wrestlemania videos. The wall on the left side of the door was horror movies. The wall of terror is what I called it. It was such a cozy little mom and pop store, I was happy just to go in there and walk around. I’ll never forget my dad and I going in on the afternoon of the first day of school. We rented Super Mario 2. They said my dad was so cool for letting me rent games on a school night. He told them that I had better enjoy it, because after that, there would be no more games on school nights.

I remember they had a copy of Fire and Ice. There was a label on there saying that it was a very expensive game, and as such, it would only be able to be rented by a responsible adult. And the rental price was something like $7. My dad nearly had a stroke, and declared he would never pay that price.
I rented my first Power Glove there. It came with a really cool blue and red back pack that I could sling over my shoulder like some grade school badass.

During the 16-bit era, they moved to a larger store. It had the feeling of a Blockbuster, and they hired new employees. The place felt sterile and cold. I stopped going, and not long after, they were history. Though I did rent the SNES there before my parents broke down and bought it for me.

Later, I went to the local Blockbuster. What can be said about that? You been to one, you’ve been to them all. The last generation I rented was the Gamecube era. Gamecube was my console of choice. I think one of the last games I rented was Smash Bros. Melee.

These days I usually only buy old stuff. In the unlikely event, I pick up something new, it’s either play a demo, or roll the dice. That’s one of the reason’s I’m not a huge fan of the new generation of gaming. It’s just slowly becoming a world I don’t want to live in.

Vinnk

Awesome comment. And I agree with everything in it.

http://blog.carlsensei.com Carl

This was a great episode, maybe the best one ever, and I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. Only 75% for that reason.

Last week I saw my eight and ten year old niece and nephew. They were playing old console games that were emulated on some shady website using flash. Mario, Sonic, the true classics, all for free in browser. So that’s what kids do now instead of renting games.

Not that I can totally blame them. I spent my high school and college years emulating all the SNES titles I missed as a Genesis kid, and then the years after that I ended up buying the titles legitimately on GBA and Wii VC. It goes to show that piracy can

Vinnk

Sorry it took so long to get your voice mail in the show, but feel free to leave another, we will try to be more prompt.

Crade Lit

I remember we lived 2 or 3 Km from town and when school was closed
because it was below -40 out we would bundle up and trek into town to
rent a couple games. In those days our allowance would actually cover the rental, maybe even one each. I think they were 2 bucks to rent them, does that sound right? I definitely see renting in a good light. Personally i think rentals
stopped because they became greedy (or maybe the licensing for renting forced their prices up?). I think the movie rentals were always their primary market
and paying 2 bucks to rent a 20+ dollar movie for long enough to watch
makes sense… Who in their right mind pays 5-10 bucks to rent a 20
dollar movie for one viewing?

My dad also used to exchange games with the community center he worked at so we would trade our games with them for a while, or we would trade with our friends..

It’s true nowadays review sites are where kids decide what games to get.. I think it’s unfortunately because the review sites are often under the influence of the publishers and good games from not so influential publishers have less chance.

The other way to try games nowadays is just to buy them for mobile games since many of the mobile games are in that range that you can buy them for a price that is still reasonable even if you just want to try it out.

semi-related rant:

imho The publishers keep balling that renting selling used or whatever
people actually want is somehow unfair to them and how can they survive if people are allowed to do those things and yada yada.. I’m pretty sure they are just pretending they don’t know how renting and used sales work and that they don’t know
recent history exists.. There is no way they actually drink their own
koolaid.

They are all going to punish and threaten all the rest of their customers away and will probably blame their customers when they go under. Heres hoping that makes them go under and we get new companies aren’t at war with their customers. The other possibility is they just bribe politicians so they can make sure to continue get money without needing customers lol.
uglyjoe

It’s a MOS 6502, not a Motorola, but you guys probably know that 😉

I frequented a few different rental places growing up. The first that I can remember was a mom-n-pop store that happened to also rent out NES games. It was within walking distance from our house, so my older brother and I would go there every week or so to rent a game. My brother always decided what we’d rent, but it was still fun for me to see what they had. For some reason, I can remember that they had a copy of City Connection and that my eyes would always be drawn to its box. I would ask my brother every now and again if we could rent it, but we never did. They also sold this chewing gum that had flavored syrups in the middle — awesome.

I also want to echo the sentiment of “this game sucks, let’s go ride bikes”. That happened so many times to us growing up — I’m looking at you Metal Gear. That game may as well have been a get-bitten-by-dogs simulator.

Vinnk

Yup, I got it confused. I mixed it up thinking the M in MOS was motorola. Wow, 2 mistakes in one episode… But I’m not too far off.

The 6502 was designed by many of the same engineers that had designed the Mororola 6800 microprocessor family. From Wiki “The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of competing designs from larger companies such as Motorola and Intel. It was nevertheless fully comparable with them”

So I was half right? A third? I am willing to accept a tenth.

And I too always wanted to rent City Connection but never did. It was one of only 20 or so games the local IGA supermarket had. There were poker chips velco attached to the cases so if you wanted to rent a game, you brought the poker chip to the cash register. The color of the chip determined how much it cost. New releases were Red and cost like $3, Blue were a bit older and maybe $2 and white were the ones I would go for because sometimes my dad would let me rent two.

Also my mom read in the paper that in City Connection you got points for running over people (not true) so she said we couldn’t rent it.

uglyjoe

Poker chips and Velcro, you say? One of the other rental places I used to go to had these round metal-edged paper hang tags for each game and movie in the store. The name of the game would be written (as much as possible) on the little tag and get a hole punched in it. There were a series of nails in the shelves under each game, and the tags would be hung there. If you wanted the game, you’d just grab the tag and bring it to the counter.

Now that I stop to think about it, it must have been maddening to put in all of the nails, write in all of the titles, and punch all of the little holes.

Erm…not sure why I typed all of that…I suppose it is worthwhile to someone to have the Internet archive the ancient home-spun methods of video-game rental transaction systems.

Mo Rahman

Magnavox Odyssey2 anyone? Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Atari ST, Commodore 64GS (Games System) Amgia CD32, and how about…THE SEGA DREAMCAST!? But you guys probably dismissed those too.

And what about those games developed for computers that were ported to consoles? What category do they fall into “Consolidated PC Games”?

Now what would be really cool, is if you could borrow games from the library.

Though I did buy some games Thrift Stores that I wouldn’t mind trading in for…I guess that’s my experience of discovering games.
http://discord-inc.tumblr.com/ James Fletcher

I never really rented games growing, mainly since the only system I owned for the longest time was a Game Boy, and Blockbuster shied away from renting portable games. That being said, I remember that whenever I went to the video store I remember browsing all the console games there and wishing I could get them. In particular, I remember always seeing Earthbound there with its giant box (sadly I have yet to get a boxed version of that game).

Plus, one thing you didn’t mention is that video stores sometimes get really weird video game related stuff, like the Pokemon Snap and later Pokemon Stadium kiosks that let you print out your photos from the game.

Demo kiosks are another thing that’s gone by the wayside. I mean you still have demo stations at most stores, but since most of the demos you can play there are the same ones you can download at home there isn’t any allure to them. I have found memories of trying Mario 64 on a demo kiosk at a Kaybee Toys (which is also gone the way of the video store at this point) and just having fun running around with Mario in the castle garden.

Oh, and I can personal certify that your podcast is available in the Zune marketplace, since that is how I’ve been listening to it for the last few weeks (I don’t own an actual Zune, but it is also used by Windows Phone).

http://twitter.com/ebbhead1991 ebbhead1991

I worked in the media section at Best Buy for a while. It kills me to think of the stacks of NIB Earthbound games we had sitting on the shelf on clearance at 5 dollars a piece, that no one wanted to buy.

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