Zoomer born in 2000 here. Did boomers and uncs REALLY go all the way to a store just to rent a video game for a few days?

Nah, nobody did.
The old world probably didn't exist. Everything started in 2007.

dumbahh uncs cray frfr cuh
pmuch just paying for air ong

>>11822429 (OP)
You will never know how glorious it was to walk into a place that smelled like old carpet and stale candy, calmly browse the games and movies while the gentle sound of air conditioning humms above you, and then proceed to the checkout with your chosen N64 game and oogle the clerk girl's fat ass, and then stop to pick up pizza om the way home. You couldn't possibly understand.

>>11822429 (OP)
Yes.
>>11822431
I started college in '07 and there was a Blockbuster near the campus we used for a couple more years before it closed.

>>11822429 (OP)
Yes. There was big stores like the Blockbuster in your photo but also countless independent or small chain stores usually run by a person of Middle Eastern or Asian persuasion and many convenience stores started having small video / game rental sections along with 1 or 2 arcade machines, I think the one near me had a Raiden machine alongside an ATM. The net the media rental service cast was so widespread that you were never really that far from a place that rented games even on foot.

>>11822429 (OP)
>Did boomers and uncs REALLY go all the way to a store just to rent a video game for a few days?
No, it was their moms

>>11822429 (OP)
Yeah and it was fucking awesome.

It was an experience and made everything so much more special.

Unc here, do zoomers really pay to watch someone else play video games?

>>11822452
>pay
Not just pay, some of their lives are centered around hearing a streamer thank them for a donation.

>>11822458
grim

>>11822429 (OP)
there were like three video rental shops within a 5 minute drive of my house, and I lived in the suburbs. fuck you mean "all the way" to a store?
and yes. swinging by the rental store on a Friday to pick up something for the weekend is a classic memory.

>>11822429 (OP)
I'm a 2000 baby too and I rented games. You also sound like a complete fuckwit; nobody in Queensland says "unc".

>>11822429 (OP)
Yeah man. I'd even rent games like Lufia 2 multiple times, hoping my save was still there.

>>11822462
>Queensland
nobody cares about whatever backwater shithole that is

>>11822446
This. People get nostalgic about Blockbuster (including me), but back when it was alive people often talked shit about it compared to local places.

>>11822462
Australia must be behind the times. None of us Americans born in 2000 knew what a video store was. One of my high school teachers told us about video stores and we all thought he was joking.

Unc is a great word

We went to Family Video a lot, while they still had N64 and Dreamcast games. My memories of that are not such much the games but that a place called Family Video had movies like Cannibal Holocaust, Toxic Avenger, Basket Case, Silent Night Deadly Night, and Maniac

I was lucky, we had a cool Japanese import video store in the 90s. Got a lot of anime early along with monster movies and stuff. I was friends with the owner's son in grade school too, so I got to play Sega Saturn a few months early at his birthday party.

>age wars
>gender wars
>race wars
>somehow, OWS movement silenced forever, no more class war.
curious innit

Instead of paying full-price for a game only to find out it sucks and you wasted your money, you could pay $5 to take a game home for a few days and try it out. It was great and I did it all the time. I miss it.

>did boomers REALLY
this needs to be made bannable

>>11822438
the blockbuster in my town was next to papa johns, and the video spectrum was next to little caesars. it was heaven.

>>11822495
I forgot what they called it, but there was this monthly rental program where you could do unlimited rentals and have a couple things out at a time. Perfect for loading up a modded Xbox with all the games you could want

>>11822519
>Papa John's
The de facto kino 90s/early 2000s pizza joint.

>>11822429 (OP)
>try to rent a console
>the deposit is the price of the console brand new

If I had that kind of money I would've bought the console.

>>11822469
>but back when it was alive people often talked shit about it compared to local places.
Their rentals were always a little more expensive than the smaller operations but one thing that really bugged me about Blockbuster even when I was just a little kid was how expensive the snacks and candy was. It was well above convenience store pricing and even the rare times when my parents would say "do you want anything" from the snack stand near the door I'd say "let's just go to the dollar store". This was in Canada so I don't know if US snack pricing was more reasonable.

>>11822429 (OP)
>No internet at all
>Life is you, your console and your 21" tube tv
>Dad takes you to the game rental store in your hood
>Owner welcomes you like a real friend
>You talk to him about this game you liked the cover for
>He passionately describes the game to you and your dad
>Decide to go with it
>Get a new, unexpected experience at home (sometimes good, sometimes bad)
>Bring it back a couple days later
>You and the owner swap tips and tricks for the game
>Word of mouth gets those tricks around the community
>Tfw the owner called my house to ask me for secrets for some game he was playing
>The rental store holds sports and fighting games tournaments on the weekends

Man, those were the times.

>>11822451
this
i thankfully experienced this towards the end of the life of blockbuster, i'm still happy i did
renting a ps1 game, getting a candy and a movie for the weekend

>>11822431
Do you ever think about how the past is purely an act of imagination and it truly no longer exists

>>11822429 (OP)
Yes, especially for cartridge consoles when games would be priced in excess of $70 or more sometimes due to cart manufacturing costs. It started slowing down during the PS3/360 era when consoles became more internet-dependent and died out entirely early in the PS4/Xbone gen when consoles became almost-entirely internet-dependent.

>>11822683
Physicists actually recently found a way to prove the past exists

>>11822429 (OP)
>uncs
I was born in 99, none of my peers talk like this.
Stop having a mid life crisis and talk like an adult.
Also we still had blockbuster and various other video rental stores for our early childhood, stop acting like it's a foreign concept.

>>11822634
Peak comfy. I bought pirated bootlegs from a guy in his thirties, probably a NEET. I used to call him to orderand we talked about new games for hours, lol.
>tfw my FF8 and FF9 copies were made by the chinese triads

>>11822683
Considering how souless my adult life is compared to my insanely cool childhood life was, I sometimes feel like all my happy memories are a fake coping mechanism.

I never rented games but I loved going to the video rental store and just browse the movie covers and seeing the posters and imagining what they were about
This is a feeling that cannot be replicated ever again.

>>11822707
You were born in 1999. I was born in 2000. We are not the same.

my family never rented games, but there were rental places that flat out sold games as well, and for pretty cheap.

i spent a lot of the late 90s walking down to this place and filling out my genesis and n64 libraries for $5 a pop

renting games was crazy work fr

>>11822707
I think people forget that there were video store holdouts for a while. I was born in 2005 and there was a blockbuster in my area until around 2012 and we had a Family Video until 2020 I believe. Let's not forget Redbox either. The bait on this board lately has been particularly rancid, it's not even funny bait it's just being an absolute retard under the guise of irony. It'll never happen but if a /vr/ themed altchan ever gets made I'm jumping ship immediately.

>>11822429 (OP)
You're not Zoomer, you are just a bot.

>>11822683
the past existED
memory is the thesis and the present is proof, idiot
what you think we all just SUDDENLY APPEARED WITH NO CONTEXT?
(smdh this is what kamala was talking about with the coconut tree shit but none of ya'll got it then either)

also yeah OP blockbuster was pretty cool. Back in the 90's you were lucky to have good enough internet to read text reviews of a game, much less images (and definitely no video). Paying 5 bucks to play a new game for a week was a steal.

It was pre-internet. You had to leave the house more.

>>11822438
My Blockbuster didn't smell like shit you sarcastic snidely douchebag.

Mine was clean, had good smell, had 2 play TVs with an SNES there, and a Genesis with Sonic 1 but nobody played it so it burn the TV, I played Prince of Persia there.

>>11822774
there's still one last blockbuster open in oregon

>>11822482
Awesome! How were the animu rentals there? Official VHS or bootlegs?

>>11822808
>this pleb thinks old carpet and stale candy stench is a bad thing
Oh, ho ho, ohhh...

>>11822774
Last time I saw a Redbox, they only rented shitty Direct to Video who gives a fuck movies and one shitty modern kids movie.

>>11822774
I remember the last game I rented from blockbuster was Red Dead Redemption. People ITT talking like Blockbuster was completely dead by the late 2000s confuse me.

>>11822857
Mine had PS4 games and some older movies last time I cared to look at one. Although I'm not surprised some only rented out trash.

>>11822730
Kek

>>11822429 (OP)
We also rented movies. It was great. Sometimes they had really good games too, like rare Japan imports

>>11822429 (OP)
Yes but it was pretty expensive at my place (Germany) like ~7$. But still fun, the store also had a playstation display to play on. Most of the time there was Xtreme Games on it, on bad days Disc World.

>>11822507
agreed

>local hole in the wall game store had all the good shit
>remember renting the first Dragonball movie there on VHS
>also had a bunch of Asian porn DVDs he rented out
>owner was a total weirdo who was probably selling coke out of the store
>DDR machine in the back
>got a bunch of Neo Geo Pocket stuff there circa 2004 when nobody else wanted it

Man that place was unhinged. I miss it.

>>11822774
>Family Video
Yeah there were a few around where I live until relatively recently. I'm not sure when they all closed, but around 2018/2019 they were clearing out their Wii U stuff for cheap, so I grabbed a few things (Shovel Knight, Paper Mario Color Splash, and Yoshi's Wooly World)

>>11822451
yep, along with sleepovers on the weekends. it definitely did make the games more special.

10 years ago when I had a ps4 it was nice to be able to spend 5-7 bucks to be able to get through a quick single player campaign. even going for an extended period, week and a half it'd still be under 15$ to play through recent releases. back then I had the time to marathon a new release I was amped for so the cost was a great deal.

>>11822429 (OP)
Imagine Netflix, but you had to put effort into your pick, and you could actively see what other people were looking at or interested in, and maybe even strike up a brief conversation with them.

>>11822972
Where and when did Blockbuster rented Japanese Imports? aside MAYBE from Final Fight Guy? (supposedly).

I think you are thinkin of either a ma and pa video store runned by japanese americans or those comic/geek stores that had anime VHS and bootlegs (i quite often see ads for those places in old 90s american magazines)

>>11823064
>>11823396
Speaking off Imports and Dragonball, if you were Latino? how often you saw these? and these were around in many places in Argentina too, before the official Latino dub got to the Saiyan saga!

>>11822598
Pretty standard to buy dollar store candy before going to the movies and smuggling them in, but also skipping video store prices for snacks was a good choice back in the day too. Ahh, I remember blockbuster and all the best video and tons of other small scale local video stores. Great timess really

>>11822683
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-theory_of_time
>The B-theory of time, also called the "tenseless theory of time", is one of two positions regarding the temporal ordering of events in the philosophy of time. B-theorists argue that the flow of time is only a subjective illusion of human consciousness, that the past, present, and future are equally real, and that time is tenseless: temporal becoming is not an objective feature of reality. Therefore, there is nothing privileged about the present, ontologically speaking.

>>11822594
Those hard plastic briefcases rental consoles were stored in were fairly expensive for what they were.

I rented so many games that Rogers sent my dad some special gamer club card where I could rent even more games for cheaper and longer. I'm talking like a week for brand new games and two weeks for older games.

>>11822471
>None of us Americans born in 2000 knew what a video store was.
That's because your helicopter parents never let you leave the house except to go to school or church

>>11822451
Yes. There used to be an EXPERIENCE to renting old games(buying them too). You had to save up your money, browse, make an informed decision and then dedicate your rental time to beating that game. So many good memories of white knuckling my way through an RPG I only had for a few nights. There was a level of investment and commitment there you don’t experience when you just boot up something from a list of 10000 ROMS

>>11823434
I remember those. I also remember one rental store had all their videos in these nice vinyl-covered cases. It made everything feel so premium.

>>11822437
you weirdass fags really hate uncles for some reason

what did your uncles do to you?

>>11822834
>How were the animu rentals there? Official VHS or bootlegs?
Mostly official stuff but some bootlegs too if I remember right. It was a university town so we also had the college anime club, they hung out around there and people could get bootleg/fansubbed tapes from them or other people passing them around.

>>11822429 (OP)
>Zoomer born in 2000 here. Did boomers and uncs REALLY go all the way to a store just to rent a video game for a few days?
Yes, and we still had video stores here until 2011. Whenever I would spend the night at my buddies house in high school we would go to the video store and rent Left 4 Dead for xbox 360. Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 were some of our other cooperative centric favorites.
Did you really never go to a video store and rent games as a 8-10 year old in the late 2000s, OP?

>the video store in my neighborhood used to have little flashing incandescent light bulbs around every window to make the place literally more flashy and I would be naughty and unscrew as many as I could when no one was looking so they wouldn't flash anymore. Some wagie had to go around and tighten them up eventually to make them work again lol.

Only picture I could find of my childhood video store, and it's just the outside of it. When they closed I bought some of their old rental games, random stuff like Art of Fighting for SNES. We also had a place called 49er Video with a great selection.

There's technically still a rental video store in town, but it's the back section of the local comic shop and not its own place.

>>11822634
Fake and gay. You're a zoomer roleplaying.

>>11822463
>I'd even rent games like Lufia 2 multiple times, hoping my save was still there.
Renting goldeneye from the local mom and pop video store was always a blast because on one of the save files someone had beaten the game unlocking all of the levels and then entered all of the cheat codes on top of that so I could always go wild with big head mode and paintball mode and other crazy stuff without having to invest any of the effort into the game myself. Which was good because as a 8 year old I was awful at the game.

>>11822683
Sollipsism is gay and retarded.

>>11822857
The grocery store in my town just pulled out their redbox after having had it there for a decade. I wonder if times are changing again.

I'm from the late 80s and only rented a game one time, Tarzan 64. My parents bought me games and that's what I played until DSL / high-speed internet.

>>11822429 (OP)
>Zoomer
>boomers
>uncs
Truly can't stand the way people talk anymore.

I used to walk to blockbuster to rent games.
One time I miscounted my change before I left home and didn't have enough when it was time to pay, and they actually felt so bad for me they told me they'd "short the register." Which I was too young to even know what that meant.
The world was a better place back then, if you were born after 9/11 you can't even imagine. I assume it was better going even further back, too.

>>11822429 (OP)
You're 25 and talk like a 15 year old, grow up.

>>11822429 (OP)
You're being disingenous, I was born in 2000 and frequented BlockBuster for DVDs and Video games until it closed down in 2013. Notably I rented Phantom Hourlgass for DS there and we as a family rented too many DVDs to even count.

I always just got old games second-hand instead of renting them.

>>11823991
Boomer has been used for decades (Baby Boomer) Zoomer is literally a 4chan word but I'll give you unc, unc is ebonics that niglets use to refer to older nigs (post 30) because its impressive to live that long and not be dead from murder. The tiktok kids have begun using it because of the proliferation of nigculture and nigspeak on the normalfagnet, the kids be talking bix nood.

>>11822438
>oogle the clerk girl's fat ass
Nobody cared about big asses until the late 2000s. Coincidentally the same time rap began dominating the music industry.

>>11824196
Fat asses were already appreciated in ancients time, zoomie.

>>11823991
Krautfag here, when did this start in the US? I remember being a kid in the 90s and reading about Generation X in magazines when Reality Bites was released, but no doubt those journalists just translated and reshuffled the original American release texts they got as part of the press package. But I never heard anyone refer to themselves as Gen X or millenial or whatever, online or irl, until maybe 10-15 years ago. This is purely an internet thing isn't it? I mean it makes even less sense for me because in the end these generations just describe middle-class WASPs.

>>11824201
I'm over 30. Look at any sex icon from the early 2000s and before. None of them had big asses.

What do I report OP for for using stupid faggot fake baby words like “unc”?

>>11822429 (OP)
that voyeuristic feeling of loading a rental and seeing a stranger's save file

>>11822429 (OP)
People still go to stores now. Rental places were usually just another place you stopped by on the way to somewhere else. It was a main source for discovering new releases also. I imagine you could get Uber to deliver the game to your door nowadays if rentals were still common.

>>11824278
I would pick up a stranger’s save file and beat the game on it. I wouldn’t even make a copy. I regret nothing.
>>11824285
I mean that’s what GameFly was(is?)

>>11822452
You know full well we did too. At least half of us had siblings we watched play singleplayer games.

>>11822429 (OP)
I remember one time I had to pick up cabbages for my Asian roommate and a DVD from block buster. We were all going to watch that one movie so I was super stressed about it. I don't remember what we watched. The house we stayed in is gone, the store is gone, the friends are gone. All that's left is the memory and I can almost taste the anxiety

>>11824191
Lighten up, unc is a good word. You'll appreciate it when you're older and less retarded.

>>11822786
>what you think we all just SUDDENLY APPEARED WITH NO CONTEXT?
To be fair - there is christian denomination that believes that sort of thing and the spoof of it equally valid that the world was created mere seconds ago and god implanted memories of what the world was as well as all the evidence.
It's bat shit insane, but it's not really falsifiable as a hypothesis other than claiming that any god exists or the other parts which may have him interacting or that
That being said... even if such a thing were true... it wouldn't be functionally different from if shit actually happened.

>>11822429 (OP)
Hell I even worked at one. Albeit it was blockbuster and like three people rented games from there because it was expensive and their selection was garbage. West Coast Video was the fucking bomb though, even though their selection wasn't too much broader - you used to be able to rent like two games for a whole week for 5-6 bucks. Blockbuster was like one game for 3 days for for like 6-8. Though I think it basically became the last rental store before it died in the area anyway, wiping out the others. I also cut out rentals by getting sega-channel anyway which was basically all 50 or so titles on the genesis for a month straight for 30 bucks. Slightly pricier, but also never had to ask parents to go to rent again with it. It was just there.

>>11824364
Also my memory may have possibly been off. This commercial suggests Sega Channel was 12-15 bucks a month. I know I made a price point argument as well, so that very may well be the price we had. I was a kid, I didn't sit there shit about the bills much - but if it was 12 or 15 vs paying 15-20 a month for rentals and they'd never have to drive us to the store or waste their time, that was an upsell for the thing. Albeit of course, that meant good bye SNES titles to rent, but that was fine since I got more selection anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBCtj39oxJw

>>11822438
No one thought it was "glorious" No one gave it a second thought. It was just the way we did things. I don't stand around in blockbuster marveling how this was the greatest time to be alive in history. You're a larper.

>>11824364
>>11824375
Did you have a job by the time the 5th generation was in full swing, or did you just not rent/play games after the Sega Channel was discontinued?

>>11824415
Well Sega Channel was discontinued in 1998, and by then I was transitioning to playing more PC online stuff since I always did both. Like in 95-96 I was playing Duke Nukem 3D on Kali for example and in 97 I was playing Quake 2, in 1998 I had Ultima Online Second Age... I was downloading a lot of free games of course, warez etc... but also spending a lot of time just getting a multiplayer fix on PC anyway. Plus I also had PSX/PS1 and N64 as well so sega channel dying didn't bother me and I didn't really rent games much after that anyway yeah. The sixth gen consoles I didn't really buy anyway. A friend got a dreamcast and another had a PS2. An uncle also had a PS2, I played them intermittently a bit before finally getting my own PS2 in like... 2006ish with the modem, controllers, 3 GTA games, etc... and I hooked up a hard drive and an ftp server and slid games onto it over the network - as well as used it to watch episodes of House in college on the couch while I did my homework.

Really, there's never a period I didn't technically have hundreds of games to play.. I did some small jobs early, but my first major job was in 1999 - and I immediately dropped like 300 bucks on games from Electronics Boutique for like two dozen games and then built ended up building two PCs over the next two years with massive amount of RAM, like 384MB and 768MB costing over a thousand dollars for that alone at the time. Not really the smartest move but it was awesome, nothing ever gave me memory problems in an era where most people had 64-128 at most. One of them even had SMP back in 2000, with an Abit BP6 rocking two celeron 500Mhz that costed like 30 bucks each. Shit was wild. Also, it was lovely to be able to ctrl alt delete a frozen program because only one processor locks up and the OS didn't, instantly improving stability for that alone. Albeit, most things didn't utilize both processors at the same time anyway. Quake 3 had SMP but that crashed.

>>11824445
>>11824415
Also, after 2000 I I built my own LAN in my house which, switch and all, had four machines by like 2004 and me and my friends would play Quake 1/3 or C&C Generals, NWN and shit or whatever. They could also bring over theirs since I had connections for like 8 port gigabit my floor, and could extend down to the other floor in my house if needed. So they'd bring over their own machines too or use one of my extra machines. If they weren't couching it to play console games. Eventually that waned and I shifted to another room that could handle three computers and then eventually in time friends stopped playing games and I moved and now have the space for maybe two machines for people if I sort my shit out.

>>11824410
You're attacking an argument that was never presented, and now you look like a big fat faggot. What now?

>>11824196
Anon, I...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X53ZSxkQ3Ho
>that's rap it doesn't count
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMnjF1O4eH0

I assure you, men have enjoyed nice fat asses for all of time. But maybe the definition of "nice fat ass" has changed to accept larger women, so you might have something different in mind. I'll agree liking big asses are way more openly appreciated nowadays though.

>>11824196
t. irish

>>11822429 (OP)
I bought more games from used bins than I ever rented games from. I rented wcw/nwo revenge and just never returned it or rented anything else at blockbuster again

>>11822429 (OP)
Motherfucker, you're 25.
Why are you speaking like a child, you should remember Blockbuster.

>>11822707
>I was born in 99, none of my peers talk like this.
Your peers are societal outcasts

>>11823991
>Truly can't stand the way people talk anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE

>>11824678
>these "girl next door" types in the 70s are now the prime most sought-after women

>>11822774
I'm from regional Australia and the last Blockbuster where I live closed in 2017, and the last video rental store closed almost exactly two years later in 2019. I still used to rent DVDs practically every week until about 2012 or so. I think the last time I rented some DVDs were some low-budget Australian movies in 2017 that I couldn't find anywhere online to torrent.

>>11825573
do you mean actual DVD, or is that being used as a broader term that includes blu-ray? i wasn't accepting DVDs for free by 2010

>>11822429 (OP)
>bait thread
(you)

>>11824196
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTEErZXvAo

>>11825592
I only remember renting a couple Blu-Rays ever since around the time I stopped renting (and ripping) DVDs circa 2012 my internet plan was big enough that I could download 1080p rips without worrying about exceeding my data cap. And it must have been around that time that I got a WD TV Live Hub media player; so I could easily watch everything I downloaded on my 51" Plasma TV.

>>11825619
Is this the thing you use to stream videos from your Hard Drive into your TV?

>>11822683
sure, but the fact it exists means it theoretically could exist again, you just have to convince everyone else it's worth it

For years I thought Death By Degrees was an edgy early 00s movie solely based on my memory of seeing it in a Blockbuster.
>all the way to a store just to rent a video game for a few days?
This was usually part of an overall town trip for my family. So you'd hit up the mall, the grocery store, Blockbuster, maybe get a pizza to eat when you get home to watch whatever movie you wanted. It wasn't like you necessarily went to just Blockbuster just to get a game.

>>11825767
it existed*

>>11822429 (OP)
Nah. They rented movies while they were at it.

>>11824678
>he knew about uggs in the 70's
Nostradamus

I remember renting Contra (nes) from Erol’s for $3 and some change (memory is fuzzy on the price as this was the early 90s) for the weekends.

And that goofy snes game Hagane. Never beat it but it was fun.

You actually had to leave the house and be social back then. We rode bicycles to the nearby shopping center (to rent games) and also spent whatever extra quarters (25¢) at the video game arcade nearby.

Can you remember the games you Rented from Memory?

>>>/trash/

We used to rent Sega carts every weekend, and tended to buy the more fun games. Ended up with over a dozen games that way. good times.