Nostalgia Bits - Blockbuster
The Wayback Machine
Welcome to Nostalgia Bits, a new series of articles where I get to rant and analyze a bit about nostalgic things from the past. While the majority of these articles will focus on video games, I will, from time to time, write about something outside of gaming. As for today, we are talking about Blockbuster Video, a very important part of my childhood, especially when it comes to gaming. Gen Z may never understand why renting was such a big deal, but I’ll try to explain the experience and why it gives so much nostalgia, as best as I can.
Renting
Many of the younger generation won’t know how it feels to pull up to a store and rent a couple of movies and maybe a game or two. This was a major part of my childhood growing up, as my parents didn’t have the income to buy many movies, and getting one video game was limited to a birthday or Christmas gift. Luckily, my parents became members of Blockbuster, and we would go rent a movie or two once every weekend. This actually started before I came to the States, with my first time watching Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, and The Little Mermaid coming from VHS rentals at a local shop in Puerto Rico. It’s how I watched Jurassic Park for the first time as well. That didn’t mean we never got a movie here and there; I remember getting The Lion King on VHS as part of a birthday gift.
Blockbuster became the way my family and I grew up on films from the 90s and the endless classic VHS tapes that began to make available to homes. It would also become the way I got to be a part of the mid to late nineties gaming scene, which would not have been possible without renting. It may not sound special to the younger generation in today’s world of subscriptions, but understand that for someone who didn’t grow up around money, it was a way to experience entertainment and grow into my hobby of video games.
Godzilla, Disney, and Movies
Growing up as a Godzilla and Disney fan, the rental experience was crucial to those fandoms. I grew up watching Godzilla movies whenever they happened to come on Puerto Rican television, but in the States, it was hard to come by them outside of the 1956 Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which tended to come on WGN. When we started to make stops at Blockbuster, my brother and I were allowed to rent one movie we wanted, and we bumped into a whole section of B-movie monsters and Godzilla. It was like a dream come true, and this would be our first experience with many Showa-era classics. We were biased towards the films where Godzilla was a hero rather than a villain. This is how we saw Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster, Invasion of the Astro-Monster, Son of Godzilla, and many more. We also rented movies like Carnosaur, which, looking back on it, isn’t a great film, but we ate it up.
Another important memory was renting Disney films. The Disney Vault was in full effect, and of course, so was the Disney Renaissance. I may be biased, but I still think I grew up during one of the best times to be a Disney kid. Now, thanks to the local dollar theater, we did watch a good amount of these films in the theater, but that didn’t stop us from wanting to watch them again. After buying The Lion King, we rented the rest of the Disney animated canon, from classic films like Oliver & Company, The Black Cauldron, 101 Dalmatians, and Fantasia to 90s hits such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan, Tarzan, Toy Story, and A Bug’s Life. Many of the modern films were rewatches, but it still had that magic as a kid. We also had the straight-to-video films, which created event nights for movies like Aladdin 3, The Lion King II, and The Little Mermaid II.
I also grew up in what I call the peak of the box office hits from the 90s. You think of a 90s classic, and we rented it. We did have a few movies that we rented so many times that I look back and realize it would have made more sense for us to just buy them. These included Jumanji (our MOST rented film), The Santa Clause, Congo, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Men in Black, and others.
My Peak Gaming Childhood
The real gem of this time period for me was the video games. After getting an N64 for my birthday in 1998, my family started to let us rent one game. This was a choice between me, my brother, and sometimes my sisters. I still remember the first game we rented being Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (which I’m sure my mom wasn’t aware was an M-rated game, and we wanted it because it had a raptor on the cover). After that, I got to enjoy most of the N64 classics, which would not have been possible if we didn’t have renting, because our family would not have been able to buy games. I can tell you all the games we owned for N64 - Super Mario 64, 007 GoldenEye, Glover, and way later in the system’s life, we finally bought Super Smash Bros. after constantly renting it. Outside of that, we rented them. Some highlights included Turok 3 (which my friends and I stayed up all night playing one time), Kirby 64, Paper Mario, Pokémon Snap, Quest 64 (yes), Mario Kart 64, Yoshi’s Island, Banjo-Kazooie, and even our only Game Boy title we rented - Pokémon TCG.
The big ones for me as a gamer were Super Smash Bros. and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Super Smash Bros. introduced me to Samus, which in turn led me later to play Metroid Prime and resulted in Metroid becoming my all-time favorite video game franchise. Then we have Ocarina of Time, which was recommended to me by a school friend after he got it for Christmas. I did just that and booted it up at home. This was my first Zelda game. The moment I went out to Hyrule Field and saw what at the time seemed like such a vast place to explore is the reason I am still a gamer. This was the moment I knew video games would be a lifelong passion.
In the 2000s, things started to change for my family that led to fewer trips to the rental chain. First, my parents began to gain upward mobility, and by the time I graduated in 2007, they were essentially on the high end of middle class. Second, my dad got a DVD player in 2001, and that changed everything, including purchasing movies over renting. We would still rent some movies, but all the big films started to get bought. Then, we had the GameCube, which I did rent for most of its life, but I was starting to get games just as much. I bought or was gifted games such a Luigi’s Mansion, Star Wars: Rogue Leader, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, and Metroid Prime. I sometimes rented games like Kirby Air Ride, Pikmin, Resident Evil Zero, and Paper Mario. However, there wasn’t much to rent even with games I didn’t but because as I started to make lifelong friends in High School, I was able to play and borrow titles like Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Resident Evil 4. By the time I got an Xbox, it was pretty much over for my days of renting.
Today
Today, the closest thing we have to renting games is subscription services. While I am aware and understand the gamers online who want to own their games, I do think these services, such as Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, can be used by lower-income or more restricted households to still get time to play a varied amount of games. It’s not the same as Blockbuster, but it’s as close as we are going to get.
Blockbuster Video (and for some of you, it was Hollywood Video) was such an important part of my childhood. For someone who didn’t have the resources to buy the games he wanted or the movies to watch, it helped me experience that era of gaming in a way I would not have been able to otherwise. I still have nostalgia for those weekends and going up to those shelves, looking for that next great adventure.