The AVGN recently wrote a blog entry about the bygone era of video rental stores. He invited readers to share their own memories, so I did–and it ended up being long enough to be its own blog post! (I feel kind of bad for co-opting the post like that, but oh well).
I was already planning to incorporate these memories into a video someday, but really, this is the best way I can tell the story 
So here we go!
Rental stores were such a fixture in my life that I used to play “Video Game Rental Store” with my NES and Genesis games (though I only ever had about ten games and 2 customers). There were two rental places in particular that I loved as a kid.
One was Tropical Video, located three doors down from my first house. (The fact that I could walk down there by myself to rent a movie or game was kickass!) To the left of the entrance, there were a couple of saloon doors and a room beyond with posters for Chucky II, Pulp Fiction, and others–the owner didn’t like kids near there, but I always tried to peer inside. I think my brother once ran in there and I went after him; that was quite an experience.
Why I loved the place was this room in the back. Through a low-ceilinged passage, just the right size for a kid, you would suddenly find yourself in a big white room wallpapered with NES and SNES games! There was a rack in the middle stuffed with Game Boy and Sega Genesis games, too. It even had a little drawing table and toys… just great for kids. You could only rent games for two days at a shot, but I tried some of the best games from that place: Kirby’s Adventure, Little Nemo, Gunstar Heroes, Star Fox, Super Mario Kart, some of the Game Boy Mega Man and Ninja Turtles games… the list goes on. We also got the THX-Remastered Star Wars VHS Set from there, which remains one of my favourite things of all things ever.
My approximation of the Tropical Video store logo
When Tropical went under in ’97 or ’98, I was pretty heartbroken. If I had been a little older and richer, I would have bought up so many of their games; as it stood, I could only pick up a few of the pink and white plastic Nintendo cases from the curb in front of the store.
The other place I loved was Jumbo Video, which still operates a store in my town, though the one I went to closed long ago. They had a theatre-style popcorn machine and let you take a free bag just for walking in–sooo good. By seeing all the VHS boxes, I became aware of a lot of films of the day, like Silence of the Lambs, that I wouldn’t see until much later. There was this cool corner of the store that was made up to look like a castle dungeon, under an archway with “Occult” written on it, with movies like Hellraiser on the rack inside. They had different lighting and everything; I wasn’t allowed too linger too long in that place. I think they might have done that especially for Hallowe’en.
The newer logo of Jumbo Video rental stores, still with the same old elephant, Jumbo.
Then there were the games. They had a Sega Genesis in a 6-game demo unit, with Sonic 2 and Eternal Champions, among others. I used to play the crap out of Sonic 2 just because it was there, though I wished they would change the games more often. I rented most of my games from this place–probably 80% of the games I played on NES and Genesis–including my first and most-treasured RPG, Phantasy Star IV. I even tried a couple Game Gear games from there.
Then of course there was Blockbuster, which was where I went mostly once we got our own SNES and later, the 32- and 64-bit games. Those were great days too, but these are the stores that were gone too soon, and I’ll always wish they were still around.
problemgamer
