Me and my friend, both poor HS kids at the time pooled money to buy this game, played it over the weekend and returned it :P
It was a great game and we felt so clever for "beating the system" but we didn't even leave the store with the money as we immediately spent it on Warcraft 2 which we kept and played forever.
Remember when you could 'rent' games? I remember renting games all the time and then copying the discs so I could play them after I returned them when I couldn't afford a certain game.
I'm convinced if renting games wasn't a thing, I may have never discovered my love for gaming. I owned maybe less than a dozen total physical games in the 4th gen 16-bit era, but was able to play 4-5x more than that thanks to being able to rent them. Its the only reason I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways as a kid, so that I could rent a couple genesis/snes titles each weekend.
While it is true I couldn't afford the games I played as a teen, I'm confident I would have pirated them anyway. It had less to do with the game, and more about the conquest. When you discovered that a certain game had a keygen or was cracked, and you could get it for free, there was a certain rush of endorphins that would occur. Many of these games went mostly unplayed in my collection while I moved on to see what else I could get (if I recall, I did most of my searching on IRC and the games were downloaded via DCC, but my memory is getting fuzzy on the details). What nostalgia... that was back when piracy went mostly unpoliced as only the uber nerds were doing it or knew how (just remembering we called pirated software "warez" back then).
Pretty sure my local Blockbuster never allowed "renting" PC games.
Even then, CD writers in the early days could be of dubious quality. I remember letting a friend borrow my prized copy of Starcraft so that he could clone it through his CD writer, and when it emerged from the disc tray, it was scratched to hell and back. I still have no idea how a the disc laser could do that.
I don't think Blockbuster ever did PC game rentals. It was smaller independent places and I don't remember ever seeing them after CD-ROMs became a common thing. I remember it being a thing around the time the sun was setting on 5.25" floppies and rising on 3.5".
For us we had a little store in a strip shopping center on the corner called "Floppy Joe's". When you rented the game it came with the full box it came in, disks and instruction manuals. We'd goto the library and xerox the manual for the copy protection questions then copy the game contents onto a repurposed AOL floppy disk. I remember my dad being so pissed when AOL switched to read-only disks. After we did that we'd return the rental game. It's not surprising that business model went away. It was just the thinnest possible veil over piracy.
I still have really fond memories of Floppy Joe's though. I remember going in once and seeing two people playing Doom multiplayer. It blew my mind. I had no idea such a thing was possible. I kept trying to tell one of the guys about IDDQD so he could beat his friend. He was being really sweet and patient to what, in retrospect, was probably a super annoying nerd kid bothering him while he was trying play.
Floppy Joes, at least in my experience, wasn’t a “rental”, it was “pay $100 for this PC game, return it within 48 hours, get a full refund minus a $10 restocking fee.” It was the same system in the three locations I visited in the 90s. They were also inevitably next door to Kinkos and the manuals were usually already manhandled in a way that made photocopying them very easy.
It wasn't the laser, it was the tray; if any dirt got stuck to the tray in just the right way, the CD could be scratched to hell and back quite easily.
Some CDROMs also could have the "wait until spun down before dropping down" mechanism not work, and you could hear it spinning in the tray.
Lol your friend ruined the disc by not handling it correctly. Trust me, I did the same thing with my friends 4 disc copy of diable 2. I remember while waiting for the discs to burn I was playing with the old one. I had it in the case and I was spinning it like it would in the drive.
I ruined his copy. He cried and told his mum. I lied and said it came out of the burner like that.
Poor bastard. I stole his cd key and got it banned online for playing with cheats.
Kind of.... My local video rental place back in the day stocked just about every release for all the major consoles though. You weren't limited in scope in the same way GamePass will limit you to only GamePass supported Xbox/PC games.
I don't think there is a modern service equivalent to peak video-store era game rentals, at least none spring to mind right now.
ehh having to use it on a machine that has ms store enabled and run their fat client to download 50s of gb games is quite different in many ways. while months at a time for a game is nice it feels more as a data collection spigot and loss leader for onboarding users, vs a fun weekend rental
It was a great game and we felt so clever for "beating the system" but we didn't even leave the store with the money as we immediately spent it on Warcraft 2 which we kept and played forever.