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.
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.