It has been a little while since the last Throwback Thursday blog post but it felt fitting to share a little one this week.
Now I’ve talked about the fact that I rent a lot of my games at the moment via Boomerang Games and this started a conversation between my brother and I a couple of days ago. He asked me what made me decide to start renting games and that I told him that we use to rent games when we were younger to help save money. While I remember going into the likes of Choices and Blockbuster to choose games (and movies) with my parents, my brother doesn’t recall much as he wasn’t very old at the time.
I remember going into both Blockbuster and ChoicesUK a lot on the way home from school two or three times a week. Blockbuster was a bit more out of the way but ChoicesUK was on the way home. To be honest both stores had pretty much the same selection of games and movies.
Blockbuster turned into a few different second-hand stores before being turned into a Dominos Pizza earlier this year but I remember it being very cramped and always messy. ChoicesUK, on the other hand, was massive and had so much to choose from and not just game wise either. I remember that the staff always went the extra mile and took the time to talk to everyone who came in and visited the store.
Walking into ChoicesUK I always felt like I was spoilt for choice. I would spend as long as I possibly could going through the PlayStation 2 games and occasionally the Game Boy Advance games. There was something about being younger and getting excited about going to the store to pick up a new game to play. Then, once getting it you would then have to try your best to complete it before you had to return it. It was always a challenge and there were many times that I wouldn’t complete the game but would try and rent it for an extra week if the store would let me.
Our little conversation went on for a while and he understood that as we were growing up that renting was the done thing by many people, not just by us but he also understood why I now use Boomerang Games for a lot of my games.
It seems slightly strange to be thinking about how many of us would be exposed to so many different games through renting and it’s brilliant that there are still options out there now. There are still an odd couple of rental shops dotted around but they are very few and far between. Although there is a retailer not too far from where I live where they’ve still got the old Blockbuster signage up on display despite now being a car dealership.
It is sad that both chains in the UK did eventually end up closing down but that is just how things go sadly sometimes but that is a discussion for another day maybe.
Do you have any memories of going into Blockbusters, Choices or any other rental store? If so, let me know in the comments.
LeeksPlays 