How the Heck Did We Buy Games Before the Internet?

A few months ago, I catalogged my entire video game collection and posted it as a note on my Facebook page.  Looking back on it now, especially the stuff up through the SNES era, I can’t remember how I decided I wanted at least half of the games on the list, and I think it’s worth exploring how the simple act of choosing a game to buy has changed.

In the first few years of my gaming life, I was pretty much at the mercy of whatever my parents bought me, and damned if I know how *they* ever figured out what to buy.  Did my dad recognize what was in the arcades at the time, ask the clerk what was popular, or just walk into a store and eeny-meeny-meiny-moe his way to a game?  I’m guessing it had to be a combination of all three because I somehow ended up with Atari 2600 copies of Asteroids, Missile Command, Space Invaders, Frogger, Q-Bert, Yars’ Revenge…and E.T..  Things stayed pretty much the same after I received my NES in 1985, with my allowance at the time being sufficient for weekly candy purchases and not much else.  Yet, in the first few years of owning that console, I ended up with games like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Mega Man (and how anybody ever decided to buy that game with this box art is beyond my comprehension).

Things definitely changed as I started to get older, with two HUGE developments shaping my entire adolescence:  first, a lot of my friends started to get into games, and second, video stores started offering games as well as movies for rent.  For anybody under 16 back in the non-internet age, a good friend who had the same game system you did meant that there was a whole other set of games that you could play without spending any money, and being able to rent a game for three days at a fraction of the cost of actually buying one was the next best thing.  Here’s the crux of the whole matter, folks – back then, you had absolutely no idea whether or not a game was any good, and very few ways of actually finding out.  Unless your Toys ‘R Us clerk was a font of gaming knowledge, all you had to go on was the box art, so it was a 40-dollar crapshoot every time you stepped to the register – and when that 40 dollars represented the only game you were getting for the next two months, you had to hope the dice were hot.

Friends and rentals helped to spread out the risk – instead of everybody getting stuck with the same awful game, we could all try different things and then borrow and trade the gems we’d found.  Rentals helped us thin the crop even further – three days was plenty of time to find out whether or not a game was worth further play or was just a waste of plastic.  Although, if a cartridge game with a battery backup turned out to be good, you were always stuck with the conundrum of a) buying the game and thus having to start over, or b) re-renting it until you beat it – which, if you didn’t have the time or the money to keep it in your constant possession, was fraught with the danger of having your save deleted before you could get it back.

These days, of course, video game news is available in vast quantities for anyone who chooses to look for it.  A great many games are under the microscope from the second they’re announced for weeks after their release – from professional publications and bloggers all the way down to official and unofficial forums.  When looking to buy a new game, instead of getting one opinion (if you were lucky!), now you get thousands of opinions in a matter of minutes.

Still, even with all the opinions out there, it’s the ones you trust that matter.  I had no plans whatsoever to pick up Earth Defense Force 2017 until I read an impassioned Something Awful forum thread extolling how fun the game was.  Even with the whole internet buzzing about Fallout 3, I hadn’t planned on playing it until a close friend told me how much he was looking forward to it.  And sometimes, it’s still possible to go with your gut and toss those dice, like on Dreamcast launch day when I bought Blue Stinger.

Craps.