That, or you're getting a pre-opened box and fingerprint-covered game at GameStop. Nowadays: You need the cashier to come to you, so they can begrudgingly unlock the sliding glass display case for the millionth time that day and liberate your copy of the game from its garish plastic casing. The clandestine contents of that room were more valuable than a Swiss bank vault to most gamers.
Once you made your pick, you simply grabbed a representative slip of paper and took it to the cashier, who would dip into a top-secret, mirrored-glass room to snag a copy of the respective game. Your choice was a big deal, because you probably couldn't buy games without the aid of birthday or holiday bonuses. And that box art was literally all you had to go on if you were considering a purchase, because it was only sample boxes on display. The gaming section of Toys 'R Us during the '90s was sensory overload to young gamers: rows upon rows of Super Nintendo, Game Boy, and Sega Genesis box art as far as the eye could see. Gathering paper slips in the Toys 'R Us games aisleīack then: You could look, but you couldn't touch.
But developers have still found creative solutions for giving game pirates a real bad time, like gimping Batman during Batman: Arkham Asylum, torturing the player with unkillable pursuers in Dark Souls and Serious Sam 3, or the subtle and gradual deterioration of game code as seen in Arma 2's FADE system. Nowadays: Piracy is a nearly unstoppable force, with no form of DRM able to stand up against the will of a thousand stingy hackers. Even if these didn't have a 100 percent success rate, there's no denying that they were darn crafty.
You've probably heard of Monkey Island's Dial-A-Pirate solution other famous examples include a King's Quest 3 puzzle that required the manual and Worms' black ink-on-black paper code sheet that was basically impossible to photocopy.
PC games often came with "feelies," an affectionate term for any physical objects included the game box that could also double as copy protection. In an effort to combat rampant piracy, developers had to devise clever ways to verify paying customers, before always-online DRM was a thing. Oftentimes, in the olden days, those weird, obscure game demos ended up being some of the best ones.īack then: If an educational video couldn't convince you not to copy that floppy, you were a massive threat to the earnings of hard-working game developers.
Exciting? No-and lengthy download times or install sizes usually deter people from giving unfamiliar demos a try. In their place, console demos can be downloaded day-and-date from PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, and Nintendo eShop. Nowadays:Production costs and the waning of print media have sadly made demo discs impractical. After you had repeatedly played through all the demos, you could even find trailers (this was pre-YouTube, mind you) or tricked-out save files you could copy straight to your Memory Card. These demos usually spanned a range of genres, with a headliner, big-name game bolstered by lesser-known releases-and while they all varied in length, you were all but guaranteed to get hours of free entertainment.
Pop this sucker into your PlayStation, and you'd have instant access a suite of seven or eight game demos, plus extras. Oh sure, the articles, reviews, and columns were great-but the icing on the proverbial cake was the CD-ROM in the back of the plastic-wrap packaging. Actually, that's probably for the best, because those Blockbuster exclusive games are now insanely expensive and hard to find, or dirt cheap and all but worthless.īack then: Getting the latest issue of Official PlayStation Magazine was such a treat. Nowadays: Blockbuster is dead, and developers would rather just make widely accessible DLC instead of giving GameFly a chunk of exclusive content. The closest you could get to owning these games was to rent them over and over, or attempt to get away with the ol' five-finger discount. And to sweeten the deal, Blockbuster sometimes worked with publishers to get exclusive content, either with enhanced versions you couldn't find in stores (Clayfighter 63 1/3: Sculptor's Cut, Final Fight Guy) or even entire games that were rental-only (Hagane: The Final Conflict, Razor Freestyle Scooter on N64). It was the ideal way to try before you buy, giving you a weekend to demo (or possibly even beat) a game before your parents returned it with their VHS tapes.
Back then: When cartridge-based consoles ruled the roost and the aftermarket at EB Games or GameStop didn't yet exist, renting video games was all the rage.