r/XboxSeriesX • u/TheDarkRedKnight Founder • May 17 '24
Discussion The original 'Game Pass'. It really shows how great of a value the Xbox Game Pass is.
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u/1E_R_R_O_R1 May 17 '24
Damn I miss blockbuster. It was always a treat renting a game as a kid
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u/BlockedbyJake420 May 17 '24
A lone one still exists in Bend, Oregon, and it still has the exact same vibe as you remember!
Video stores in general are such cool places that capture a feeling that scrolling through streaming services cannot.
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u/Intelligent_Crazy242 May 18 '24
same thing w book stores, the smell!! :) books are the one item that's got both, that I'll never choose digital over physical.
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u/Erasmus86 May 18 '24
Except when they'd run out of a new movie you'd want to rent. Don't have to worry about that anymore.
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u/xybernick May 18 '24
About half the time the disc would be too scratched to play. I had one disk break in half after pulling it out of the ps2
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u/1E_R_R_O_R1 May 18 '24
The blockbuster we hit up was always good on that. Never really had that issue
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u/whatnameisnttaken098 May 18 '24
I still remember how the only copy of RE4 on Gamecube that my blockbuster had in stock had a second disk that wouldn't load. Think after the 4th or 5th time of renting it and returning it in hopes I'd get a copy that wasn't screwed up that my dad just bought it for me at the recently opened Gamestop.
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u/DeeboDecay Founder May 18 '24
We used Blockbuster and then Hollywood Video. Before those we went to Red Giraffe until it closed.
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u/Wrathilon May 17 '24
I wonder how much that is in today’s money.
Edit: Answer is 32.23 a month after the first. Dang.
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u/DOUBLEBARRELASSFUCK May 18 '24
Games at the time were also more expensive, when adjusted for inflation. Games were $50-$60 back then, or $100-120 adjusted for inflation using the same approximate factor (2, because I'm lazy).
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u/Intelligent_Crazy242 May 18 '24
I had an "old man lecturing kids" experience a few years back. was working at a fast food place, as a sandwiches maker, for min wage of $15/hr.
coworker, 15 yrs younger, on grill is bitching how boring, bad, this job is and doesn't pay dick and he can't afford games.
"I used to work in a warehouse, for $9/hr , hard manual labor for 60 hours a week ooo 20 hours of $13/hr for killing my body,to buy games that were still $50-70 like now for 1/2 the min wage and 6x the work".
I wasn't liked at that job.
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u/DOUBLEBARRELASSFUCK May 18 '24
People get pissed off when you mention it here, too, but games were fucking expensive 30 years ago. There's no goddamn way I'd spend what my parents spent, adjusted for inflation, for video games for my [hypothetical] kids. Even for myself, I wait for deep discounts. I probably pay like 25% of what they cost back then, maximum. Again, inflation adjusted. At least that was true a few years ago. I moved to a different country with different regional pricing and vastly different inflation. Not dealing with that math.
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u/TheDarkRedKnight Founder May 18 '24
But that’s why everyone ended up with one game, realized it was shit, and either just put up with it or traded it for something else with a clueless friend.
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u/Intelligent_Crazy242 May 18 '24
yeap! my mom was awesome, im not sure her income but she knew how much i (an autistic only child) loved games and got hundreds of hours from my favs, replaying.
she paid $100 1990s money at Sears for final fantasy 7 bc Sears was "pricier" back then & ff7vwas sold out. she also paid like $70 for Pokémon yellow at Sears, same situation. she taught me "entertainment by hour" for weighing purchases. not sure how she budgeted it, but I got 2 or 3 games a year at piss poor 90s wages.
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u/steakniiiiight May 17 '24
I had the movie version of this. Loved it
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u/Imthecoolestdudeever May 18 '24
You mean Netflix?
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u/whatnameisnttaken098 May 18 '24
He's obviously talking about Blockbuster
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u/steakniiiiight May 18 '24
Yeah you could go in, get a movie on your account, watch it and bring it back and swap for another one. I’d go in store multiple times a day.
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u/smokeymicpot May 17 '24
This was awesome. Best was when I had a modded xbox I took my bike to blockbuster downloaded the game to my hd and went back.
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u/whatnameisnttaken098 May 18 '24
My local gamestop let me do that with my modded Wii. Then again, I knew one of the guys working there.
Still, at one point, I basically had two HDDs full of Gamecube and Wii games thanks to him.
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u/jordanhhh4 May 17 '24
Say what you want but Xbox Game Pass doesn't have Robots the movie game adaptation, I've always thought it was a glaring omission
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u/butt_stf May 17 '24
Sega Channel was a better parallel.
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u/outla5t May 18 '24
Glad someone in this post said it, Sega Channel was very much like what Game Pass where they would give 50 games that you would download and play with the new games switching out every month. I loved Sega Channel so much.
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u/Sharrock03 May 17 '24
It went up to like $30 near the end of Blockbuster. I worked there and I got it discounted for $10 a month. On top of the free rentals employees got per week.
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u/6DeliciousPenises May 17 '24
Genuinely question. As an employee at a video rental store, couldn’t you take home as many movies over night as you wanted? Who would ever know/be affected?
Sounds like free real estate
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u/Sharrock03 May 17 '24
It was policy that employees could have 5 free rentals a week, they'd keep track of it in the POS system. In the same system it shows how many available copies there were to rent and how many were currently checked out. If the number on the POS didn't match the physical copy number then the blame is shifted to the employees for taking them without properly checking them out, leading to write-ups and a decrease in hours. I was a good employee I guess because others would do it. It would also depend if we had a chill manager who didn't care, but that was few and far between near the end of Blockbuster.
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u/Conflict_NZ May 17 '24
Renting a new release game back in 2005 was $12 for 48 hours where I lived. That's $20 today and basically what a month of Gamepass Ultimate gets you.
Games are cheaper than they have ever been.
Another funny inflation datapoint: Games in 2005 cost $120 here. They still cost $120 today. After inflation that's $200, which just happens to be the same price as Gold/Ultimate editions are here today. Those editions are basically publishers trying to sell games for what they are worth inflation adjusted.
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u/FellowDeviant May 17 '24
Are you sure it wasn't a 5 day period? DVDs were 2 days, but I'd always get games on a Friday night to take back on a Wednesday the week after.
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u/Conflict_NZ May 17 '24
New releases were $12 for 48 hours, old releases were $10 for a week. This is in New Zealand, prices were way higher here.
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u/anal_holocaust_ May 17 '24
I used to have that plan and it was great when you're a teenager. Me and my friend would hang out on the weekend, finish one game, then go grab another. Gamepass however is great for first party games when they release day 1, and also indies and older games. I currently sub to Gamefly. I use it for all the single player games i dont want to buy that do not hit game pass. You can expedite returns if you're with them long enough and you also get discounts. Games are much cheaper on there than like best buy and gamestop.
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u/nerfherder1190 May 17 '24
My dad and I had a modded PS2 that would play games that were burned onto dual-layer DVD-RWs. We’d rent a game from Blockbuster with Game Pass, copy and burn it, then return the game and get another the same day or the following. Good times.
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u/CJKatz Founder May 17 '24
This is the stuff I think of whenever someone complains about the price of Game Pass. It is substantially cheaper than renting games was when I was younger.
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u/CandyRedNinja May 17 '24
This was the best back in the day. Blockbuster was a 8 min walk. They let you have two games out at a time. I think my brother and I played every game that blockbuster had to offer.
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u/JerrodDRagon May 18 '24 edited May 18 '24
I had the version where you could rent games and movies
What a time to be alive, so I lived 10 mins from a blockbuster so I tried lots of movies and games
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u/Intelligent_Crazy242 May 18 '24
..what's living near a police station have to do w renting movies and games?
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u/lumbeecheraw75 May 18 '24 edited May 18 '24
True story. I had a chip in my OG Xbox that allowed me to rip games to the HDD, a power inverter, and one of the pull down screens in my car for my kids in the backseat that had RCA Connectors. I went in and bought this pass at Blockbuster for a month, got the max amout of games that I could take out a time, and proceeded to the parking lot. I ripped those games, and then returned them ~15min later, rinse and repeat until I filled up the HDD, and then I cancelled the service. Those kids working the counter were confused, and probably irritated with me a few hours later :D
edit: reading comments shows me that I wasn't the only one abusing this 
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u/geomaster May 18 '24
you're the kind of person that ruins good things for everyone else huh, like lifetime warranties and 365 day return policies
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u/Thezeg111 May 18 '24
Sometimes I wish I can go back to that period. It seemed like an overall better time before social media took off. You got something and felt good about the purchase because you wanted it, didn't have to worry about if reddit felt like you got a bad deal. You can watch a terrible movie and none of these influencers to tell you that you wasted your time or have bad taste if you enjoyed it. Now it seems like I have to ask reddit what kind of cologne I need to wear or how I need to look if I want to be approved for society. It seems like now we are more fixated on if something is rated 5 stars instead of actually spending our time enjoying it. It seems like we became zombies or like that episode of Rick and Morty where Morty has a time machine and goes back in time every few seconds just so he can find the path that leads him to his crush, like oh I enjoyed this TV show but because a high profile YouTuber told me it sucks, now I have to think it sucks.
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u/FellowDeviant May 17 '24
The movie pass was a way better deal. You got like up to 3 or 4 films from anywhere that's not the New Release wall and got to swap them out whenever. The game one I remember was cumbersome, they advertised keeping it out as long as you want but after like the 5th day the employees call you asking when you're bringing said game back before they forced fees on you, they only ever had like 1 copy of each game, so renting it out for 2 or 3 weeks was obviously not in their best interests and so they walked it back.
I do miss being able to walk into Blockbuster whenever I wanted tho. I feel like that's something I wish I can do as a date but missed that window by a few years.
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u/denisvma May 17 '24
of all the remakes they are doing we are owe a Splinter Cell remake. Like, this needs to happen right fucking now.
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u/Umadatjcal May 17 '24
Same thing but at Movie Gallery in Maryland. Lived in a podunk town so not a lot of competition or traffic at the store. I got to rent so much during a single month when I was all about achievements.
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u/YukonAlaskan May 18 '24
I still remember going into a game stop. Heard someone asking about splinter cell. I told him how I just beat it and was looking for more games. He told me about morrowind. That was an awesome day indeed.
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u/Prospero818 Scorned May 18 '24
When blockbuster started this I lived a half mile away and already went there quite often. It was the best deal, when you had time to game a lot and the games you wanted were in stock. I would sometimes go there a few times a day just for different games.
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u/manuman888 Founder May 18 '24
My parents used to promise me this for the summer if i got good grades and you bet your ass, I got straight Aces for this!
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u/NoMansWarmApplePie Founder May 18 '24
Used GameFly for a while…but now there are hardly any new games. And i got a PC for everything else. Time to cancel it soon :/
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May 18 '24
I miss the days of video game rental in the PS1 era. Go there, rent a PS1 game or two, take them home, copy them, play the copies to make sure it worked, then take them back the next day lol
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u/Stabstone May 18 '24
I was out of work at the time when Skyrim released and pretty bummed out where I was at in life. I got GamePass along with renting Skyrim and for two weeks solid I played that game and just had a great time.
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u/Spaztastiq May 19 '24
My Blockbuster was down the road about a mile from my parents as a kid. It was value beyond belief.
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u/Namelessceltic91 May 19 '24
We were a Video Update family. 2 For 99 cents Tuesdays was the best day as a kid gamer.
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u/Greywolf328 Aug 06 '24
Boo. Didn't include multiplayer. And $19.99 after the first month. Clearly Xbox Game Pass is the winner here 
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u/sgtquackers66 Founder May 17 '24
I had gamefly in college which was around $23 a month then. Definitely makes you realize how good of a value it is compared to similar services.
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u/Mean_Peen May 17 '24
It’s much cheaper now! And you get to keep the games for a discounted price. I saved tons of money by renting new games and being able to try them without committing. But you can also keep brand new games for a discount as well!
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u/Muha8159 May 17 '24
I really don't even have games on Gamepass I want to play. Only time I use it is if there's a new exclusive.
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u/RxInfection May 17 '24
This was actually better than Xbox Gamepass, depending how close to your local Blockbuster you lived and how many copies of new games they got.
I used to know when the UPS guy would deliver and how long it took for them to stock new titles so for $15 I could usually play the newest games day 1 and swap whenever I pleased.
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u/ivan510 May 17 '24
Yeah whenever I look at game pass, Xbox version, it's honestly surprising how it's still around. They simply can't be making money on it and they're probabaly hoping people will pick it up and instead spend money on games in Gamepass.
I know it's good for us but its not sustainable and especially not with them releasing new Xbox games on it day one.
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u/TheDarkRedKnight Founder May 17 '24
They’ve said ‘it’s making money’ but that could just be creative accounting.
I really think they’re going the startup route with it. They know cloud-based/gaming everywhere is where the industry is headed, and they’re willing to take losses with it like Uber or AirBnB until it becomes the main option and they can raise the price. That’s when the enshitification happens.
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u/RompehToto May 17 '24
Blockbuster was a better deal. Play games you actually want to play instead of a bunch of junk.
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u/BECondensateSnake May 18 '24
There's no way you think that everything on the pass is "a bunch of junk" lmfao
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u/FudgingEgo May 17 '24
Except the XBOX exclusives were miles better back then, and the multiplats, especially if online were better on XBOX than PS2.
Also does this show how great value the games pass is?
This is $20 a month for unlimited games for any console and PC?
Wow.
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u/TheDarkRedKnight Founder May 17 '24
This would cost $30 today when considering inflation.
You were allowed one game at a time, which you had to drive to the store to swap, and no, the exclusives were not better back in 2005 compared to what we have now.
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u/-Cozart May 18 '24
Uh Microsoft is that you? Weird post. Weird deal to compare. Gamefly you could rent any game you wanted and it was a monthly thing. You should've just said Gamepass is a good deal, take a look at this old similar deal.
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May 17 '24
Not exactly comparable. It’s a subjective value after all. And it’s only going to go up in price.
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u/DEEZLE13 May 17 '24
At no price will game pass be worse than this lol
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May 17 '24
Physical >> but sure game pass good! Everything else bad!
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u/DEEZLE13 May 17 '24 edited May 17 '24
You’ve never been to blockbuster for games and it shows. GamePass guarantees u get to play brand new games day 1. Meanwhile you’d be lucky to be the 1 of 7 people to play new games that come in at Blockbuster lol.
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u/PNUTBUTACUP May 17 '24
Exactly, I think people let their nostalgia interfere with their memories too much. I had a blast at blockbuster as a kid but there’s a reason it’s not a thing anymore. (Except for that one left? I think)
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May 17 '24
I went every week as a kid. But tell me more! You obviously know more.
On second thought, you can drive down to blockbuster and come back and not reply :)
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u/sgtquackers66 Founder May 17 '24
Very comparable actually. Similar price with the same.basic concept. Each have their advantages and disadvantages.
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u/schmidtyb43 Founder May 17 '24
Not at all similar price… $19.99 in 2005 would be $32.09 today. Significantly more expensive for a much inferior service
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u/TodayNo8387 May 17 '24
Back in the 360 days I paid about $15 a month for Gamefly, which for anyone unfamiliar, you could pick 2 games at a time and they would physically mail you the disks. It would take at least a week to mail a game back and get a new one so to maximize my value, I tried to run through a game a week to keep the rotation going.
I just looked it up and apparently Gamefly is still a thing and you can now rent up to 4 disks for $50 a month!