Renting games as a kid was frequently the only way I could play many new games. I was lucky that I’d typically receive a game for my birthday and for Christmas, but the rest of the year, games were expensive and out of reach through any other method than renting. It was the 1990s and the idea of cheap digital downloads to stave off the lack of games seemed unfathomable.
The advantage to renting games is I had the opportunity to experience many more games than I ever would have risked asking for as a gift. The disadvantage? The competition involved in acquiring the game I was after.
That was the case with not-quite-Zelda-clone-but-it-is-basically Story of Thor on the Mega Drive. In many ways, competing for a copy of Story of Thor, also known as Beyond Oasis, was harder than actually playing the game. My local Blockbuster (remember those? No? Oh) had two copies. It looked thrilling. It had one of those newer Mega Drive boxes that had a thick blue line down the side of it. On the one hand, that meant that the game would have superior graphics and other bits and pieces. On the other hand, that meant the Mega Drive was getting a bit long in the tooth and my days of owning the latest console were very numbered. To put it into context, in Europe, Story of Thor came out the same year as the PlayStation 1 launched. Change was coming. Fast.
Most of my local area seemed desperate to try the ‘new’ games – the ones with the blue line – so Story of Thor was very popular. I’d fight for a copy by getting my parents to drive me to the local store as early as possible on a Saturday morning. The challenge didn’t end there though. The game was one of those ‘fancy’ games that enabled you to save your progress on the cartridge. Something that felt like magic back then and saved a lot of time previously spent writing down excessively convoluted passwords. Of course, remember there were two copies? That made finding the right copy hard, before you even factored in the risk of your save file being overwritten. It was risky.
I spent some time trying to figure out how I could identify each cartridge and never really determined a good method. In hindsight and having stumbled across someone with the same predicament on YouTube recently, I could have just written a note in the manual or left a sticker on the cartridge to ask them not to delete the save. But hey, I was a kid who clearly could only solve in-game puzzles, not real ones.