How game rental worked
Video game rental in North America operated on the same legal basis as video cassette rental — the first sale doctrine, which holds that the purchaser of a copyrighted work may resell or rent that specific copy without requiring permission from the copyright holder. A retailer who purchased a game cartridge owned that cartridge and could rent it repeatedly without paying the publisher again. This was well-established law for films by the time game rental became commercially significant in the mid-1980s.
The NES era, beginning in 1985, coincided with the rapid expansion of home video rental. Blockbuster Video, founded by David Cook in Dallas in 1985, grew by franchising aggressively and using inventory management software that allowed stores to carry larger libraries than independent rental shops. Blockbuster began renting NES games alongside VHS tapes, quickly discovering that game rental was profitable — games rented at $2 to $3 per night and a single copy could cover its purchase cost in a few rentals while continuing to generate revenue for months. By the late 1980s, most video rental chains stocked games, and game-specific rental chains had appeared.
Nintendo attempted to prohibit game rental through licensing terms — their agreements with retailers prohibited rental — but these restrictions were unenforceable against retailers who purchased games at retail rather than through Nintendo's distribution system. Blockbuster purchased games at retail, making the licensing restrictions inapplicable. Nintendo's subsequent lawsuit against Blockbuster on copyright infringement grounds failed; a federal court ruled in 1990 that rental did not constitute infringement. The ruling settled the legal question in favour of rental and left Nintendo without a mechanism to stop it.
How rental shaped game design
The rental market created specific economic incentives that influenced game design in ways that publishers and developers had to respond to whether they acknowledged them or not. The fundamental tension was between a rental customer's interests and a purchase customer's interests. A rental customer had typically three to five days with the game. A purchase customer had indefinite time. Games designed primarily for rental customers needed to be either completable in a rental period — which argued for shorter, more linear games — or engaging enough in that period to generate a purchase decision. Games designed primarily for purchase customers could be longer, more complex, and more demanding.
The password system — used widely in NES-era games to allow players to resume progress without battery-backed save memory — served rental customers well: a player renting a game could write down a password at the end of their session and pick up where they left off if they rented the game again. Battery saves, which appeared in games beginning with The Legend of Zelda (1986), were expensive to include in cartridges and created a rental problem: if a rental copy had a battery save, multiple renters would share the same save files, either overwriting each other's progress or discovering a partly completed game.
Long-form RPGs with battery saves were the category most affected. A Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior game required thirty to fifty hours to complete — far beyond any rental period — and depended on save files that accumulated dozens of hours of progress. Rental customers who started these games couldn't finish them, and the save files they created occupied space in the rental copy's save memory that subsequent renters might erase. Square and Enix designed their games for purchase rather than rental, accepting that the rental market was not their primary audience. Their games benefited in the long run from the design decisions this forced: complex, lengthy, richly designed games that rewarded purchase and extended engagement.
The manual problem and its consequences
When a customer rented a game, they received the cartridge. The instruction manual typically stayed at the rental store — or was lost, destroyed, or kept by an earlier renter. This was a significant problem for games that required the manual to play. Copy protection schemes including the Ultima series's "cloth map" and code wheel required physical objects included in the retail box. Some games used lookup tables in the manual as copy protection — Wizardry's early versions required entering codes from the manual on startup. Rental copies couldn't deliver these elements, which forced developers who wanted to support the rental market to design games playable without the manual.
The practical design response was the in-game tutorial — instructions delivered within the game itself rather than assumed from external documentation. Super Mario Bros. is famous for teaching its mechanics through level design rather than explicit instruction; part of the reason for this approach was that arcade games and rental games couldn't assume the player had read anything before sitting down to play. The tutorial as a design element — the first level that teaches you the controls, the early section that introduces mechanics without punishing failure — has tutorial roots in rental-era constraints as much as in design philosophy.
The internet created an alternative solution before the rental market ended. GameFAQs, founded by Jeff Veasna in 1995, collected player-written guides, walkthroughs, and FAQ documents for games. A player who had rented a game without a manual could download a community-written walkthrough that was often more detailed than the official documentation. The rental market created the problem; the internet provided the community-generated solution. Blockbuster declared bankruptcy in 2010, a casualty of Netflix's mail-order and streaming services and Redbox's kiosk model. The rental market's specific influence on game design had largely faded by then, but the design conventions it had established — the in-game tutorial, the completeness of in-game documentation — had outlasted the industry that created them.