Video rentals went through their golden age in Canada from the late 1980s to the 2000s. People could visit well-known high street stores like Blockbuster, also famous for its video and DVD rentals, and rent a video game. Essentially, gamers were borrowing the game for a few days at a low price, squeezing in long gaming sessions to complete it before returning it. It gave Sega, Nintendo, and PC gamers cost-effective access to a variety of games without paying full price, only to leave them gathering dust on a shelf.

It is an often-overlooked side of the retro era of gaming for Canadians, and we’re going to take a look at the chains that rented out these games and consoles, and why we are dubbing this period ‘The Golden Age of Video Game Rentals in Canada’.

What Was the Golden Age of Video Game Rentals in Canada?

The Golden Age of Video Game Rentals in Canada was a time when gamers rented video games for just over two decades.

It began around 1980 when stores already renting VHS videos and DVDs took advantage of their reach to the rental movie market and diversified into games. You also have to bear in mind that in the 80s, for much of the 90s, when the video game rental industry was booming, there was no internet.

Some of the most popular game rentals were for consoles like:

NES
SNES
Genesis
PlayStation
PS2
Xbox
GameCube

Compared to today’s online-driven market, renting a game is similar to playing a demo of a game you’re thinking of buying or signing up for a free trial online to test a subscription before you pay for a full year. You get to test the game before committing to it, paying full price to own it, or, for some players, they’d rent and challenge themselves to completing a game over a weekend.

Once the age of the internet came, like VHS and DVD rentals, the industry died out in the early 2000s, replaced by downloads and streaming.

Which Chains Ran Canada’s Game Rental Scene?

In Canada, a mix of domestic and international high-street rental chains became the backbone of the game rental scene.

Rogers Video: This was one of the country’s first video rental services. It later branched into game rentals.
Jumbo Video: For most Canadians who lived through the game rental era, Jumbo Games was a well-known domestic high street store.
Microplay: Microplay was another homebred Canadian game rental store that opened in the 80s before being taken over by Jumbo Video in the mid 90s.
Blockbuster Canada: A global brand from the USA renting games across Canada, the UK and the USA. It was the largest video and game rental store across most nations during the golden age of game rentals.
Le SuperClub Vidéotron: As the name suggests, this high-street brand was popular among French-speaking Canadians.

These names are some of the bigger brands in the business of renting video games to Canadian gamers. However, independent stores also saw the benefits of renting games. They could make 5x, 10x or 100x the value they paid for a game by renting it through their corner stores or gas stations. We even saw grocery chains that also saw a profitable opportunity in game rentals by adding a small rack of rental games.

How Did Renting a Game Actually Work?

Renting a game meant paying up front for a set number of days. It could be $1.99 per day, for example, to rent a game that retailed at $39.99. The player would then return the game after the agreed rental period was up, or hold onto it longer by either phoning the store, visiting to extend the rental, or paying a late fee on top of the rental price.

Step 1: Rent the game for a set number of days
Step 2: Pay the daily rate upfront
Step 3: Return the game before late fees stack up

Essentially, it was a simple borrow-and-return model, just like a car or van rental service. Of course, the shops didn’t just let these games go without a membership card, which meant supplying ID and proof of address to avoid outright theft.

What Are Gaming Rental Extras?

Games were not the only gaming items for rent.

Memory Cards: Some consoles, like PlayStation and GameCube, required additional memory so you could save level progression. Rather than leaving the console on to avoid losing their place in a game, players would use a memory card, which, like games, was also available for daily rent.
Controllers: For multiplayer games, when someone had a friend over but didn’t want to invest in a brand-new controller, they could rent one. This was especially useful for 4-player N64 games like Golden Eye and Worms.
Game Consoles: Some stores even rented out consoles to trusted members. It meant Canadian gamers could test different options and rent games at the same time to test which one would suit them best.

As you can see, the entire rental setup was based on affordability and flexibility, much like the VHS, DVD and Blu-ray rentals of the same era. In today’s rental industry, we wouldn’t call van or car rentals ‘affordable’, but you could compare them to cable or satellite channels that offer film rentals.

How Did Canada Compare With the United States?

The video rental industry in Canada and the United States was practically the same, with the only difference being the mainstay high-street rental stores. Blockbuster was one of the largest brands in both countries; however, aside from this store, the rental retailers in both countries were different, but the same borrow-and-return model for a price existed.

The main difference was scale, since the larger American market supported more stores and more specialist game outlets.

American chains pushed game-only formats further. Hollywood Video ran GameCrazy counters, and GameFly launched in 2002 as a mail-based service with no late fees, shipping discs straight to your door. However, Canada never produced a homegrown GameFly rival at the same scale.

What Ended the Golden Age of Video Rentals in Canada?

The introduction of the World Wide Web effectively spelled the end of the physical game rental industry in Canada and around the world.

Digital storefronts: With the introduction of Xbox Live, the PlayStation Store, and the famous online gaming service Steam, players can now download games. Retro gaming consoles used what we now consider old-style cartridge or disc setups, which, with the advent of downloadable games, physical storefronts simply no longer see the demand they once did.
Streaming and on-demand gaming: You can stream games online these days without downloading. Many are web browser-based and playable on a PC.
Streaming and on-demand movies: High street rental stores like Blockbuster, which introduced the borrow-and-return model for physical game rentals, generated the majority of their revenue from VHS, DVD and Blu-ray rentals. With the introduction of online movie streaming services, their primary business model became obsolete.
Kiosks: Redbox-style machines undercut staffed stores on price for the titles they carried.

With the World Wide Web in full swing, stores closed quickly as profits rapidly declined. Brands like Jumbo Video disappeared almost overnight. By 2010, the high-street video and game rental stores that were once part of people’s weekly routine were obsolete.

What Remains of Game Rentals Today?

There is still a game rental industry in Canada, but it is just a shadow of what it was during what we’ve dubbed ‘The Golden Age of Video Game Rentals,’ when almost all gamers in the country would rent either regularly or occasionally.

Services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus still operate on a borrow-and-return model, but it’s not the high-street rental scene of the 1990s to 2000s. All that is remaining are Jumbo Video stores and a handful of specialist retro gaming shops that keep a small piece of the era alive, but most are localized, for example, A & C Games in Toronto, and GT Games in Almonte, Ontario.

Also, in the US, Gamefly still operates a much smaller version of its postal game rental service, renting discs for PS5, PS4, Switch 2, Switch, Xbox Series X and Xbox One via mail. Overall, it’s not an easy industry to get into in the modern era, hence the Canadian and global game rental business is now close to being obsolete.

FAQ

Were video game rentals legal in Canada?

Yes. Because Canada’s copyright laws were rental-friendly, stores were able to purchase games and had the right to rent them. Although Nintendo contested this business model through a legislative fight in the US, the game manufacturer was unsuccessful and didn’t launch a similar campaign to ban rentals in Canada, so video game rentals remained legal.

How much did renting a game cost?

Usually, you could rent a game for $1.99 per day, but more popular games and new releases could cost up to $4.99 per day before prices were reduced as the game aged or demand decreased.

What console games could you rent during Canada’s golden age?

From the 1980s to the 2000s, rental stores kept up with the times and stocked games for all major consoles of the era. A variety of Nintendo and Sega consoles dominated Canada’s gaming market early on, and later, the Sony PlayStation and Xbox models challenged for market share.

Did rental stores rent out consoles, too?

Yes. It was mostly a fad limited to larger stores, which offered the service to trusted members with a good track record. Blockbuster Canada is one such example of a video game rental outlet that also rented game consoles.

Can you still rent physical video games in Canada?

Not really. It’s a dead market, with most rental stores seeing the end of an era in 2019 when the last of them closed. With that said, Jumbo Video is still open, but most Canadian gamers are online these days.