The Video Store
The video store. Way better than church. Far more important than school.
There wasn’t a lot to do in the town where I grew up. In the summers I found myself either playing video games in the basement or wandering the small-town streets. There were a few kids I’d pal around with and a lot of times we had our bikes. We’d ride to each other’s houses to play more video games and maybe watch a movie.
Lots of Super Mario, Duckhunt, and Double Dribble. Later on NBA Jam, Madden, and Duke Nukem.
Aside from hitting up the Dairy Queen for hot eats and cool treats, the place we went most often was the video store. There were several in town. Standalone or tied to gas stations and grocery stores. If we needed a new game, latest movie release, or just to kill an hour or two, we loved browsing the aisles. Hours and hours of time was spent doing that. Time well spent if you ask me.
You can pack a lot of meaning into a small rectangular shape. Oh the excitement of so many wonderful covers! Was the thing inside of what the cover was selling any good? Sometimes it was exactly what we wanted and sometimes it was a total bummer.
Zelda? No thank you.
Commando? I wanted to like you, but you really weren’t that great. Certainly no Contra.
There were movies too. But I honestly can’t remember which ones we were watching then except for CB4 with Chris Rock. From the cover to the actual movie, about spot on.
The video store. Way better than church. Far more important than school. In my town it was the only place to collide with the ideas of a broader culture. This was well before the Internet.
No YouTube, Facebook, blogs, or email. Nope, just enough options for action, comedy, horror, and Nintendo to keep us endlessly occupied. Even though supply was finite, it did the job.
What a kid could find in a video store in the late 80s and early 90s was magical.
