What were you doing in the summer of 1999? I was renting a Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure from Hollywood Video and dreading the imminent commencement of my high school career. Was my Dreamcast obsession rooted in a pathological avoidance of growing up? Absolutely. That’s what made this particular time in my life all the more bittersweet, and fodder for plenty of therapy sessions later on. How did the Dreamcast make you feel, Mitch?
Ahead of its North American launch on the infamous 9/9/99, Sega’s exciting new 128-bit console snuck into Hollywood Video rental stores in mid-July of that year, and you can bet I was on our landline phone every day during the excruciating lead-up, annoying minimum wage employees with my incessant pubescent inquiries. What a treat I was. Delightful.
“When will the Dreamcast be available?” was the endless chant, and I’m sure I got a definite answer at some point, because I dragged my father to our local HV on July 15 (exactly, if memory serves) to eagerly partake. But hey, my family didn’t even have dial-up internet at this point, so cut me some slack. Gaming information was hard to come by in those days, and all I had to work with was a brief mention of the Dreamcast rental program in a recent issue of EGM.
I wrote about my rental experience several years ago, as it’s one of my fondest gaming memories, strangely enough. So imagine my surprise and delight when I stumbled upon what amounts to a video time capsule of this specific era in Dreamcast history. Posted by YouTube user Vampire Robot, the footage is dated to September of 1999, a few months after the rental program started, and mostly showcases an official Sega Dreamcast demo kiosk running the Ready 2 Rumble Boxing attract mode on maddening loop.
The endless Ready 2 Rumble theme song is enough to drive anyone insane, especially (I’d wager) the Hollywood Video workers who were running the establishment that early Fall day, but the pure nostalgia on display here is palpable. A giant Sonic standee next to the kiosk proudly lets potential Dreamcast gamers know you can ‘RENT IT NOW’, while rental display boxes for Power Stone, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing and Sonic Adventure sit patiently on the background shelves, waiting to be snatched up.
Another sign states renting the system with one game for two days will set you back $19.99, although there was a massive $350 security deposit. Not mentioned, of course. It seems they really didn’t want you absconding with all this new tech. Additional games were $4.99 to rent.
The entire video is a borderline unsettling peek back into a simpler time, complete with those microwavable popcorn buckets, Cracker Jack boxes and various movie theater-style candy offerings near the checkout area. You can also glimpse in-store signs mentioning DVD, a then-burgeoning media format that, alongside Sony’s PlayStation 2, ultimately contributed to the downfall of my favorite console of all time.
I mean, rampant piracy didn’t help either, but if only the Dreamcast had also included a DVD drive with its out-of-the-box online play and irreverent creativity. Perhaps Sega’s bright, pioneering vision of the future might have seriously connected with the masses, and we’d be looking at a different gaming industry landscape today.
I’d rent the Sega Dreamcast twice in 1999: Once with Sonic Adventure and once with the aforementioned Ready 2 Rumble Boxing. Both times were amazing, and it’s honestly the last time I felt that sort of buzzing excitement surrounding a console launch. It turned out that I couldn’t avoid growing up for much longer. The death of novelty, I suppose.
That said, if you haven’t checked out Vampire Robot’s YouTube channel yet, it’s very much worth binging. I don’t know exactly why all this old footage exists, but I’m happy it does, because it provides a window into yesterday’s retail shops, malls and daily life like nothing else I’ve seen online. Magical, for real. And now we have VHS evidence of that one time a now-defunct video rental store offered early access to Sega’s stunning hardware swan song.
Le sigh.
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