Renting Super Mario RPG In The 90s Made It A Co-Op Game
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is far and away my most-played single-player game of all time, despite the fact that I never actually played it all the way through until recently. For me, Mario RPG is kind of like a movie you’ve only ever seen on cable. You never sit down to watch it all the way through, but you catch bits and pieces of it enough times that eventually it feels like you’ve seen the whole movie. My unconventional experience playing Mario RPG came as a result of repeatedly renting the game over the course of a year and working through it with the help of another kid I don’t know, and never met. For me, Super Mario RPG will always be a co-op game, and a perfect representation of the idiosyncrasies of gaming in the ‘90s.
If you walked into a Blockbuster Video in 1998, you’d find a corner of the store filled with PlayStation and N64 games to rent. Most millennials probably have fond memories of the first time they rented Metal Gear Solid or Banjo-Kazooie, but I didn’t have a current-gen console back then. Instead, I was across the street at my local Schnucks grocery store, trading coupons from the newspaper for $1 Super Nintendo rentals. My favorite game, of course, was Super Mario RPG, despite the fact that I could never get past Tadpole Pond.
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I was only allowed to play an hour of video games after school every day, so every time I got to Mallow’s house my rental would be up, and I’d need to return it to the store. I’d try to renew it, but there was always a waiting list for Schnucks’ single copy of the game. By the time I got it back, I’d invariably find my save file overwritten. So, I’d restart, play to Tadpole
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