This week, I became a beta tester for a programmer who is working on a remake of a classic 80s British computer game. Being able to gauge the beta version on a selection of Intel Macs with differing specifications and OS releases is a big help to them. So I've been working through noting how it performs on i5 and i7 MBPs down to a C2D MBA.
Ordinarily I'd share some images but the project is pretty secretive at the moment. When that changes, I shall reveal the details.
What I
can share, however is what I've done with my 2011 MBP tonight: watch
this documentary on
the world's last Blockbuster store.
Of course, VLC is the default choice for media files and I'm running High Sierra.
If you're a fan of documentaries, you'll enjoy this one. It's funny, sad, engrossing, enlightening and thought provoking with a large number of participants from Hollywood and former senior figures at Blockbuster.
TLDR:
As an aside, we also had the Blockbuster chain in the UK and I remember when the first store opened here in the late 80s. During the latter seasons of Star Trek: Voyager and Deep Space Nine, I'd use them to rent new episodes because I didn't have subscription TV but eventually I found a cheaper - and better Indy store for that.
Right into the final years, I'd visit my local Blockbusters to buy new and used DVDs. Nowadays I have to obtain Blu-rays/DVDs from Amazon or eBay and some stuff was never available from UK retail stores anyway - like Criterion's titles.
Please don’t pillory me too heavily for this: I have no nostalgia at all for Blockbuster, and there’s sort of a valid reason for it.
I used to work for a regional music and video chain, a partial competitor, which had been around well before Blockbuster went national and turned up on every street. Our stores were founded on selling music — vinyls, cassettes, CDs, and even MiniDisc and DCCs right at the end — but also sold mostly music-oriented VHS tapes (like concerts and music video compilations). We sold Discmans and Walkmans and portable stereos, along with a remarkable variety of blank magnetic media — from cheap, normal-bias cassettes (a brick of five maybe for $8) to metal-bias Sony ceramic series cassettes (they’d go for up to $16 for two, 90-minute blanks, in 1991 freedom dollars.)
Larger locations — namely, locations not inside shopping malls — had pretty robust video rental departments, coupled with a modest sales selection of films on VHS and LaserDisc (usually, recent/new titles not being sold for $80, but for $20). On the last bit, we competed directly with Blockbuster and held our own quite well. Our stores were, typically, open until midnight, seven days a week. On weekends, business would stay brisk right up until closing time.
(Somewhat ironically, our store’s brand mark was also yellow-on-blue, but had been around since 1972; Blockbuster opened in 1985, and unapologetically mirrored the scheme.)
I was considering to go into a long description of how Blockbuster, buying out the chain I worked for in 1992, absolutely ruined music retail by trying to impose their video rental formula and culture onto the one which made, ours, Sound Warehouse, do as well as it did. But I just found someone did a fairly accurate historical overview of what happened.
I’ll still add a few notes from my experiences during the few years I worked for them (both).
Post-buyout by Blockbuster, in 1992, our stores were re-badged as Blockbuster Music by mid-1993. They didn’t last very long: by 1998, they were sold off, and those music locations went bankrupt maybe three or four years after that. I left just under a year after Blockbuster’s buyout, as re-branding took over and managers were sent to meetings with Blockbuster corporate management, who presented their vision of what they’d turn our stores into.
Their big, uh, humid dream: deprecate, then eliminate special orders — sort of our killer feature (we had a few, actually) — using a then-non-existent technology they envisioned: print-on-demand CDs and sleeve art, downloaded from some central server. All the while, the customer would wait.
Their hubris: they never paused to factor in the tech limits of the time or how much people would be willing to wait and pay for, basically, inferior media (basically, bootleg-quality). T1 connections were costly and scarce (T3 hadn’t really taken hold yet, and the whole World Wide Web had, maybe, 20 or 30 sites). CD-Rs at the time were still more costly, per blank (about $30), than any pre-recorded, glass-master, mass-produced CD. Printing tech would have been some glorified colour laser printer with (probably) a Canon engine. “While-you wait” would take probably a couple of hours, per title, and the company would be taking a massive, per-unit loss to be selling them for the same price as the real thing.
Blockbuster completely overlooked how music buyers and collectors wanted something they could hold, which was, basically, official, tangible, and lasting.
There was also the odious dress code imposition upon women and men both, which saw a lot of the most successful locations’ other killer feature — the extensive, collective, varied knowledge of staff — leave. Most of the most knowledgeable staff ranged from ages 17 to 30, and that is really not the time or place to be imposing uniformity on basically a bunch of musicians, DJs, and cinephiles working their day gig to make a living. We weren’t an office supply store.
When Blockbuster were later served and humbled by Netflix, I was OK with it. “Wow, what a difference,” indeed.
