Retro Rentals
Bringing focus and problem solving back to wasting time
What is RetroRental.org?
Retro Rentals is an idea that was brought on by one of our studio musicians seeing that the games now-a-days are leveraging a kids attention to make money. There are numerous games out there that are pointless, but yet force kids to watch advertisements to earn in game money/points to continue playing the game.
Candy Crush is one of the first games that implemented this, but it has grown exponentially since the inception of that formula.
Why is this a problem?
Some of these games actually give kids points based on the advertisements they watch.
They then display these points on a scoreboard for all of their friends to see.
Then kids do what they do best... they get competitive with it.
They find the most efficient way to get to the top of that leader board, even if a little cheating is involved they don't care.
We hope this simple example illustrates the exploitation of a kids attention for monetary gains and how it negatively impacts their view on how to beat their "friends."
So what are we supposed to do about it?
Nothing. We are hoping that the kids will choose these retro games that entertained us for years as a better alternative then these mindless games that are free on an app store.
We hope that if we just give them the opportunity to experience these timeless games like Mario, Megaman X and Zelda on their original consoles will help to guide at least some of the kids to enjoy playing offline more then online.
We hope that in the long run it will connect generations just like books, movies and, especially, music has been doing for decades.
We hope that the parents will see these timeless games as much of a necessity as they see their favorite musical artist like The Who, Metallica, Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC, The Ramones, The Pogues, The Grateful Dead, Led Zepplin, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Patch Adams, etc.
Ok so what now?
Well technology has come a long way. There is many ways we can get actual game consoles into kids hands without them needing to do all the leg work.
The Nintendo Wii was one of the most sold consoles of all time... and luckily it is one of the most flexible consoles of all time with putting old games on it. It has inputs for the Gamecube controller which is one of the best representations of all the iterations of controllers that Nintendo has gone through.
Most importantly... it's cheap. Anywhere between $40 to $100 on used markets.
This is our first phase that we will offer. We plan to get about 5 Wii's for rent and or purchase.
We have a phase 2 planned on getting a fleet of real retro consoles (eg. Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, etc.) for the kids to rent, but if phase 1 doesn't take off then it will be tough to invest more money into our second phase.
So do I need to buy it from you then or something?
Nope. We plan to rent these out.
There is a lot of red tape around renting retro devices with old games preloaded onto them. To save on reading time we won't go into the details, but we will say that you are not responsible for this at all.
Instead, if you attend one of our family events we will have the kids use polaroid cameras to sell pictures for $5.
They will be able to snap the picture of a group of people and those people will be able to buy that picture for $5 cash.
We will then either let them rent the console from us for $20 till the next event or if they make enough money they can purchase the console from us for $150.
All money made will be either reinvested in replenishing the fleet of Wii's or put towards making Phase 2 a possibility.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and we hope that you help support our movement in getting video games back in the living room of our children and giving the older siblings a chance to teach the younger sibling how to beat the game.