1. Growing up, this place was synonymous with happiness for many of us.
2. And if you didn't have a Blockbuster in your town, this was your film school:
3. You had several cards to keep track of from all the times you forgot yours and they had to give you a new one.
4. If you were truly old school, you still had the card from the Blockbuster Kids Club.
5. And maybe you're still carrying one of these around on your keychain to this day:
6. You would spend HOURS walking up and down the aisles, reading the back of every case.
7. But when it came to this section, you covered your eyes and walked past it pretty quickly:
8. Because it was filled with awful box art like those stupid cases that had little packs of fake blood attached to them:
9. The worst feeling was going to pick up a new release and discovering that every copy had already been rented.
10. Even worse was when you had to watch a movie for a school report, but one of your classmates rented it before you could.
11. You knew that sooner or later, all those new releases would be banished to the "semi-new" section, or even the dreaded 2-for-1 bin.
12. Which was fine, because it meant you got to fill out your DVD collection for cheap.
13. A collection that accidentally included a couple movies that you completely forgot to return.
14. Occasionally, you'd give in to their little promotions just so you could get whatever neat thing they were giving away with their rentals.
15. No entertainment center was complete without one of these during the Blockbuster era:
16. Because if you didn't rewind your tapes before returning them, you better believe Blockbuster would fine you.
17. Speaking of machines, there was nothing greater than when your parents would let you rent an entire game console for the weekend.
18. The only thing more exciting was getting one of those orange tapes Nickelodeon used for their movies:
19. On more than a few occasions, you got home to find that the movie in the case didn't match the case it was in.
20. But that just gave you an excuse to go back and pick up more movie snacks.
21. And nothing was more iconic that that familiar Blockbuster sign. You'd recognize it anywhere, even now after their all gone.
This post was translated from Spanish.