Video rental stores have become all but extinct after the rise of streaming services, but those of us who were around in the ’80s and ’90s still carry a very fond nostalgia for them. Cycling through titles on Netflix brings the content straight into your home, but for so many of us, nothing can ever beat browsing the aisles of your local video store to find a movie or two to spend your Friday night. Perhaps nobody feels this way more than VHS and classic video game collector Nick Collins, who has taken the extra step of actually creating his own video store in his basement to perfectly recreate the classic movie rental experience.
Called Nostalgia Video, one look at the photos will instantly have you feeling like you’re in Blockbuster Video, circa 1992. The video store recreation is so detailed and realistic, pictures of its shelves have gone viral on social media with many mistaking them for photos of an actual video store from over 20 years ago. To find out more, we spoke with Collins about Nostalgia Video and how the project came to be, and here’s what he told us.
“I have always been into what would be considered ‘retro’ or ‘nostalgic’ by today’s standards. There was always an up and running VCR and tons on Sega Genesis, N64 & SNES games in my bedroom. These things truly never went out of style for me. Even during the ascent of Blu-Ray, 4k, XBox One & PS4, I was still rolling with my old games and VHS tapes.
In 2012 I started collecting retro games pretty seriously. As any collector would probably tell you, the obsessive collecting doesn’t stop once you near the end, it merely moves on to something else, and VHS tapes felt like a natural transition.
Collecting VHS tapes quickly became an even bigger passion of mine than when I collected retro games. There was just an indescribable feeling of seeing these old VHS covers again that I would see so regularly in the video stores of the late 90s. Holding, examining, observing these works of art brought back incredibly warm memories for me. It was a joy to begin owning a lot of these movies that I rented so many times in years past.
As the years added up, so did the tapes. I was quickly running out of space. The room you see today was previously about half of the size it is now; it was a glorified closest with a few shelves patched together on the walls. Around this time, James Rolfe (The Angry Video Game Nerd) had also built a video store in his basement. Me being a big fan of content, I thought that was just the coolest thing. So with James’ store being the inspiration, a blueprint started to form in my mind.
The construction to expand the tape room began in the spring of 2017. My uncle and I tackled the project, which took about two months and cost around $1,200. From May-July of 2017, I spent pretty much each day & night cutting, sanding, measuring, and painting until the sun came up. I am not a handyman and had no prior carpentry experience before this, but I was determined to build this damn basement video store.
When it was finished, even I was shocked at the end result. It had the real look and feel of a Blockbuster Video from the 90s. The first night of walking around the newly finished store, picking up and looking at tapes off the shelves – it was an awesome feeling, and an experience I’ll never forget.
I’m not really a social media guy, and didn’t even have a personal Instagram at the time Nostalgia Video was finished, but I figured that I may as well throw some pictures of it up online. Fast forward to today, as the Nostalgia Video Instagram page nears 13,000 followers and it’s all still mind blowing to me.
I have the best followers in the world, and it’s a true joy for me to hop on the Nostalgia Video IG page each day, share pictures of the store and talk tapes with everyone.
Here are some additional pictures of Nostalgia Video – I hope they bring back the same warm memories that VHS collecting as a whole has done for me!”
To find out more information and to see many more photos, follow Nostalgia Video on Instagram!
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[…] on sale, and awesome movie posters on the wall—and Collins has recreated that aesthetic with “two months of labor and roughly […]