Did anyone experience neighbor friends lending you games?

My neighbor always borrowed games from our house, but they fucking sucked at taking care of games. Our games got visibly degraded each time we lent them out. Fortunately they started burning games sometime later, which meant they stopped nagging so much for borrowing our games. Great people, but it makes me cringe when I think about how they took care of their things.

PS1.

Man, thanks for sharing that. You made me remember the sharpies, they were definitely a thing, haha. I remember seeing a cartridge with purple sharpie, I thought it was hilarious. I really hope the Switch isn't the last one with physical stuff. I really like cartridges for games.

I had one main friend as a kid who I'd trade games with. Particularly in the SNES era, since we were both into JRPGs, that was a great thing. With only a few exceptions (FF3/6 and Secret of Mana come to mind), we'd try and make sure to ask for different games for Christmas and birthdays, since they were hellishly expensive. Much easier to beat a long game when you can borrow it for a week or two, instead of just renting it for a few days.

There were the odd times in the NES and SNES days where I'd borrow from or lend games to other friends, but not to the same degree. A lot of that had stopped by the PS1 era. I had a friend (still do) with a huge PS1 collection, but he'd been burned before when getting a game back in very poor condition (Bushido Blade, I think), so never lent them out. I have played through a number of his copies of games over the years, but always with him bringing them over to my house, and then taking them home with him.

These days, there's not a ton of lending/borrowing going on, as I don't have a lot of physical games any more. It occasionally happens though, as I played through both recent Spider-Man games on borrowed copies.