My Experience with Scratched Disc Repair

One day during the holidays, I got together with my brother to play some video games. He wanted to give Tekken 6 a try, since he hadn’t ever really played a Tekken fighting game.

That Doesn’t Sound Good

So, we put the game disc into his Xbox 360 and prepared ourselves for what would have surely been hours of button-mashing and yelling of expletives.

The game started to load, showing the Namco logo, and then the screen went blank. We noticed that the Xbox was making more noise than usual and nothing else was loading. I went over to inspect the system, picking it up and looking at it (bad idea). A terrible crushing and rattling noise ensued and I quickly ejected the disc, only to find that it had been scratched horribly. Not good. I figured the disc was toast.

Removing the Scratches

I knew about some of those home scratch repair kits, but I had used something like that in the past and it didn’t do the job. Then, poking around on the Internet, I learned that Blockbuster Video had a disc repair service that was supposed to treat even deep scratches. This may or may not be at all Blockbuster locations, so your mileage may vary. You can see this service on their promotions page. My local store told me it was $2.99 to repair a disc.

Figuring that I had nothing to lose, especially since my friend Joseph gave me a Blockbuster gift card for Christmas, I thought I’d give the scratched disc repair service from Blockbuster Video a shot.

The girl behind the counter said that it would take about 20 minutes, so I took the time to get some grocery shopping done. Coming back to the store, another employee removed the game from the machine, cleaned it off with some spray liquid (water, presumably) and showed me the results.

How’d It Turn Out?

Let me tell you that the difference was dramatic. The gouges in my copy of Tekken 6 were pretty bad, but the “repaired” disc showed minimal signs of damage. You could see a little swirling, but it otherwise looked new.

The employee behind the counter told me that if the game didn’t work, I could always come back and they’d run it through the machine a second time for free. Well, that’s not going to be necessary. I tested the disc and it works perfectly.

If you’ve had the unfortunate experience of scratching up a DVD movie, Xbox 360 game, Wii game, PS3 game, or any other kind of optical disc, consider giving Blockbuster’s service a try. It was three bucks well spent… even if the three bucks wasn’t really mine. I was not compensated by Blockbuster to write this post, but I thought I’d share my experience with you. Happy gaming ahead!