SAVE? ● YES ○ NO

February 23, 2019 6:42 AM

Saved, But Not Forgotten: The evolution of saving in video games, from the password to the cloud, and nearly every obscure memory card format in-between. [Tedium] “Earlier this year, a Twitter user named Paul Hubans shared a screenshot from his 87-year-old grandmother’s long-running Animal Crossing session; after four years of daily play, she had logged 3,580 hours—nearly 150 days—of total playtime. Being able to save progress in a game and return to it later has enabled some amazingly deep experiences. It wasn’t always like this, so how did we get here? Let’s find out by taking a look back at the history of saved games.”

• Coder figures out, explains, and implements Mega Man 2 password generator [GEEK]

“Back in the early days of console gaming, we didn’t have enormous built-in hard drives or cloud saves, so the way we saved our progress was either via a battery on the cartridge, or complex passwords that didn’t really save data, but generated a game state that included all of the stuff you had and progress you made. Some of you might remember the password generator and entry from Mega Man 2, as it was a grid into which you placed orbs, rather than something like the password entry in Metroid, which required four lines of jibberish. GitHub user Kevin Shekleton managed to figure out the MM2 password grid, and devised a method for generating working passwords even if you haven’t actually played the game.”

• The Lost Art of Saving [Kotaku]

“The modern videogame has rendered the save point a relic of the past, and many would say for good reason. We’ve all had those soul-destroying moments of forgetting to save over an hour ago in the last village, and a nasty ambush wiping out your party - and all that precious time and progress. No one’s got the patience for that anymore, and why should we. [...] I’m probably coming off as a romanticising nostalgist and, to be fair, there’s plenty of save systems that have earned their place in history’s dustbin. But even its basic form in Final Fantasy was always a welcoming sight after a tough slog of random battles, with some also well-placed to telegraph a major boss battle - becoming almost markers for you, a clue from the developer that was always heeded. In the right kind of setting, a save point can create anticipation as well as perform a function.”

• Where Save Games Go to Die [Waypoint]

“The last time I saw Geralt of Rivia, he was standing somewhere in a marsh—though come think of it, that doesn't even narrow-down which game I'm referring to—haggling with a peat farmer about the price for killing some kind of swamp monster. He's also got to find his missing daughter at some point, but for now there's this swamp thing. In the time since I took that contract in The Witcher 3, I moved house, changed jobs, moved to Los Angeles, changed jobs again, and moved back to Boston. The save has been transferred between three different computers, and never loaded. Every time I think about returning to Geralt, I think about that swamp and feel a wave of fatigue wash over me. Lately I've been trying to clear out my gaming backlog, but as I do so I keep finding the remnants of previous failed attempts to do so. No sooner have I tried to start one old game than I remember an abandoned save somewhere else, something I really do need to get around to finishing… someday.”

• What is your oldest game save? [Polygon]

“Years ago on another site, we asked readers the longest they had left a game on pause. This answer absolutely floored me: A PS1, game unspecified, disc in the tray still spinning. Plugged in for ten (10) years. "It was burnt out. It could have been a power surge at some point, but it won't turn on any more, and the disc has a big black spot," the reader said. Modern consoles, with suspended states and cloud uploads, may moot the possibility of such a thing happening, or needing to happen, again. But it always made me smile to think of a video game living for a decade, instantly ready, there to play if only someone would pick up the controller. So anyway, what's the oldest game save file you have? Why do you keep it? Why is it special?”

posted by Fizz (50 comments total)

   CONTINUE
❤️ SAVE
   RETRY
posted by Barack Spinoza at 6:54 AM on February 23, 2019 [16 favorites]

Wizardry on the Apple ][ saved your game to floppy whenever it wanted, also immediately after your party died. There was only one save slot. This I think contributed to my dour worldview.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:57 AM on February 23, 2019 [10 favorites]

I'd imagine a lot of us have NES carts that once had saves on them. Like Zelda.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:00 AM on February 23, 2019

Someone should introduce that Kotaku writer to Skyrim.
posted by saladin at 7:37 AM on February 23, 2019

My sister has offered to let me have the Atari 800 my father brought home when I was nine (in 1980). It turned on as recently as a decade ago, and includes a box of floppy disks with the games and programs I used to love (and a well-used 300 baud acoustic modem!) -- can't imagine any of those disks work, but if they do, I might have some kind of saved game or two from the 80s, if any games saved back then.
posted by davejay at 7:52 AM on February 23, 2019

My favourite of all time is the Mario Paint save robot.
posted by oulipian at 7:53 AM on February 23, 2019 [5 favorites]

We were readying my wife's old NES system to resell back in November, and to my surprise her old Zelda savegame (stored in battery backed SRAM) was intact!
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:53 AM on February 23, 2019 [7 favorites]

Not just Wizardry, RobotVoodooPower, Ultima too. It was de riguer to play Ultima II with one hand on the disk drive to pop it open whenever you didn't want it saving on you.

The nostalgia of old save game carts is real. Specifically remembering the son who raced his deceased father's ghost.

The article's a little optimistic about how games are all saved in the cloud now. Steam and Xbox have figured out how to do that mostly, but Sony's PS4 cloud saves are really poorly implemented.
posted by Nelson at 8:15 AM on February 23, 2019 [8 favorites]

Saved games were such a revelation for NES games. I still remember the incredibly frustrating Metroid passwords--literally 28 characters long, both letters and numbers. Get one digit wrong and your password was worthless. Then after awhile some "Justin Bailey" passwords started spreading around the pre-internet gaming community, which would allow you to start close to the end of the game. Supposedly, this password was not hard-coded into the game but just happened to work? That boggles my mind, but according to the four seconds of research I just did, is true.
posted by skewed at 8:26 AM on February 23, 2019 [7 favorites]

I remember adventure games with limited save slots and so you could get yourself into an unwinnable state and not figure it out until many many hours of game play later and also all your saves were after that mistake. I know I had tricks to get extra save slots.
posted by jeather at 8:34 AM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

The lack of saving ability was kind of convenient in early gaming, since it was an easy way to add difficulty without adding new levels or enemies. Those old PC and cartridge systems were severely memory-limited.

My favorite RPG from the 80s, Autoduel, used this tactic. When you died in the game, you had to start over from the beginning unless you made a "clone" of your character, which cost a lot of in-game money. I remember the game being pretty hard to beat. A few years back, when Autoduel became available on some emulator or another, I picked it up again. Only this time, I made a copy of the data "disk" every time I wanted to "save." I beat it in an afternoon.
posted by panama joe at 8:40 AM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

I remember leaving games running all day so that I could come back after school to pick up where I left off. Explaining that to a child of today feels a little bit like explaining madness.
posted by Fizz at 8:47 AM on February 23, 2019 [22 favorites]

I leave my PS4 "on" all the time. By which I mean I put it in Power Saving Mode, which is roughly like the sleep mode on a laptop when you close it. I've played whole games through in 2-3 weeks without ever exiting them. Always amazes me a bit the games work this way, they don't have memory leaks or whatever that necessitate restarting the engine.

Can we talk about those little "game saving" indicators? The superfluous animation that pops up in the corner of the screen? Every PS4 game comes with an explanation the first time you play, "do not turn your console off when saving or you may lose your saved progress". Which, WTF? Like can't you do some transactionally-safe game saving so you don't delete my last save until the new one commits? And then most games take at most 1 second to save; why even bother popping up the icon for that brief a moment? Particularly in games with frequent autosaves.

Anyway what I really want is some obsessive game nerd's collection of these little saving icons. Many of them are beautiful, tiny little 64x64 pixel animations to convey the game is saving. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is particularly beautiful, a mesmerizing square spiral / Greek meander thing that I never could quite figure out.
posted by Nelson at 8:54 AM on February 23, 2019 [6 favorites]

One of the only games I ever played (almost) all the way through was Myst, probably more than 20 years ago now. I got to the final decision; I made the wrong decision; and somehow I elected to “save” after losing the game. Which meant in order to see the ending I’d need to start over. I never finished.
posted by eirias at 8:58 AM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Political threads here should have save and replay buttons.
posted by sammyo at 9:02 AM on February 23, 2019 [5 favorites]

The oldest save I have is for a lego game I made as a final project in my 4th year computer graphics class. It's written in C++ and OpenGL and has survived being ported from Linux to Windows and then to Mac when I've changed OSs and still runs. Sadly APple is deprecating OpenGL so it's days are numbered. But it still has the first text file with the positions of the pieces all laid out that i used as save data that I made when I turned the project in.
posted by Space Coyote at 9:13 AM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

My oldest save has to be for SimCity2000, that I now play in an emulator.

The worst are games that offer no in-level save at all. I recall Playing Future Cop:LAPD on my old Mac and being utterly flummoxed upon discovering that there was no way you could save your progress other than by completing the entire level. Argh!
posted by Thorzdad at 9:25 AM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

When I begin a new RPG, I will still use one of the character names I picked out as a kid. It's a way of touching the past for me. But I'm kind of a crouton petter. Recently, I started playing Stardew Valley again. I started at the beginning with a new save file so that I could a different character in the game. I could have divorced my current husband and had his memory magically wiped by visiting a shrine of dark magic, but no. Harvey didn't deserve that.

Oddly enough, I remember being downright spooked by the idea of the Kid Icarus password DANGER !!!!!! TERROR HORROR. It's a shame that most haunted-video-game stories are so terrible; I have a natural weakness for how uncanny those old games could be.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:30 AM on February 23, 2019 [14 favorites]

I'd imagine a lot of us have NES carts that once had saves on them. Like Zelda.

I was one cave away from finishing Zelda when the battery died. I was too heartbroken to start over.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:42 AM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

I was one cave away from finishing Zelda when the battery died. I was too heartbroken to start over.

Slight derail: If you have a Nintendo Switch with an online subscription, they've done something really interesting. They've uploaded a special edition of Legend of Zelda where you start out with max hearts, tons of rupees, etc, "The Legend of Zelda: Living the life of luxury!". [YouTube]

It's essentially an overpowered Link who is ready to play the game with a bit of a leg up. I never had much luck with the original game, I just sucked at it hard, but playing this version is absolutely the best.
posted by Fizz at 10:02 AM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

those weird passwords live on as gibberish at the end of a url
posted by idiopath at 10:16 AM on February 23, 2019 [25 favorites]

complex passwords that didn’t really save data, but generated a game state that included all of the stuff you had and progress you made

For no reason I can remember this only occurred to me last year and it blew my 38 year old mind.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:38 AM on February 23, 2019 [6 favorites]

My favourite of all time is the Mario Paint save robot.

That jam slaps unnecessarily.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:50 AM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Back when the PlayStation 2 was new and I didn’t own one yet, my girlfriend and I rented one for the weekend, along with a copy of Devil May Cry. Thing is, the rental didn’t come with a memory card, so we had no way to save the game. That meant that we had to play DMC from start to finish in one sitting, or at least keep the PS2 running when we paused to do something else. It was thrilling and grueling to power through it without a safety net and remains one of my fondest gaming memories.*

*Playing without a memory card is permanently saved to my memory, how meta
posted by ejs at 11:03 AM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Slightly off-topic, but what this makes me think of is playing old games on floppy drives when you'd do something and suddenly the drive would spin up. Holy cow, you accomplished something! Or doom was coming your way.
posted by praemunire at 11:38 AM on February 23, 2019 [11 favorites]

A fresh C60 rewound with the tape counter reset and a pencil and paper for the progress notes gave you all the saved games you could need on a CPC464.
posted by scruss at 11:39 AM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Saving? Pah! Kids these days don't know how good they have it.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:54 AM on February 23, 2019

I remember getting a PS1 (aka PSX back then). By this point saved games were common. Most of the SNES games I played had saved. Most PS1 games saved to a memory card. But Pandamonium had an old style long passcode. It annoyed me to no end. But I did it because it was a weird half 3D but still 2D platformer and I just wanna run right.
posted by downtohisturtles at 12:35 PM on February 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

I also remember making elaborate worlds in Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set, then rampaging through them in play mode, forgetting that your level and the save game were one and the same. Why are all the monsters dead? Oh.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:45 PM on February 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

praemunire: YES. I remember SO vividly playing those old Sierra games on my Apple //c and getting SO STOKED when I would hear the disk spin up! You'd just tried 102 ways to solve some abstruse puzzle and FINALLY SOMETHING HAD WORKED!!! sometimes, it meant SEEING A NEW SCREEN!!!!!

I would just sit there and bask in the new screen for a while, enjoying it, before getting started on solving the next nonsensical puzzle. (i loved it so much though!)
posted by capnsue at 1:58 PM on February 23, 2019 [6 favorites]

I remember leaving games running all day so that I could come back after school to pick up where I left off. Explaining that to a child of today feels a little bit like explaining madness.

We had some kind of baseball game on the PC in the 80s which you could set to play the games automatically. So you'd set the roster and whatever settings and the game would play full baseball games. It wasn't a very good game but my baseball stat loving brother would often set it up so it'd play continuously often leaving it on when we went to school. He had a STACK of notebooks where he'd carefully notate the stats of his team as they played through the season. I found it mind numbing. RPG series were more my jam particularly the Ultima series... I kept saves for every one I played as I moved from computer to computer only finally losing most of them in a dead hard drive a few years ago. I still have my Civ2 files though!
posted by Ashwagandha at 2:03 PM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

"The modern videogame has rendered the save point a relic of the past"

I just sorted my game library by release date and this isn't remotely true.
posted by one for the books at 2:26 PM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

On this topic, I also really enjoyed merritt k's essay on ZEAL, "The Afterlife of Digital Ghosts", about save files in rented video games.

"What this meant is that each copy of a game at a video store might carry a stranger’s save data. It might carry multiple, if it supported more than one save file. A single file might even represent the cumulative efforts of many people building on the same file, unknown to one another. Unlike a film or, later, a CD-based game, where previous viewings don’t change the media itself — beyond, perhaps, gradually wearing it down — players could change the experience of a cartridge based game for those to come."
posted by ITheCosmos at 2:38 PM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Since 1991, every time I have got a new computer or hardrive I have copied the contents of the previous one onto it. I have all sorts of old save games, and even ancient installations of win 3.1 and dos buried deep in nested folders labelled “old computer”.
posted by fimbulvetr at 4:06 PM on February 23, 2019 [10 favorites]

The oldest save I still "have" is a password for an educational game they had at my school when I was 5? 6? I might be mixing it up with other games, but I think it was about finding a magical gem, and the final puzzle was a logo-like thing where you programmed it to draw the gem you'd been looking for all along. ICICLE.
posted by lucidium at 4:50 PM on February 23, 2019

What was the first saveable game, though? I thought it might be Crowther and Woods' ADVENT/Adventure/Colossal Cave, but I understand the PDP-10 could save and restore (or restart) a process, so users would just use the built-in OS functions. Although there may have been ports of Adventure and Zork to other platforms which added save/restore explicitly.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:49 PM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

I remember I used to play King's Bounty on Sega Genesis when I was about 8 or 9, we'd rent the damn game from Blockbuster because you could never find it in stores, and Blockbuster only had the one copy, which was always checked out. So I'd get it like once every 3rd or 4th trip to BB, and could never beat it in the 2 days before it had to go back.

And the password/save screen was this fucking monstrosity. Look at that shit. 7 lines of 8 characters, and both 'O' and '0' and 'B' and '8' were indistinguishable on a 1994-ish CRT monitor. It took 9 year old me 15 minutes to attempt to enter the password I'd written down from the last time I rented the damn game, and it never worked, because I'd written down a B wrong, or something.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:02 PM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

I know this is an article about consoles, but I think one of the most interesting developments in video game saving is the nearly instantaneous quicksave/quickload. I don't know which game was the first to have this feature, but Doom is the game that really stands out for me as one of the first that seemed designed with the idea that a player could easily save and retry at literally any moment in the game (in Doom, I think it made level designers much more free with traps and other sudden deadly surprises).

In games like Thief and Deus Ex (and later Dishonored) quicksaves allow a level of experimentation that make the games qualitatively different from a game where failure means replaying significant chunks of the game and it's just not worth the effort to try lots of little things differently.

Quicksaving also made some games much more accessible to people whose schedules don't allow long periods of uninterrupted time to play games.

It also created something of a backlash, with some gamers considering "save scumming" to be a form of cheating, saying that it makes randomized events (like percentage chance to pick a lock) meaningless, and making other sorts of claims about how quicksaving is a bad influence on game design.
posted by straight at 7:41 PM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Regarding "cheating" with save games, I remember reading (but cannot find references so maybe this is all lies) that in the early computer RPG games, some players would quickly eject the floppy diskette if a character died, hoping to reload the game from an earlier state. Game designers could wait until after the game was saved to tell the player that a character had died, but diskette drives were slow and a significant pause could give the player as much warning as printing "IOLO IS DEAD."

Supposedly in one of the Ultima (?) games, the programmer manipulated the code for the read/write head of the diskette drive so that at a crucial moment it would be poised to instantly write the bit signifying a character's death to deny the player any chance to eject the diskette ("eject" in this case meant disengaging the read/write head so the diskette could be safely removed).
posted by straight at 7:53 PM on February 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

Like can't you do some transactionally-safe game saving so you don't delete my last save until the new one commits?

we do that, there's an api we use and it just does exactly that

it used to be a lot worse in the memory card era

so many rules, so many trc fails

but now we have giant hard drives, on the internet

and it's hard to tell when a well written game is saving at all
posted by inpHilltr8r at 9:50 PM on February 23, 2019

Meh, this automatic cloud saving crap makes you totally dependent on whoever maintains the servers and the code for the Microsoft XboxOneLiveAllMyCommunityEtc., which means you have to pray every time your profile tries to sync. To hell with that; give me Skyrim-style local autosaving and the manual save option any day. I can sync those files my own damn self.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 5:05 AM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

No mention of the legendary Elite (Acornsoft, 1984)

Load New Commander? (Y/N)

Someone reverse engineered the save format and bought us "Elite Cheat" a year or so after release ... without which I'd never have experienced most of this ridiculously huge game running on 32KB ram.
posted by memebake at 6:15 AM on February 24, 2019

T.D. Strange I see your King's Bounty and raise you the 60 character long password screen for Legend of The Mystical Ninja on the SNES.
posted by tomp at 11:06 AM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Nelson I love that story!

you know, when a time race happens, that the fastest lap so far gets recorded as a ghost driver? yep, you guessed it - his ghost still rolls around the track today.

and so i played and played, and played, untill i was almost able to beat the ghost. until one day i got ahead of it, i surpassed it, and...

i stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure i wouldnt delete it.

Bliss
posted by bendy at 12:56 PM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

And then most games take at most 1 second to save; why even bother popping up the icon for that brief a moment? Particularly in games with frequent autosaves.

I find them very reassuring. It's like, well, I may have completely lost control of my life, but at least I'm not going to have to do that boss again any time soon.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:59 PM on February 24, 2019 [4 favorites]

On passwords:
Really a form of data encryption/obfuscation that offloads the data onto a *really* physical storage medium: a piece of paper. They typically took the form of a bunch of characters that encoded essential game information plus a checksum or other failsafe to ensure the correctness of the rest of it.

Metroid is an interesting example. The infamous JUSTIN BAILEY password is just random data, that happens to be interesting and memorable enough (it has Samus without her spacesuit, ordinarily a reward for finishing the game very quickly) to catch on. Probably more people have seen Samus without her suit because of this password than the intended way. The checksum in Metroid is only one byte long, meaning, generally speaking, any random password will have a 1-in-256 chance of being correct. (Source)

Metroid was originally implemented as a Famicom Disk System (FDS) game that saved game data directly to disk. What you enter is basically a conversion of the scant few bytes that would be written to disk into a password. Encoded within that password is some surprising data. It not only records which of the many missiles, energy tanks and other items you've found, but also how many missiles you're carrying, and the amount of time you've been playing. This last bit is probably the part that takes up the most space in the password, taking up four full bytes. Each character in the Metroid password format is six bits, meaning five of the characters in Metroid's 32-character password are there simply to record the amount of time, in rough units of about 4 or 5 seconds, you've played the game.
posted by JHarris at 9:45 PM on February 24, 2019 [4 favorites]

Metroid Password Tool, if you want a graphical way to build up a password. It's interesting to me that it's possible to create illegal game states with some passwords. The game engine apparently runs just fine, even if you load a password that specifies "The High Jump Boots were taken, but I do not have the high jump capability". The interesting state is you can have both the Ice Beam and the Wave Beam simultaneously, about which the article JHarris links says "you get a weird cross between the two beams. It doesn't seem to hurt the game".
posted by Nelson at 7:25 AM on February 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

> the disc has a big black spot

Mmmm. Doubt that. First, PS1 discs were already black on the data side and, second, the disc still spins while the game is Paused. So.
posted by Sutekh at 10:24 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I remembered them being blue, but you're right. I guess it was the PS2 that had blue discs.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:50 AM on February 26, 2019

fimbulvetr: "Since 1991, every time I have got a new computer or hardrive I have copied the contents of the previous one onto it. I have all sorts of old save games, and even ancient installations of win 3.1 and dos buried deep in nested folders labelled “old computer”."

Whenever I upgrade to a new computer, I make a point of installing two of my all-time favorite nostalgic PC games: SimCity 2000 and Civilization II. It gets a little harder each time, but setup doesn't feel "done" until I get them both working.

Looking into the Program Files, I still have my saved Civ2 game from the afternoon of 9/11, with cities named after characters from Les Mis (which we were reading in English class at the time) and schoolyard slang. It's weird having an artifact of such a distant time so immediately accessible, in perfect fidelity. Like a 4K video of your tenth birthday party, or a childhood toy that's impervious to dust and decay.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:11 AM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]