The terror of a memory card
Almost every owner of a classic PlayStation will have traumatic memories of the “memory cards.” These were external storage chips on which game saves were stored because consoles did not have internal hard drives back then.
However, some nasty developer must have thought back then to make memory card technology so short-lived and unreliable that gamers would regularly have a scare.
It was common for beloved game saves from particularly long titles (like the Final Fantasy series) to simply disappear into data nirvana, nullifying the work of hundreds of hours.
There were many sources of errors. Here are a few highlights:
- The PlayStation would freeze while saving. After a restart, both the old and new save would be gone.
- Game saves would become “corrupt” and could no longer be read.
- The memory card would completely stop working.
The worst “source of errors,” however, were probably younger siblings who were allowed to “play a little on the console” – and ended up “overwriting” the 140-hour save of Final Fantasy VII with a 30-minute save of some boring racing game. These tears hardened us and created feuds that would last for decades.
Some even claimed that this was Sephiroth’s true power…
In today’s times, gamers can only smile tiredly about this. Save files are stored on reliable internal hard drives, and many devices even offer the option to save game files externally in the cloud.
We did not have that luxury back then. However, old gamers know their classic video games almost by heart – they were often forced to play through them multiple times because the save file was lost.
Multiplayer on the same PC was a nightmare. Didn’t exist? Oh, it did…
