When you consider what an incredibly basic feature it is, it’s difficult to believe there was once an era in gaming in which the ability to save was a novelty. Because of the technical limitations at the time, developers sought to make simple experiences that weren’t really meant to be completed in the traditional sense, but rather played like a game of pinball wherein you kept going until you expended all of your lives. When console gaming truly took off, however, the idea of playing a game in multiple sessions became mainstream after being pioneered in the PC gaming scene for a number of years.
Considering how long the ability to save has been around, one might think there’s nothing to the process anymore, but you would be surprised how easy it is to mess up.
One of the games that brought my attention to the strategy RPG genre was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I picked it up around the same time I discovered Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. Although I enjoyed both games back in the mid-2000s, I ultimately feel The Blazing Blade has held up better by virtue of having a story that doesn’t crumble when you the minute you consider its implications.
One year after I got the game, I wanted to do a second playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. This proved a little problematic because the game only features two save slots. I wanted to keep my original playthrough while experiencing the game from the beginning in a different way. Unfortunately, the fact that I saved in the second slot ended up being my undoing. Eventually, out of force of habit, I eventually ended up overwriting the data in the first save slot, erasing all of the hard work I put into that file.
One of my childhood favorites was a game by the name of NHL ’94. I ended up learning a lot about hockey through playing that game, and it is still a game I like to revisit every now and again. Those familiar with the game may be wondering why I’m bothering mentioning it in an article about saving. After all, NHL ’94 features passwords, not save slots. Even so, I assure you there is painful, saving-related memory to be had with this game. You see, rather than saving your progress via an internal battery, this game makes you write down decidedly lengthy passwords. I remember making it fairly far into the playoffs only to realize – to my horror – that I had recorded the password incorrectly. This was long before smart phones or capture cards were around, meaning that I had no way of taking a snapshot of the screen itself to ensure I recorded it properly. If I didn’t, that was the end of it.
Although not quite an example of inopportune saving, I do have one weird story regarding Super Mario 64. I remember one time in which all of my save files were inexplicably missing. I was annoyed, but I decided to start the game over from the beginning. However, before I obtained a single Power Star, the game froze. Upon resetting, all my previous saves were restored. As odd as it may sound, the exact same thing occurred a number of years later with my Goldeneye cartridge.
This last story is technically a near-miss rather than an actual saving failure, but it’s too strange not to include. It tangentially involves BioShock 2. However, this has nothing to do with my playthrough of said game, but rather what happened as I was writing up my review of it. You see, sometime last year, I decided that my review of BioShock Infinite wasn’t that good. I ended up making a very amateurish mistake when reviewing it because my argument as for why it was good boiled down to “because I said so”. It was a common approach many prominent gaming critics such as Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw and Bob Chipman adopted, and when I gained more experience writing, I realized what a debilitating flaw that is.
Anyway, after making the decision to rereview it, I took down the original review and started over from the beginning of the series. After discussing BioShock, I set my sights on BioShock 2, which I had recently completed. I find it difficult to concentrate on writing reviews at home, so I took my laptop with me to work on it outside of the house. That morning, I made the active decision not to back up my work, reasoning that I was running short on time when I finally remembered. “What could possibly go wrong?” I thought.
I ended up getting my answer after putting the finishing touches on my review when the building I was in caught fire and I had to evacuate immediately. Naturally, I had to leave my laptop behind. Fun fact: this marked the very first time I ever called 911. Once the fire was put out, I asked one of the firefighters if they could bring back my backpack, and they did after deeming it unimportant to the investigation. Thankfully, nobody was killed and those who were injured are expected to make a full recovery.
So now it’s your turn.
Have you ever made a gigantic mistake through the simple act of saving? Or actively choosing not to save as the case may be?
Extra Life 
Great topic! And it varies game by game. I’m on my first ever run through Skyrim on the Switch right now and saving regular is highly important. But if you time it badly it can really screw you over.
Ori and the Blind Forest has a similar issue, due to its difficulty. My advice with that one is just to save as often as possible to avoid frustrations.
Was it you who set fire to your building, by the way? I had a housemate once who went to bed drunk and left noodles blasting away in the kitchen over a pan and flame. Almost did us all in.
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Yeah, considering how many important decisions are in that game (and the Elder Scrolls series in general), I myself ended up making several saves just in case I made a bad decision. As tough as it makes things, that’s the think I like about Dark Souls; you really have to make decisions carefully because of how frequently it autosaves.
It’s interesting how Ori lets you create save points. I can imagine a lot of strategy goes into that.
Huh, I thought I was the only one around here who went through something like that. Sounds like you came much closer to biting it, though; I was thankfully close to the door when I had to escape the burning building. Fortunately, it turned out well for the both of us, huh? Mine was caused by a propane explosion. I’m not sure exactly what happened, having not witnessed what caused it myself, but I think an errant spark caused the explosion as a mechanic was working on a vehicle. Did you have to use a flame-resistant towel when you escaped?
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Dark Souls I’ve yet to play. It’s on the Switch so I may well give it a whirl post-Skyrim.
There was a lot of smoke and a pan into the sink type deal, plus a raging fire alarm. Way back in 2006 when I were a whippersnapper, but still saving lives evenn then.
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I know right! Saving is especially critical on older games sometimes because sometimes they do not have the auto save feature. Awesome article! Also congrats on the author getting their Super Mario 64 saves back too!
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In all honesty, I prefer manual saving over autosaving because the latter has the potential to leave you up the creek if it saves in an inopportune moment. Manual saving involves an extra step, but at least then, you get to contemplate whether or not it’s a good idea at a given time (and if the answer is no, you have no one to blame but yourself assuming the game is designed well).
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In today’s era, I am always immensely annoyed, if there is no option to save freely (except maybe horror titles).
Even with free saving, I have adopted the habit of keeping at least three different save files, in case one of them got corrupted or deleted. Very often, I just make a new savegame every time I save.
There was one time, however, where that habit backfired, namely while playing “The Witcher” (the first game). I have a pretty beefy PC, so performance is not really an issue, but gradually the game slowed down. At first, everything went super smoothly, but loading times kept getting longer, framerates would drop, I’d get issues with screen tearing and so on. After doing a lot of searching online, which didn’t help me at all, I noticed that my hard drive was full. It turned out, the hundreds of savestates had amassed to a gigantic data pool and used up more than three-quarters of my disk space!
So I deleted all but the most recent few files, and after 15 minutes of horrible framerates and loading times, it suddenly worked. I have no idea of how the programming of saving works, but to me, it seemed as if the game had to load up the whole world as I played, and once it was finished, from one second to the other, it worked smoothly again.
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I don’t mind that so much as long as there’s a way to suspend the game. This is because I feel autosaving causes developers to get lazy. By placing save points, they have to consider if the stretches between them can be completed in a single sitting. If there are frequent checkpoints, the game has a larger potential to become a trial-and-error affair.
Save files for RPGs tend to be large, so I can see why that would clog up your hard drive quickly. That’s definitely one way to make the computer run faster – free up space so it doesn’t have as much to load, though your case sounds like a bit of bad programming may have been involved.
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You almost said it yourself: “they have to consider the stretches”. If they would, then I’d have no problem with it. Sadly, many games without manual saving have badly designed checkpoints/save spots.
Although I do admit that when they are implemented well, then it can be a very effective tool to set the pacing, make you feel tension and relieve (i.e. Dark Souls’ bonfires), or simply provide you with cool in-game extras (Prince of Persia’s sandstorm-thingies)
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I think it should be mandatory that every game have an automatic save feature that happens whenever necessary. I love Stardew Valley but my only gripe with the game is that it only saves once you go to bed for the night, so if you had to stop midday, you’d lose all the progress you made. Same goes for Animal Crossing, I felt like it only saved when I was done playing for the day or for a short session and I would be “punished” by Resetti (spelling?) if I chose to reset the game without saving cause I did something I didn’t want to save. In earlier games he would make me type a dialogue back to him and wouldn’t let me go on until I got it right and then in later games his aggressive nature was toned down.
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I would say that if the game limits your ability to save, there should be a “suspend” option to compensate. Having to complete an hour or so of gameplay in a single sitting is a bit much. I think the inability to reload saves worked well enough in Dark Souls, but I can see why you’d find it frustrating in Animal Crossing – especially when you realized you made the wrong decision.
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I had to learn the “save early, save often” approach the hard way when I was playing through Dragon Age, or pretty much any earlier BioWare game. I would play for about 45 minutes, get game over and panic when I’d realize I forgot to manually save the game. And that was AFTER the prehistoric age of passwords and memory cards 🤓
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I haven’t played much of BioWare’s output, but that is a mantra I had to adopt when playing Baldur’s Gate (though “save early, save often” was originally coined by Sierra). If you don’t save every five minutes in that game, you’re going to get wasted every time.
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I made the mistake of restarting Breath of the Wild to try and get that “new game” feeling again. It didn’t work as well as I’d liked, and now I have to eventually redo all the DLC, shrines, Korok expansions, etc. So I might just not every play again 😛 Although I do love the game!
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Ouch. At least it’s a great game you’re replaying, but I can imagine it was at least a little annoying. That’s the great thing about it though; it’s just like the original in how you can have subtly different experiences every time you play it.
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That’s very true. My second go round was much more successful as far as not dying and being familiar with the tricks of the trade. The biggest obstacle is needing to complete the Master Trials again…that last one in particular was very tough lol
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Back when I played console games far more often, (Playstation 1 era), I definitely made the mistake of forgetting to save at critical points. Now, out of paranoia, I save at literally every possibility lol.
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I’ve also found the opposite would occur as well in that I would forego saving because I felt I was in a dire situation I didn’t save myself into an effectively unwinnable situation. It’s a good thing most games now allow you to choose a slot to save in as opposed to forcing you to use the original one because now if something like that happens, you can restore the older one easily enough.
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I definitely have but I can think of a single exact instance. I just know I’m so paranoid about saving that in todays world of multiple save slots I usually have at least 5 different opportunities and overwrite each one as I go. (In case of glitches, I can revert back to a previous save and hope it’s fixed). I think that particular fear has a lot to do with trophies too though, and fearing I’m passing a point of no return.
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I know what you mean; whenever I’m typing up my reviews, I have a tendency to hit Ctrl and S almost every time I finish a sentence – autosave isn’t something you can take for granted. Glitches aren’t quite as debilitating as they used to be because erasing the game doesn’t erase the save file, but when they do, it’s highly troublesome.
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Oh yeah, I’ve been there many a time with each Final fantasy game. Accidentally overwriting my save files I intended to keep or worse, my memory card got too old and stopped functioning, making hundreds of hours of gameplay (mainly FFT the first one) obsolete.
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Is it true that PlayStation memory cards were notorious for breaking? I’m glad we’re past that era of gaming because I myself remember when my GameCube memory card stopped functioning; it was indeed heartbreaking.
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They weren’t very notorious for breaking, but over the years I did have to buy new ones unfortunately.
Oh no! How much gametime did you lose? It was indeed heartbreaking for me.
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Thankfully, I wasn’t in the middle of a playthrough of anything, but I did lose all of the progress I made in every GameCube game I owned. Makes me glad backing up saves is a lot easier now.
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Oh god, no! How dreadful! Yes, things are better now, thank goodness.
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I am not a gamer but enjoyed reading about how early games were meant to use up lives and be played like the pinball machine – good analogy
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Well, to be honest, I’ve run into this problem in non-gaming situations as well. Like when I was writing up a review and failed to notice my time on the library computer was about to expire. Thankfully, I only lost a paragraph or so.
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Thank goodness that passwords are no longer a thing. I too have lost progress in the past by writing down a code wrongly. The worst save issue I ever had was with the Danganronpa shooting game. I saved after beating the final boss because I had to go to work. When I returned home and started the game I discovered the file was corrupted. Apparently it was due to a known bug. Sadly I only had one save file so I had to watch the ending on YouTube. These days I make a point of having multiple saves and worry whenever a title doesn’t give you the option to save in different slots.
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I know, right? It’s downright heartbreaking whenever it happens. I especially disliked it whenever they consisted of zeros and Os along with uppercase Is and lowercase ls. And oof, you lost your progress right at the end of the game? That must have been crushing. It’s bad enough whenever it occurs within the first act. I myself can get a little paranoid and end up making multiple saves if the game allows for it – even if it really isn’t necessary.
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Well, I think losing your work to a fire is one of the more dramatic ways I’ve seen it happen.
I’ve had the problem of accidentally saving over file 1 many a time. The worst has always been Bethesda games. My old girlfriend and I always ended up having parallel runs going through those at the same time, and whichever save were most recent would be the ones on top. Multiple times, I had accidentally saved over hours and hours she had put into her own game. It took a long while for her to learn to use multiple save files, but I would have hoped that she never needed to.
That’s about the only major one I can remember. But I also remember Tales of the Abyss had the typical “Don’t turn of the power, don’t remove your memory card” while it was saving, but it also included “Don’t remove the controller” in there too. No idea why. A friend of mine and I spent some time unplugging the controller while it was saving, but never saw any effect from it.
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Yup, on that day, my life became a Michael Bay film. You guys had no idea that you almost didn’t get a chance to read my BioShock 2 review in its original form. Amazingly, I’m not the only one around here who had to escape from a burning building (though mine was the result of propane explosion as opposed to a roommate’s stove stupidity).
Anyway, yeah, speaking from experience, it is very easy to get overzealous with save files when it comes to playing Bethesda games. Saving over one’s own files is bad enough, but I can imagine having someone else using the same console erasing your saves would be annoying. It’s a bit of a shame Bethesda games don’t allow you to name the files.
I know that the Nintendo 64 often panicked whenever you unplugged the controller (or started the console without plugging one in), but I never heard of such an issue occurring with the PlayStation 2. Indeed, on the PlayStation 3 emulator, you need to press the PS button to activate the controller in the first place. That message is really bizarre.
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Yes, and it was so bad I’ve apparently blocked it from my memory. I can’t remember what game it was, but I saved right before a boss, and my previous save was a few hours prior to that, so I either needed to defeat the boss or go back two hours. I eventually gave up and reloaded the previous save and did a few things differently so I was more prepared for the boss when I got to it, and then saved maybe two or three times in between (haha). While that’s not the most dramatic mistake I’ve ever heard of, it was pretty dramatic for me. I wish I could remember what game it was… if I think of it, I’ll come back and comment again.
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It’s too bad you don’t remember what game you were playing. Now that I think about it, there was a bug affecting certain Pokémon cartridges wherein one needed to save the game twice in order for it to register. While the game could still be played, the proposition fell apart in the end wherein the game saves automatically once, preventing players from accessing the post-game content.
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It actually might have been something embarrassing like one of the Dragon Age games. Hm…
That sounds like an awful time. It’s amazing how we take good save systems for granted now, but they do still have their issues sometimes, it seems!
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I think we all have a save fail story. Here’s mine. It involves Final Fantasy VIII and me moving from one console to another. I’d been playing it in one room and for whatever reason I either had to or chose to move to another room. I’d brought my memory card with me and loaded up the game. I must’ve played for about 4-6 hours when I called it quits. I came back at a later time to play and loaded up the save file from 4-6 hours ago and somehow managed to save over the newer file like a complete ass. When I realized all of my progress was gone, I was so mad at myself. I didn’t play for a few weeks because I didn’t feel like doing the same things I’d done before, but I eventually went back. I’ve had similar things happen to me with writing, but that’s a far sadder story.
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Oof, it’s just like me with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Even if it’s a game you like, you wouldn’t want to repeat the opening few hours just to catch up, huh? And I know I’ve had a few instances in which I lost progress on a review because I was using the library computer at the time and failed to notice that I was running out of time.
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Oh no! I’m so much more cautious with any writing now. I email myself just in case so I have backup. With games I’m freaking neurotic about saving. I remember my husband was playing something and he ended up dying and hadn’t saved for hours. I looked at him like he had two heads. I save before going into any town or dungeon because you never know what might happen.
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I remember having to write down long save passwords for Super Tennis on the SNES… but I was a paranoid child and checked and double-checked what I wrote down a million times lol! Regarding your Super Mario 64 experience, I had a similar experience with Animal Crossing Wild World on the DS. I booted up the game and my town was just… gone. But after restarting a couple times, my save file was there again! The worst experience I have with saving is when I had an ex-boyfriend’s copy of Donkey Kong Country 3. He had cleared EVERYTHING in that game… I think his file was 103%. I was watching the end credits when the screen went black… nothing happened for several minutes, so I finally reset the SNES a few times. When it finally loaded the game again, his save file was just GONE. I reset a few more times, hoping it would come back, but it never did. I felt HORRIBLE!! He wasn’t even mad about it, but I still feel crappy when I think about it… even though that happened more than 20 years ago!
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I was as well, though that didn’t stop me from recording the password incorrectly on occasion. I wonder if that issue with the save files not appearing is because the battery was temporarily misaligned? I’d like to hear a technical explanation as to how that happened from someone in the know.
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