This is the thread to mourn when you accidentally delete, corrupt, overwrite important save files. It's as simple as that.
This morning I accidentally deleted my Rayman 2 save on Dreamcast. It was 96% complete (meaning I'd beaten the game, finished most side content, gotten every lums on most levels, and only had a few more Lums to collect. Also fun fact: one of the Lums is missing in the game because the bad guy eats it in a cutscene, so you can never collect them all.)
Oh I'm still bitter about this. Had a save file right before the final boss fight in Persona 3: FES on PS2. My little sister saved over that file with her save of Catz. A lot of time lost.
In my senior year of highschool, a cool freshman gave me a pirated copy of Minecraft on a flashdrive that I played on the school computers. I transfered it over to my computer I bought before going off to college and spent a lot of that summer between high school and college building a big town. A poke-center, a nearly 1:1 recreation of the then-new arena for the Pittsburgh Penguins, and a massive pyramid with secret passages and hidden secrets. I spent so many hours building some pretty fun things, entirely self-taught.
And then one day shortly after getting to college I accidentally deleted my save (was trying to delete a different save). I was so heartbroken that I didn't play again for nearly a decade.
@MovingCastles Very “on brand” thing for a cat to do, I must say.
I don’t have too many save file horror stories worth remembering but, in Ori and the Blind Forest back on the original hardware (360 ? Xbox One ?), I got a crash shortly after the cutscene showing the Giant Owl’s backstory, near the end of the game, and rebooting the game sent me all the way back to the beginning of that damn tree level. Suffice to say I have never played Ori again.
My first Switch turned on and overheated inside a fully zipped protective hard case inside backpack on the way back from the airport, just a few weeks before the firmware update which added cloud saves. As a result, I lost my 100% completed BOTW file, even though my user profile knows I played it 150+ hours… Since then, I never use fully hermetic hard cases.
I’ve lost everything in my life multiple times, so there’s very little (if anything) I’ve managed to hold onto from child hood, let alone teenagerhood or early 20’shood.
So my mourning mainly comes from saves I lost while in the middle of a playthrough. goes without saying I wish I still had my first Animal Crossing town, that I remember very fondly.
My main Chulip savegame where I was 90% through the game, did all the tedious kisses and was set for 100% completion. I let a friend play and she saved over it.
More Friends of Mineral town. ~20 hour Save or something corrupted on an EZ Flash Omega. The associated Another Wonderful Life save on GCN also had to be restarted in order to pair them. I was determined though, eventually picked both up again and beat them and unlocked all the link rewards the old fashioned way.
Over 125 hour Pokemon Soul Silver save. A roommate stole my DS and saved over it with a 15 minute file with a cyndaquil named “zombi”. Had trades from friends, and had all my GBA pokemon transferred to it.
Needless to say, nowadays that I have so much control over my modded consoles, I do regular backups, and backups of those backups. This morning’s hasty Rayman 2 incident prompted me to make the thread. Just a dumb mistake, and I had no way of backing up dreamcast saves to pc yet.
After many hours of grinding B-spec endurance races and overcoming the appearance of the Chaparral 2J, I turned off my ps2 too hastily, noticed the blinking red autosave icon in the corner right as I turned off, destroying me and my cousin’s joint progress in Gran Turismo 4. Playing that game was possibly our greatest bonding experience.
Working designs and interact memory carts had a fued, and it was stated by one party or another that if you used a working design game with an interact memory cart it would be incompatible, or corrupt, or something, but I didn't quite realize that meant when I played Albert Odyssey on Saturn that it would corrupt my 100% complete panzer dragoon saga save (and everything else, but that one got me)
I have two PS1 memory cards and a PS2 memory card out there in the garage. I can go touch them. I‘m 75% sure they will work just fine, but I don’t have the consoles hooked up and don‘t have any way to get the files off them. I did spend some time looking at buying the “PS3 memory card adapter” off of eBay the other week but ended up deciding I wouldn’t actually get a return on my investment.
Part of me thinks it would be neat to say that I have access the save files from when I was a kid learning to be a young adult. But I don't think having my save files from _Final Fantasy VII_ and other Squares, various _Ratchet and Clanks_ and ||_Dead or Alive_|| would actually provide me any insight to who I was then, who I aspired to be, or who I am now. And if I really wanted to, I can walk outside and plug them in. But I haven't done that for about a decade so by definition, it's no longer important to me.
This will make me sound like a psycho but I had a save of Hitman 2 where in the private beach resort island place, I noticed that when you reload the game from a save point dead bodies do a weird jump. So I went and killed everyone on the level and stacked their bodies in a tiny room. By the end when I went near that room the game would run at like 10 fps and loading the save while inside that room made for a hilarious effect. Sadly, the hard rive where I installed the game and had some clips of the bodies jumping and bouncing around died
[“Mourning Savegames”,“The Persistence of Random Access Memory - Mourning Savegames”]
Re: the title change @treefroggy: I mean… it's not random access memory.
@antillese can we still comment on how we lost our 2064: Read Only Memories save files though?
Besides the standard renting Final Fantasy 2 from Blockbuster and your save being gone when you got it again the next week, I remember loaning my copy of Lufia (1) to a friend and when I got it back not only was my save gone but the whole cartridge would no longer save any games at all, I guess the battery backup failed?
Also all anyone talks about is Lufia 2 and I can't remember much about 1 besides the opening, which is about the Lufia 2 characters...
I also have a Pokemon Soul Silver loss, my first ever shiny pokemon (In Pokemon games there‘s a 1/8192 chance that a wild pokemon will appear with an alternate colour, aka “shiny”) was in that game, it was a Zubat named “green”, and as a dumb 9 year-old kid I didn’t know how rare what I had was, and reset over it.
I had a Playstation at age 7, and I‘ve written about what a sweet spot it was to be super young with an original playstation and be given the budget, “kid-friendly” games that were actually just early 90’s two-didmensional gen 5 bangers that 3D-obsessed teens didn't care about anymore. I had Rayman, Mega Man 8, Bomberman Party Edition.
But for those same reasons, no one had purchased me a memory card for about two or three years of my playstation experience. That made it even more of an interesting sweet spot, where my Playstation use was pretty similar to the pre-sram NES days, starting platformers from stage 1 every time I played. Rayman had passwords, but my mom always threw away anything I left at her house…. (she was 26 lol)
I had a save file for Chrono Cross that my brother “accidentally” erased. I put that in quotes because you have to click through like 3 screens and manually move the cursor to NOT overwrite the file… He was probably just zoned out and thought he was saving over his file but I was pretty bitter about it at the time.
That's my only lost save file story, so I'll brighten up the thread with some heartwarming save file stories.
I recently sold my copy of Soul Silver that had a shiny Rattata on it that I had caught. When I sold it I told the buyer about it as just a fun oddity and I said, I know you'll probably delete that save but I just need you to know it's there. A few weeks later, he called me back and said that while he did delete the save, he had managed to catch a shiny Ho-Oh on the same cart. I'd like to think it was my old save file's spirit shining through.
Also, I have my childhood copy of Sonic 3 with all save files full, most of them complete with all characters with the Hyper Emeralds and everything from when I was a kid. I grew up super poor and didn't have a new console between when I got the Genesis and the Dreamcast, so I played the crap out of Sonic 3. I will keep those save files for as long I can until they are taken by bit rot.
When I sold my Steam Deck I attempted to copy my PCSX2 memory card off so that I could use them on another device but copied the wrong folder and wiped my saves when I formatted the device. Lost my 40 hour DQVIII save and was soooo bummed because I was really into the game. Haven’t gone back since 
When I was a teenager, I had nearly a 100% profile in Final Fantasy XII; my first Final Fantasy. On my last play session, I had saved before the door to the final boss after having completed everything in the game. The next day, to my horror, that file had corrupted.
The game is so excellent I have since seen the ending, and I play it regularly.
A few years later, still a teenager, I had attempted to get a platinum trophy in Resident Evil 5. The same thing had happened as I was tidying up S-ranking the last of the levels on the hardest difficulty.
In my early 20’s, I had picked the game up again after it had been rereleased on then-gen consoles. I went for the platinum again, this time an unlockable item had never triggered, meaning I couldn’t get one of the trophies.
In a happier memory surrounding saved games, for months my brother and I didn’t have a memory card for our PS1. As such, we treated Spyro 2 like Rogue, seeing how for we could get in a day or until we were told to turn it off, passing the controller around.
I wasn’t expecting to lose another so soon
Tonight I beat Yakuza 0
Then while enjoying the final cutscenes I accidentally tabbed out and it crashed the game. Now I gotta do all that shit again.
I'll try and use cheat tables to one-shot the bosses or something
i think ive been lucky enough to avoid most save file errors, thankfully.
but when i was a young teenager and got a ps1 as a gift i didnt have enough money to buy a second memory card for a long time. so at various times i had to make tough choices about whether or not i should overwrite a save on a game and i always hated having to do that.
now that i mostly play on pc i get kinda annoyed when games have an artificial save limit. im playing through ff7remake and i think it has 30 save slots. why not infinite square enix?? i promise my hard drive can take it! i want every time i save to be available so i can load the game up and only be a few mins away from whatever part i want to play again!
