I see with some sadness how online gaming is slowly burying that thing about leaving school and going straight to a friend’s house to do homework. With parents often working late, preparing for tests and doing the next day’s homework became a chore. play console 10 out of 10 times.
On one of those addictive afternoons we went to a classmate’s house to enjoy his brand new Dreamcast. His only game, Shenmue, was spinning on the console, and despite the fact that he had already been using the game and the console for a few weeks, what we had ahead of us was a 10-minute intro that that kid was forced to repeat day after day.
No, it’s not that I was a fan of Yu Suzuki’s work and enjoyed every second of that initial cinematic, it’s that I didn’t have a visual memory in which to save the game and he had no choice but to start from the beginning every afternoon.
The importance of saving game
If there was a moment in my life when I stopped to think how important the invention of saved gamesIt was definitely that one. The second was the first time I understood that not turning off the console while the game was being saved did not appear on the screen for trolling.
Any time is just as good to pay homage to one of the greatest inventions that video game history has given us: the saved games. And it is that despite the obviousness of the idea today, the truth is that as video games were conceived, the power did not make much sense. save game and continue later.
The point of the vast majority of the games of yesteryear was to learn them from cover to cover in order to be able to play them through in one afternoon, and only with the arrival of more and more complex experiences did the videogame industry consider how they could go one step further.
The passwords as salvation
Faced with some cartridges that in the days of Atari and NES only allowed the reading of information, the first strategy to solve that problem was to resort to passwords alphanumerics that were kept like gold on a cloth once unlocked.
Codes that allowed advance the game to a certain level right after turning on the console and that became the great technological advance that the industry needed to be something more than home arcade machines.
The password they became a bargaining chip at recess, the reason to buy a magazine, and even a marketing tool. At CES in 1987, Nintendo unveiled its line of Password Packsa series of games that, starting with Metroid and Kid Icarus, would allow you to enter passwords to be able to jump directly to where you left off.
Another big step was the internal battery of The Legend of Zelda from Nintendo. A battery with a five-year life expectancy that, far from being a save system per se, tricked the game into thinking it was still plugged in.
Unlike previous solutions that invited the player to insert their own batteries into the cartridge, the Zelda it went unnoticed like a normal cartridge. However, it was still far from ideal.
From passwords and batteries to memory cards
With the combo of internal batteries and passwords serving as an excuse to create RPG games of tens of hours, the advancement of the technique leads us to a new format and, with it, a problem with no apparent solution to the naked eye. It’s time to welcome the CD and, with it, the impossibility of inserting an internal battery into the disc.
How to dodge the bullet? Well, games may no longer come on cartridges capable of saving player progress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean cartridges should be abandoned. And that, plain and simple, was what ideas like the memory card of PlayStation.
With Neo Geo launching the first of them and Sony becoming its icon, memory cards continued to grow in size and possibilities until the zenith of the visual memory from Dreamcast.
An endearing device -half memory card, half portable console-, which Sony itself would try to replicate without much success with a pocket station who was born with the hours counted.
The USB, the GB and the cloud
With flash memory devices offering large capacities at much more earthly prices than proprietary devices, consoles began to leave behind the ability to take your games from here to there in favor of internal storages Much bigger and more efficient.
No more deleting saved games to make room for new ones and, with this, it became even more normalized a system in which we think less and less. They are simply there and we only value them when we miss them.
Thanks to cloud saves and automatic saves, the reality is very different from the notebooks and magazines with codes that always accompanied us as one more peripheral of our console.
If it weren’t for the messages about not turning off the machine while saving, we wouldn’t even stop to think about the importance of these systems. Even more than the graphics and any other advancement, they are the technological pillar that has allowed us to reach today’s games.