If My Memory Serves Me Right…

I should be able to pick up my game from where I left off, and indeed I can but it wasn’t always like this.

There was once a time when the save point was unheard of and a Hard Drive was something completely different and not always related to motoring.

Before the advent of saving there was the note pad and pen.

This handy pairing was used to take down the passwords needed to maintain your progress. The premise was simple and in theory good: at the end of each stage or level you would be given a password – this password would then be typed in when you next played the game and allowed you to carry on from where you left off. There was however one problem with this: the passwords were often epic and unnecessarily complex!

Although the pen and paper held its own for many years, game manufacturers started to put batteries into their games to allow the saving of high scores. It wasn’t until 1994 when a little company called Sony invented something called the Playstation that saving really became the ‘in thing’ – once the Playstation and its wonderful little saving card had set the standard, everyone wanted to get on-board.

Sega had the VMU, Nintendo the Control Pack and the Atari Jaguar made you type in a password! The memory card, in whatever form, allowed gamers to take their saves on the road, share their high scores and never be without those vital stats! If they had a downside it was their size and price: they were not exactly big or cheap, unlike Essex girls. These days you can pick a 4GB flashdrive for less than an 8MB Playstation 2 memory card – so it’s little wonder that in this modern time we have called upon the massive capacity of the internal Hard Drive and all its game saving greatness!