Here’s something unusual that’s happened to me a few times before. It happened some number of years ago, but I only just remembered it recently.
This takes place back in the days where video games were on cartridges. Data could be saved and loaded FAST in comparison to today, and I believe a battery (made to last a long time) was used to keep your saved data when the game was turned off. Of course, for any of that to matter, the game has to actually load the saved data when you turn it on.
But this tale isn’t about a game that fails to load its saved data and erases everything you worked so hard to achieve (although, that has happened all too many times by itself). This is about games that fail to load your saved data, then successfully load it the next time you turn them on. Apparently, these games have the ability to suffer from temporary amnesia. Who would’ve thought?
Maybe it’s just dirt in the cartridge or some such explanation, but the fact of the matter is that many times I’ve started a game, watched the title screen, and found all my saved data apparently erased at the file select screen. After switching the game off, reinserting the cartridge, and turning it back on (often enough with a prayer of, “Please no, please no, please no, please no!”), 9 times out of 10, the saved data would be exactly as it should be. Admittedly, this sometimes took more than one try, but the data was still there.
With these games (and computers in general), deleted data is “freed” to be written over, but the data is not erased. It’s more efficient to do things that way—why write over the same block of data once to blank it out and once to write the new data in later when you can just write the new data in when you have it? There’s even one “famous” (read aloud “existent on the internet”) trick for The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past to restore lost data (NOTICE: I don’t recommend trying this unless you have data you are willing to risk losing forever. You have been warned). You can read about it on this site (look under SNES and look up L—you’ll see it right away).
It would make some sense if it just failed to read saved data and wrote over it with new data if you saved again. But there’s one case that sticks out it my mind that throws off everything I thought I knew. I believe it was Super Mario 64 (but I wouldn’t swear to that). The beginning is obvious; I started it one day and the saved data was gone (3 files out of 4, I think). “Oh, well”, I thought, “I don’t mind starting a new file.” So I start a new file, play for a while, save it and turn it off. When I started the game up later the same day, the old saved data was back. The old file 1 with 120 stars had replaced that new one with 10 stars. Even if files 2 and 3 came back, shouldn’t file 1 have been overwritten? And that further begs this question: where the heck did the new file actually get saved to?
Memory cards and data saved on the system don’t seem to have these kinds of problems (not to my knowledge anyway). The closest thing to this here is when you insert the wrong memory card and panic for a brief moment when you don’t see your saved data. It would seem things are getting a bit better as time goes on.
I know I had some clever way to wrap this up, but… well, you get the idea…