Do you remember when games didn’t save your progress and you had to leave your system on if you wanted to maintain the progress you had achieved? Then pray that you didn’t have a power outage or that your parents would say that’s enough video games and as you pleaded with them, they cut the power to the system? Well, I remember those ancient times and I was so happy when you could save your game progress on your game cartridge and eventually to a memory card. But have you ever experienced the loss of save states or corruption of your game data?  

I remember 3 specific occasions in which I had this occur, so I’ll provide some backstory on each.

Mario Party 3 – I received Mario Party 3 for my birthday in 1999 and I spent the better part of 5 plus years trying to complete certain characters story modes to put a bust of their head on a Mt. Rushmore type feature in the game. I had Luigi, Yoshi, Mario and was working on the last one. In 2005 during college one of my room mates slightly inebriated classmates had started up my game and in his altered state had erased all my data. I didn’t know this until months later and I was so frustrated by this, I have not purchased another Mario party game since this occurred. One day I may go back to it, but the work I put in is forever lost and so has my motivation to play through another game in the series.   

Fallout 3 – In autumn of 2008 I purchased Fallout 3 and immediately I fell in love with the game. I put in over 100 hours in the game to find all the locations and by doing so I had not completed the storyline. I reached a point in the game called the Jefferson building and your dad in the game instructs you to take out the super mutants within the location. I went inside and instead of super mutants I came across enclave soldiers which I eliminated and then went back to my father where again he says to eliminate the super mutants. I went back in and found no such creatures and after this continuous loop of the same interaction I went online and found out that this was a game breaking glitch and since I stopped at the Tranquility Lane location prior to visiting the Three-Dog radio station, I had caused the game to break and since I had put so many hours into the game I felt cheated because I could not finish the main story. I waited about six months then played the game and only completed the main quest. However, it is still my favorite Fallout title to date.   

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – In late 2011 I picked up a copy of skyward sword and had played on and off for a few months. I reached the Ancient Cistern dungeon and packed my Wii away to move to a new town and place. About a month later I had unpacked the Wii and promptly started up the game only to find that there was no save data on my SD card. I tried to see if it was on another one, but no luck. I decided to wait a few months before I started my journey once again. The loss of this data was never clear, but lucky me I got to play through the game once again with its stellar motion controls. Well stellar may not be the right adjective in this case.    

Have you had anything like this occur to you? Have you ever accidentally deleted someone else’s data? If any of these scenarios have happened to you, I’m so sorry for your loss. Please let us no your data loss stories and experiences.

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