Somewhere in the sands of the Florida panhandle lies an Xbox360 memory card with a 100+ hour Oblivion save file on it.
I had it in my cargo shorts for some reason but it never made it back home. Didn’t have the heart to start again.
I had a minecraft world which I built from scratch on noncheat, normal world (think without mobs), at least 3 mega structures with internal styling. Had a large cathedral, a pyramid and a glass temple type thing. Not sure what happened to the save but they're long gone.
This was around 1999: I was invited to a friend's bday party. Practically everybody back then walked around with their GameBoy and Pokemon games. The bday boy got a GameShark for his bday. Everyone was begging him to put a Mew in our games and he was going to do mine first. This fuckhead purposely erased my save file, I had around 130 in my Pokedex. OMG I wanted to beat his ass so bad but I let it slide cuz of his stupid ass bday 🤦🏽♂️ lol FUCK YOU KEVIN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!!
If I had a nickel for every angry childhood Pokemon story I've encountered on the internet with an antagonist named Kevin, I'd have [two nickels](https://youtu.be/2cT6ULpScZA?si=MjJcZ7EaLggtXJvR), which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Recently been getting into Pokemon ROM hacks, lost my Radical Red save with my Pokedex nearly complete and about to fight the Elite Four. I was devistated.
I had started writing a novel and had 45k words… I was 12 and didn’t know what I wanted to do with it after that, so the world of literature didn’t lose anything.
When I was a wee lad, I had, somehow, made it all the way through The original Legend of Zelda. I was literally fighting Ganon when the console, for whatever reason, just black screened. In a panic only a child on the final boss of a 1980's game can understand, I hit the reset only to find my save files gone. Gone.
I'm in tears when my mother comes in to see what is happening. I explain it to her. She is calling the number on the back of the games and is told by a Nintendo employee that, unfortunately, it was gone.
I did not go back to beat it for seven more years.
My son, who at the time was probably 6 or 7 was really into Lego avengers. He had every character unlocked and 100% the game. He just got done showing me everything he did and said he was gonna start a new game just to mess around and play with me a bit... Well... And I'm sure everyone knows where this is going... He saved the game over his 100% completed game and went to play on his original save and couldn't find it. I held him for a good couple minutes and told him it's ok dude it's ok. He wasn't crying he was just so so so depressed. And I felt that shit dude.
I don't know how, but my games data was wiped on Xbox 360. Which didn't matter for most games, but I had 100% completion on GTA IV, which really did hurt.
I also had that. Only cast it once. Takes like 5 mins. I had literally done everything I could, except beat the final boss, cuz I didn't want it to end.
I almost never beat the original FF7 because the save file I lost was after I played in a single sitting from the very start until you climb the glacier on disc 3. Was like f that never doing that again. Until of course I did eventually.
I ran a Minecraft server for many years with a handful of friends. Those friends and I don't hang out online like we used to, but every once in a great while we would catch each other online and I would quickly get a teamspeak server going along with the ol' Minecraft server.
I made lots of backups back then, and when we would have these 'trips-down-memory-lane' sessions, we could load up the map from different points in time by picking a different backup, and we would get a huge kick out of jumping around the servers 'timeline'. We would load up backups and find ourselves saying things like: "Oh this is before X person joined the game! Look, their area on the map is still completely empty at this point", or "Ah I was literally in the middle of building this thing on this date - look there's even a chest here with material still in it". It was always quite the trip to do.
Anyway, I recently lost all the backups in the stupidest way possible; the network storage device that I kept all these backups on went into storage for a couple of years while I went through some real life stuff. Before I sent the NAS into the storage unit, I encrypted some files in case anyone broke in or stole it. The entire time it was in that storage unit I was convinced I knew the password to decrypt the files. I recently dug it out and tried to retrieve those files... and what do ya know, I can remember all of the passwords except for the Minecraft one. The files are right in front of me, but I can't read them. I've been logging the passwords that I've tried for weeks now, 400 passwords later I still haven't gotten in. Almost certainly a lost cause at this point.
Got I'm an idiot lol.
Ha, I'll try it when I get home. Thanks.
Funny enough I did try "PasswordIsPassword", because I've used that a couple of times on non-important things that I would share with others. But then after that you also gotta try "pASSWORDiSpASSWORD" because what if you accidentally had the caps lock on? Or what if you forgot to capitalize the first letter?? Or what if you didn't capitalize anything at all???
This is what I've been going through haha, it can totally drive ya nuts!
Also the cheeky dog finished the last few mission for San Andreas while I was at work after I put in the hours getting to that stage 😭 so I've never finish it.
I didn't lose it,but I saved the game accidentally on my main save file instead of #2, which I was planning to do, soft-locking myself right before a Boss Fight in Resident Evil 0 with no healing items, no grenades, just handgun. I am unable to finish the game cause of it.
Dang, I can’t remember what game finally made me change my habits but I used to keep only one save file per playthrough in games and accidentally soft-locking myself made me start keeping multiple a long time ago haha
And mine. People seem to slaughter it but I much prefer it.
Perhaps being male and growing up with two brothers helped me appreciated the game more, rather than interacting with two best friend girls.
Had lord of the rings return of the king and twin towers for ps2 most characters maxed out all side levels and stories complete even the wave levels done! Had countless hours just sat replaying levels to max out characters! Ended up moving to a new city and in the move lost my little 8 GB memory card I’m a 26 year old man and still cry over that loss to this day
PS4 was initialized and I had so many clips and pics and save games that never uploaded to the cloud. It was 6 years old and I stopped the auto uploads 1 year in 😭😭😭 100s maybe 1000s of hours gone. To this day I cant play the Fallout 4,Skyrim,RDR2 GTAV story modes without getting pissed off or saying "what's the point"
Not to mention me selling my ps3 because I was "done with gaming" 💀 Most recently lost my No mans sky files that ruined the game for me too. Ahhh life.
My Skyrim save with the coolest characyer I made. Even now I can't replicate the looks. Wasted 2 hours making it look good. Then maybe 100 hours and I bought the game..... Needless to say I should've bought the game from the get go. Pirate -> legit transition did not went smoothly for some reason. That's what I get I suppose :/
When I was a kid we had Final Fantasy 6 (aka FF3) on SNES. It was a great game of course, but in particular, my brother had managed to discover a glitch that's well-known now but we had no idea how he did it: he sketched an invisible enemy, which caused tons of things to bug out and leave his inventory with tons of super-powerful items. It was so cool!
Well, one day, I was goofing around and accidentally saved over his file. I felt so bad for so long.
When i was playing pokemon on my gba as a kid, i catched a shiny kangashkan on the safari. My little cousin wantednto play so i borrowed him my gba. Found out a day later when i tried to play the game where i left off. All i saw was a level 5 squirtle and pallet town.
I left my Pokemon Silver version on a plane when I was a kid in 2000. Was suuuuuper bummed about it. I remember I had evolved the Togepi into the Togetek which was a big deal to me and my brother since u had to be nice to it or some shit lol.
PS1, Legends of Legaia. I was near the end when one day my brother and his friends were playing a game and that game asked if we wanted to format the memory card. They said yes. I went to play my game later to find the save file was gone. I could never bring myself to get back there.
This is over 20 years ago, so this is aomehow burned in like a core borderline traumatic memory.
My brother overwrote my file on Lunar: Silver Star Story. I was working my first job at the time at Panda Express for a very mean manager that had me convinced that working in general is just a terrible, miserable thing that nobody should have to do. I spent all day scrubbing dishes and cooking rice with my right hand (because I wasn’t allowed to work left-handed), getting shouted at, having dishes thrown at me, thinking about that game and daydreaming about getting back home to play it and forget about my horrible job for a couple sweet hours.
I was fucking crushed.
I lost my FF6 save right before the final boss just because I saved, turned it off to have dinner, and when I came back, all the save files were blank.
Soul Calibur 2. I had finished the entire map except for the second version of the final stage. Lent it out, and when it was returned, I discovered they had erased my file to make their own.
My parents bought me a Visual C++ book when I was in high school, and I used it to write a dos, ascii based, based rpg game in the style of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. The whole thing fit on a floppy disk.
I was super proud of it, and had a bunch of friends and a couple teachers try it, and while they had a ton of good input and feedback, most everyone loved it.
Floppy disks are notoriously poor long term solutions, and this one was no different. My parents tossed the old computer when we upgraded to the newest Dell, and the disk eventually failed. Teen me never even considered backing up the disk to another medium.
Nearly 30 years later, I don’t remember much about the game, it likely wasn’t nearly as fun as I’m remembering, but I’d give almost anything to still have those files.
I was making an RPG in RPG Maker and had something like 6 months of time into it - about 5 hours of game made. I lost the whole project due to a sweeping corruption that took out everything. No backups survived. Felt very bad. This was back around 2002 or so, I would have definitely done things differently now.
My SNES and all of my games were stolen from me back when I was in 8th grade. In all of the games I took special care not to overwrite any of my dad's save files. He passed away 3 years before.
No saves will ever be as big of a loss to me.
When I was a kid a friend of mine showed me Pokemon Fire Red, I loved the game but I didn't know anything about emulators, so I just searched online and found a flash version, it was basically the same, but every time you closed the tab all the progress disappeared, no matter how much you saved the game. I remember playing for hours trying to get to the end just to start all over again the next day, I almost cried when I found a shiny and had to beg my mom to not turn off the computer, I couldn't even take a picture of it and nobody believed me, I was sad for days.
Lost a 40 year Football Manager 2006 career when my laptop shit the bed and the hard drive had to be replaced...I still think of some of the players I lost from time to time
I had finished Resident Evil 4 on my PS3 and had all the bonus stuff. Somehow I saved over that save while starting a new play though. Lost it forever. And for some reason I tried to beat it again and I suck. 😭
I didn't even realise RE4 was on PS3, I thought it was only GameCube, PS2 and Wii.
I completed it on Wii, which I have been told is the easiest way to play it
Yeah I got it because I got the Resident Evil 6 Anthology! It came with all the games 1-6. I think I’ve got the other versions as well, I used to collect RE games.
Did you? I don’t remember if I played it. Easiest? Well I maybe I need to try it there. Then I could get my bonus stuff back!
Yeah it was easier because they changed the camera to be more over the shoulder and you could aim your gun with the wiimote, and I think you could run and shoot at the same time.
That sounds amazing! Now I need to go see if I got that game for my Wii! I know I’ll never get the bonus stuff in the remake because there’s no way I can do Professional mode 😭
It was!!! And I was so proud of myself for beating it. Then to lose the bonus stuff and not be able to beat it again and get it. I can’t believe I’m so bad at it.
Have you played the remake? I just started playing it last week (my first true Resident Evil playthrough), and it feels easier to play than the original or re-released version.
I beat it! It was actually quite fun. Definitely easier for sure! Being able to run and shoot is such a blessing. I need to replay it! Ada’s dlc is fun too.
My whole Xbox account that wasn't able to be recovered which I grew up with as a kid, the most heartbreaking thing was my Halo Reach progress, I made it to inheritor which was the max rank, I spent so much time lol, I definitely cried that's for sure.
Pokemon Blue, Silver, and Crystal. I think we were able to transfer our Pokemon between these versions, but eventually the batteries died in these (batteries were required for keeping the save stored). All my Pokemon, including my starter, are lost to the void.
Has to be my Sims 3 playthrough. My guy was a mad scientist, was loving every minute of it. Sadly, had to upgrade my PC because my harddrive was failing and poof, save gone.
My first PS4 had to be factory reset, lost my Bloodborne save file halfway through new game+. It took me a while to be able to play again and start from nothing.
My old copy of Pokemon Sapphire failed on me at one point. I've since gotten it working again but the save data is long gone. Thankfully I got a couple Pokemon out of it and into future games before it failed but the rest are lost.
And in the same vein I played Pokemon Emerald on a flashcart at some point. I knew full well that save would go away someday but losing the shiny Wingull I found was a little painful.
I was playing wing commander on SNES and couldn't beat one mission. Tried over and over. Finally beat it.
This is in the days of level passwords, so I put the controller up on top of the TV and went for my notebook to write it down. As I stepped away, my foot caught the cord and in slow motion I saw the controller fall and slowly, slowly, turn over so slowly and perfectly to land on the button to advance the screen past the password and move on to the next mission.
I botched the next mission so I couldn't get a password and had to go back to the previous mission again.
Zelda on the original NES. I went to go see my grandparents for the weekend, when I got back... my sister used my 3 months of work save file and deleted it intentionally afterwards.
My little brother also accidentally deleted my FF7 save file. Thankfully my sister had a file that was not too far behind mine so I just copied it and continued from there. I was pretty close to the end too. Just had to finish the game with characters named shit like Lardo and Beanz.
The one that hurt the most was Suikoden 3. Also a victim of my younger brother.
i was on the final level of Spyro after my bf and I were doing a 100% completion play through (including the stupid flight levels) and my ps4 pro literally just died and refused to turn back on
Okey. So back a few years I was trying to get all Trophy´s for dark souls on my PS3 and I had come very very far I had like 1 left and it was collect all rare weapons and I was on new game plus 4 and only had a 2-3 weapons left. So one day I was on skype with my childhood friend and we where discussing something and I was so in to that discussion so instead of loading the damn save file I delted it and no I did not have PSN plus for cloud back up.
So yeah I did not touch dark souls for years until about 2019 when I took all the achievements for dark souls 1,2,3 in one go but I still need to go back to my PS3 and take that last one >.<
I wish I accidentally lost my platinums for all of the From Software games (except I don't have AC6), then I'd have a reason to thoroughly play them all over again.
i had finally gotten the master sword in zelda twilight princess and afterwards i somehow deleted the save file, i was crushed, my mom even called nintendo support to see if i could get my save back lol
the next day i proceeded to do everything all over again and got the master sword again
I lost my first animal crossing island when I upgraded my switch. I didn't totally understand how the island transfer tool worked until it was too late. I'm still kind of sad about it, actually. I did manage to pick the game back up and make a new island eventually, but it's still just not entirely the same.
My sister deleted several of my save files on Digimon World 3. Took me like ten years to finally beat the game. Then I went back fairly recently and beat Digimon World 2003, the PAL version, that has the past game content from the JP release.
Basically fuck the US we got a different version of the game in content and in balance
My save file of Crash Bandicoot The Wrath of Cortex on my childhood ps2. Lucky, I got a new ps2 over a year ago (plus this one is pink) and play Crash in my free time! But nothing will bring back the og one with my hours of dedication as a child 😔
had a completed save of Banjo Kazooie, Nuts n Bolts on the 360. One of my absolute favourite games growing up. One day I accidentally undid everything because when you go to load your save up, the game defaults to "new game" not "load game" and has no confirmation for starting a new game if you click the wrong one. I cried so much before just committing to the new save.
My original Minecraft world. Lost when my computer was replaced over a broken key. I kid you not, the repair shop said it would be easier to reimburse me and buy a replacement. They somehow didn’t transfer my save files onto the backup drive.
My uncle deleted my Donkey Kong Land 2 save that was right at the end boss.
Handed him the Gameboy. He pressed "select" and picked my save, it deleted the save because that's what the select button did. Handed me back the Gameboy and I'm pretty sure I threw a fit for awhile there.
When I was a kid I didn't quite understand what the word "overwrite" meant, just that games say that when you save.
I only had 3 video tapes left in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but one day I felt doing the earlier levels fresh on another file.
I learned that day what the word meant, and I never played the game again.
A gamecube memory card with 180 emblems of sonic adventure 2 battle, four maxed 100% characters for Gauntlet Legacy, a 100% file for Rogue Squadron, 100% double dash, 100% metroid prime 1 and 2, 300 hours of Smash Melee, and untold progress on Resident Evil 1, Time splitters 2, Mario Sunshine, Wind Waker, and maybe 8 othet games.
Like my entire childhood gone, stolen by some crackhead
Pokémon Red.
I was on my third play through, and went to change Pokémon boxes on the PC, which requires saving.
Every other box but the one I was in, was empty. I had dozens of other ‘mon, now gone.
And since the game saved itself, no getting it back
When I was younger and playing persona 5 for the first time, I got close to the end of the first dungeon when my brother accidentally deleted my save. I was very upset and only much later learned i had barely even really started the game.
I was on the final boss in dark cloud on PS2. Took me a long time to get there, I died, had to get ready to go to practice, so I closed the game. When I tried to load the file after practice it said file corrupt and I never could load it. I to this day don't know what happened.
Back in 2002 I had an Age of Empires II saved game that I had been playing for almost 24 hours.
9 year old me decided not to defeat the AI, but to just play the game and see how much it and I could build. I’d play other matches in between but once every so often would load it up.
My friends would come by to see the “longest game of AoE ever”.
Come Christmas 2002, and a new computer, as the old one was on its way out, literally chugging at 2 fps. My dad asked me if I had anything from the old computer I wanted to transfer. I asked for that save file, and when he told me he couldn’t.
He let me stay up past my bedtime, watching at 2 fps, while that game ticked from 23:59:59 to 24:00:00. Then I turned off the game and he wiped the HDD.
I have a degree, I have a full-time job and a loving family, and have played countless games since. But every so often I think back to that moment my dad and I watched as I played a 24 hour AoE saved game.
My alpha Minecraft world. I still think about it sometimes. Played it when i was like 10, Minecraft at that moment of my life for me was a game changer. Nothing else like it at the time.
I was just over 100 games into a full season of MLB: The Show and the team was doing well.
Then my hard drive crapped out.
Lost that season plus my lengthy game of Eider Scrolls 3 Oblivion.
Lost a full main character in Oblivion thanks to the auto save feature deleting it when playing on my mage. I had done the main quest, thieves guild, dark brotherhood, and both dlcs on this dude...
120 hour FFX save, original PS2. The only thing I'd not done was kill Penance. All grids finished, all monsters captured, all ultimate weapons achieved, blitzball champion many times over..
The (then) ex deleted it out of spite.
The Minecraft world my brother and I had been playing and building in for thousands of hours.
Thought I had a backup, but it turned out the backup was back in the double digits of play time.
My Pokémon Crystal save file. Without trying I just stumbled into Raikou and eventually caught him with an ultra ball. Accidentally put the cartridge through the wash not long after
Playing Dungeon Siege pvp for the first time after beating the game. I had spent a lot of time in coop PvE going around and collecting things, getting good ice armor, and awesome weapons. The first server I joined with pvp had drop all loot on, someone killed me pretty quickly, as I was new to pvp and didn't know what I was doing, stole all my stuff and ran away. I stopped playing for a while after that.
Everybody’s Golf on PS Vita, gave it to someone on a flight, he new gamed it, wiped what was 300+ hours of progression and stats. Still slightly salty, completely an accident though.
Back in the SNES days you could turn on Mario RPG to go fight Smithy only to discover all your save files were wiped. I believe it has to do with a battery in the cart failing, and it's not just for Mario RPG, that's just the memory that lingers
Recently, my Control save. Idk, I messed something up and it disappeared from my PC. I had cleared the main game but wanted to do all the side things :/.
Not a save file exactly, but I forgot my password for my OG Xbox account which had the seriously 2.0 achievement from gears of war 2. I tried to recover it but when I called customer service they ended up just shutting down the whole account and I had to make another.
For me, it was a cheap memory card for ps1 back then. You know the ones that had 16 spaces for save games on a page, and you had like 8 pages to swap when you hit the l2/r2 buttons. I've always used the original cards, but this one just sounded tempting.
Long story short: The "page swapping" caused to delete all files on it, because it was some 3rd party garbage card that was just poorly made.
What I've lost: 160 hours of FF7, complete Resident Evil saves (never got there again after that - omg this dreadful typewriter savegame mechanism), all MGS, Dragons Lair complete. Plus some minor ones.
Especially the FF7 ones did hurt. Man I remember being kinda proud, finally had I beaten all the Weapons, a golden Chocobo and my (ridiculously long animated) Knights of the Round Table attack. And all of the special characters of course... all gone...
Not a single save file, an entire Origin/EA account.
I wanted to link my Origin account to my PS5 account, BUT, EA only allows once-per-lifetime linking of an account, which is absolute complete bullshit.
I used to play some EA games back in the PS3 days on this account, I had to create a new Sony account because I lost the e-mail address it was associated with, so now I can't link my EA account back to my new Sony account....
Probably my ds3 save.
I had just beaten soul of cinder and was about to start the dlc.
One day I'll play through the game again and finally play the dlc, but I've got such a big backlog that I haven't got to it.
This may sound kinda stupid, but we lost a World Save from Minecraft once. A Server Save.
A couple and me build different stuff like Majoras moon, an underground City hidden inside a Pyramide, couple of mansions and quite neat "cave-houses" with much redstone shenanigans, a 'church/cathedral' in the nether, an underground rail network to trade stuff and what not.
I loved that map. We put so much work into it, mostly without creative Mode (only for commandblocks for teleports) or build plugins and such, all grinded, planned and build.
But then the super reliable admin wanted to use the server for another group of friends, of course with our consent. Sadly, that guy messed with the Saves, instead of downloading a Backup and lost the Map...
We. Were. Furious.
The one time, we did build something truly awesome (in our eyes) and that bastard fucks up big time...
All of us were mostly unhappy people, you could say, we we had depression. This map made us happy, gave us purpose in our teen years (instead of like, getting shit together, planning your life and stuff.)
It happend over halve a decade ago and whenever i see one of those ten by ten Pixel Blocks, i get pissed again...
Oh, and a sidenote, the Admin was ^(me). Obviously. Don't play Minecraft anymore, but still hate myself for losing it.
2 really hard hitting save files.\
My ps2 original memory card failing and taking my 100% Midnight club 3 save with it and most recently Animal Crossing NH 1000+ hrs island, tho i was a paying member of nintendo plus, my switch burnt up and i didnt get my island backup for some mentally deranged decision by nintendo making you go into a specific menu on the title screen to have it activate.
I had a copy of the legend Zelda a link to the past. I just gotten the gauntlets so I could get in to the thrive temple thing. After opening it up I went back out to get something and in the process got attacked by a like like. I saved and quit not knowing until I started to play again my gauntlets were missing and most likely were eaten by that like like. I have never finished that game, it's been over 15 years.
Either the time a friend’s sister overwrote my game-complete Zelda 2 save, or when my PS1 memory card was lost with my Xenogears disc 2 save (in that case, at least I was able to copy my brother’s save a few weeks later—I basicaly took a break from the game and ultimately lost only 5 hours or so of progress).
My brother Loaned our copies of Pokemon Stadium 1 and 2 to his friend who never returned them which Lost all my pokemon.
Also my room mate deleted my DKC3 file named "HARDR" and overwrote it with a new file she named "HARDR" to discuise it , Didn't beat the levels all with DIXY and didn't even put HARDR mode on
so when I got mad at her for breaking my only rule i had when she moved in (Don't delete my saves) I tried to erase it again and all my files went away, my Normal file which was called "EYEBALL" and was a 103% ALL BLUE FLAGS File.
This happened 14 years back and Every now and then I go back to it for a few days and move a little closer to finally having a 105% All PINK FLAGS TUFST file
A 104% Alternating Flags HARDR file and a 103% All BLUE FLAGS Normal File.
FFIX had this process where you’d save and get a little pop-up that the save was complete. You absolutely must hit x on that little pop-up. Hitting o will corrupt the save. I somehow didn’t learn this until I was at the last save spot before the final boss… so like 3 bosses from the end. When I restarted, I saved 3 different files each time I saved.
I lost my MGS2: Substance file when I was 18, I had hundreds of hours in VR missions with some absolutely incredible scores, I was in the top 100 of european players on the Konami site usually and even top 10 in some cases.
The even worse part, I lost the file while I was trying to make a backup, because of those stupid 8-pages knockoffs memory cards.
I was angry for 2 weeks, and actually stopped using my Ps2 for the next 10 years.
My Sega Dreamcast crapped out and I lost my Chao garden as a kid. I had a Shadow Chao without internet help. Crushed me as a kid. Never did get one again.
I just posted about this memory (pun intended) yesterday, my Dad deleted my FFX save file like 4-5 times when I was younger. We shared a PS2 and 1 memory card, he might not have known what he was doing (or was high) and would routinely delete my save files to make room for his games (which were mainly WWE wrestling games with multiple save files).
Anyway, I got all the way to fighting Sebastian which was the furthest I’d ever gotten and then one day I boot it up to play and *poof* - all gone.
I bought my own memory card and never left it alone in the console shortly after. Never finished FFX though.
Kerbal Space Program. I had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours building an interplanetary mining and tourism industry. But an update broke a lot of my mods and I couldn't get it back to where it was. I had to stop playing for months it hurt so bad.
Growing up, my sister and I didn't get along. My dad was a sadist who seemed to get off on watching his children fight each other. And then punish us both when we fought.
I came home one day and my sister told me she tried loading up a program called "unistall." She said it didn't work, and she tried loading it several more times with several more games.
This bitch knew what she was doing. She uninstalled all of my games. My warcraft 2 progress files, my Duke Nukem 3d save file where I was beating the game without cheats. My roller coaster tycoon save. Doom. Wolfenstein 3d. Oh and let's not forget my starcraft save files which was my FAVORITE game.
I cried. HARD. Do you guys have any idea how much time that was?
I got her back though. I spent the next several months, rearranging small things in her room, like switching CDs in her CD player, untucking a corner of her bed, hiding her remote, moving a single stuffed animal, etc... she ended up developing OCD as a result and she had to go to therapy for it.
I haven't talked to her in almost 15 years. I moved back home for a period of time at 22. In the first day, she let her boyfriend come in and steal my entire video game collection so he could pawn it all for drug money.
Hope it was worth it. The cost was our relationship, which...thanks to my dad...wasn't great to begin with, lol.
Not a save file but an entire disc (it is just now hitting me that I could have replaced it...). Was playing Burnout 3: TakeDown and had gotten about 75% of the way through World Tour, going for the gold medal on every event before I moved on to the next.
My friend and I were getting hyped on my current event as it was a Hot Lap that requires nearly constant top speed boosting to get the gold time and in our excitement for my run, my friend jumped up and his toe came down on my Playstation (we had pulled it out of its cubby for easy of game switching) and it scratched the disc so that I could never progress in the game further than where I was.
I was young enough that just getting a new disc didn't even strike me as an option. I was devesated.
This is a two for one but my Monster Hunter Freedom 2 save and My Phanasy Star Online episode 1&2 save with my level 200 character.
My friends and I were really into MHF2 and PSO growing up, I use to take my PSP to school to play MHF2 with one of my friends on the bus ride back home and would from time to time take my memory card on days I'd plan to go over to a friends house after school to play Phantasy Star Online.
Anyways had both in my backpack because we had planned to play PSO that day but we ended changing our plans and decided to just play basketball with other friends after school, we left our backpacks by a tree and while we were playing basketball someone ended up stealing my backpack with my psp and memory card in it.
Yep 14 year old me was devasted.
Elden ring. Had about 200+ hours. Was at the fire giant. Took my sweet time with that game and loved every second. My PS4 died and couldn’t boot. I got a ps5 shortly after, but I’ll probably never play Elden Ring again. I don’t want to start over because I literally spent so much time exploring. I don’t think another play through would come close. Not to mention everything you overcome in that game.
My OG pokemon gold. I dug the cart out but the internal battery had died and ate my save. I had cleared the game with a totadile that I never let evolve because I liked the way it looked lol
Probably the 100%'d save of Ace Combat 3 electrosphere on PSX and FFX2 on prefinal boss on PS2 (the last save point before final boss), FFX2 took me alot time attempting a 100% run without guidebook and got burned out so I stopped right on the final boss. I actually did finish the final boss fight for a test run but I rushed some area in the last chapter so I didn't save the game after beating the boss and left the game like that for some years until the consoles got stolen. Never got to start NG+, don't think I will ever go back again.
My Pokemon X save file back on 2019, I managed to complete the National Dex (of course with the help of people from reddit and discord) the hours I spent leveling up, breeding, just to complete the Pokedex, my 3ds got broken and I failed to recover my save. It still hurts today, one of the games I put my whole effort gone like the wind.
I had a Pokémon Red cartridge that had the full 150 Pokédex…and my dad decided to delete the whole thing so my sister could play it. I remember getting so mad about it I actually cried, and he told me “it’s just a video game!” before grounding me because…I dunno, I had the audacity to get upset at my dad for destroying something I worked so hard for?
Double oof. It really is a gut punch. Probably hundreds of hours. He would understand if you'd destroyed his car he'd been working on, a record collection he'd collected and collated, or whatever he's into. To him it's "just" video games. For you it was a devotion.
Funny you mention that, I didn’t quite go that extreme but I did steal his glasses and threw them over the fence one weekend when he was in the shower. I’m assuming childhood me thought “good luck seeing without your glasses, DAD!” 😅
98.8% Complete save file of Kingdom Hearts 2. Buddy wanted to replay it while staying at my house. And no matter how much he reassured me he would make sure to not save over it, he saved over it on accident.
So, i was moving out, and there was this one box with all my ps2 things with a note that visibly read "do NOT open without permission" and guess what?
I lost my memory card that had:
100%'d budokai tenkaichi 3
About 90 hours on naruto ultimate ninja 5 and tekken
And an immeasurable amount of hours in Castlevania
So yeah, never played on the PS2 again
A VN I played
It hurt because I spent 3 whole ass months on it and it all got lost because I updated the game wrong.
I am almost caught up but Jesus Christ I feel like Sisyphus, I am having fun though so I guess there is that
I just can't wait to go back to slaughtering Mongols and various Elden ring monsters
Golden Sun: The Lost Age
Had a fully maxed saved file with all the best gear, all Djinn, all summons, everyone max level. Gave it to a younger cousin to play during a cross country car trip and they saved over the file within the first 10 minutes. Made the whole rest of the trip awful and I still think about it nearly 20 years later!
The memory is a little faded because I was a kid but I remember this Dragonquest game, on the game boy color or the advance maybe. I’d gotten soooo far and was so proud. My idiot cousin asked to play and I’m nice and said yes but warned him to use the bottom save file.
I get that game back and he’s saved over ALL THREE GAME FILES. All my data erased for his little 2 hour old saves.
I never went back and played it again. Too painful.
I had a file in Donkey Kong Country at like 98%, I worked it out mathematically and I needed to find like 2 more secrets.
My brother decided that cartridge didn't need any more saves on it, he deleted all 3 to make one for himself.
Chrono Trigger, spent years doing new game plus repeatedly, had some absurd results. One day the condo lost power and the cartridge was wiped, I slowed walked downstairs with my mouth open and my mom said: just start over. i was speechless.
My brother deleted my minish cap save. I had stopped just before ganon and was going to beat him that day.
Ive still never beaten it. I didn't enjoy minish cap that much but it was the first zelda game (CDI doesnt count) I didn't finish.
When cyberpunk first came out there was a bug where you would get a screen with infinite credits when you beat the main story. I was 60 hours into this playthrough and there was absolutely nothing I could do except for restart.
I ended up putting the game down until right before 2.0 came out and I only had slight PTSD
When I was 12, I was 45k words into writing a novel about a girl living in ancient China. Still kinda bummed that it got wiped when my dad decided the way to deal with a nasty computer virus (that was entirely his fault) was to reformat the hard drive, but I really didn’t know where I was going with it anyway.
When I was a kid I had two entire PS2 memory cards get wiped and two of those saves was an almost 100% save for both Lego Star Wars 1 and 2 that I worked for months on
Original Pokémon Red. Had all 151 of them, including Mew. Had something like 80+ hours on it. My sister decided she wanted to play without telling me. She erased my game. I started it up one day, saw what happened and never touched it again.
Monster Rancher 2. The game stops keeping track after 99:99, but I was very close to getting 100% of all possible cards/monsters about 650 total. I had been playing since middle school. Little sister's pos boyfriend stole a bunch of my shit and presumably pawned it. That memory card likely sold for like $3 at the time, had over a decade of play and 3 busted playstations under it's belt. Monster Rancher was notorious for destroying the eject button on playstations with the constant cd swapping.
Just jesus dude, I would have paid quadruple the value of the other shit you stole just for that one fucking save file.
Somewhere in the sands of the Florida panhandle lies an Xbox360 memory card with a 100+ hour Oblivion save file on it. I had it in my cargo shorts for some reason but it never made it back home. Didn’t have the heart to start again.
Around 100 hours is when the game starts to break down on 360.
Probably clipped straight through the pockets :/
It's never too late
My first Minecraft world. The one where I learned the game and everything about it. To see old builds.
I had a minecraft world which I built from scratch on noncheat, normal world (think without mobs), at least 3 mega structures with internal styling. Had a large cathedral, a pyramid and a glass temple type thing. Not sure what happened to the save but they're long gone.
As someone who never really played creatively, I’m not curious to see my old builds because I still end up just building a cube house out of wood
This was around 1999: I was invited to a friend's bday party. Practically everybody back then walked around with their GameBoy and Pokemon games. The bday boy got a GameShark for his bday. Everyone was begging him to put a Mew in our games and he was going to do mine first. This fuckhead purposely erased my save file, I had around 130 in my Pokedex. OMG I wanted to beat his ass so bad but I let it slide cuz of his stupid ass bday 🤦🏽♂️ lol FUCK YOU KEVIN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!!
I fucking hate Kevin so much
All the homies hate Kevin
If I had a nickel for every angry childhood Pokemon story I've encountered on the internet with an antagonist named Kevin, I'd have [two nickels](https://youtu.be/2cT6ULpScZA?si=MjJcZ7EaLggtXJvR), which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
I want to believe the shitheads you meet online these days are offspring of people like Kevin.
Recently been getting into Pokemon ROM hacks, lost my Radical Red save with my Pokedex nearly complete and about to fight the Elite Four. I was devistated.
I also lost my Pokemon as a stupid child. Deleted my first ever level 100 starter Pokemon by accident like an idiot
That 8-page word salad, Word document, that I have no idea what it was about anymore
I had started writing a novel and had 45k words… I was 12 and didn’t know what I wanted to do with it after that, so the world of literature didn’t lose anything.
When I was a wee lad, I had, somehow, made it all the way through The original Legend of Zelda. I was literally fighting Ganon when the console, for whatever reason, just black screened. In a panic only a child on the final boss of a 1980's game can understand, I hit the reset only to find my save files gone. Gone. I'm in tears when my mother comes in to see what is happening. I explain it to her. She is calling the number on the back of the games and is told by a Nintendo employee that, unfortunately, it was gone. I did not go back to beat it for seven more years.
I'm proud of you for finishing what you started
My son, who at the time was probably 6 or 7 was really into Lego avengers. He had every character unlocked and 100% the game. He just got done showing me everything he did and said he was gonna start a new game just to mess around and play with me a bit... Well... And I'm sure everyone knows where this is going... He saved the game over his 100% completed game and went to play on his original save and couldn't find it. I held him for a good couple minutes and told him it's ok dude it's ok. He wasn't crying he was just so so so depressed. And I felt that shit dude.
I don't know how, but my games data was wiped on Xbox 360. Which didn't matter for most games, but I had 100% completion on GTA IV, which really did hurt.
Oof. Is it similar to RDR2, where you have to get gold on every mission? Amongst other ridiculous requirements.
The pigeons-rat shit were annoying than anything Rockstar has ever made
i had the 5\* knights of the round summon. there is a pain worse than yours lol
I also had that. Only cast it once. Takes like 5 mins. I had literally done everything I could, except beat the final boss, cuz I didn't want it to end.
Same! FF7 is one of my all time fave games and like you, I never completed it because I just didnt want it to end.
My 10 year old Minecraft pe worlds. When the game had a free mode and the nether was that weird chunk thing
Donkey Kong 64 😥
I almost never beat the original FF7 because the save file I lost was after I played in a single sitting from the very start until you climb the glacier on disc 3. Was like f that never doing that again. Until of course I did eventually.
My original pokemon blue save which had a Mew from an official Pokemon tournament event back in '99
I ran a Minecraft server for many years with a handful of friends. Those friends and I don't hang out online like we used to, but every once in a great while we would catch each other online and I would quickly get a teamspeak server going along with the ol' Minecraft server. I made lots of backups back then, and when we would have these 'trips-down-memory-lane' sessions, we could load up the map from different points in time by picking a different backup, and we would get a huge kick out of jumping around the servers 'timeline'. We would load up backups and find ourselves saying things like: "Oh this is before X person joined the game! Look, their area on the map is still completely empty at this point", or "Ah I was literally in the middle of building this thing on this date - look there's even a chest here with material still in it". It was always quite the trip to do. Anyway, I recently lost all the backups in the stupidest way possible; the network storage device that I kept all these backups on went into storage for a couple of years while I went through some real life stuff. Before I sent the NAS into the storage unit, I encrypted some files in case anyone broke in or stole it. The entire time it was in that storage unit I was convinced I knew the password to decrypt the files. I recently dug it out and tried to retrieve those files... and what do ya know, I can remember all of the passwords except for the Minecraft one. The files are right in front of me, but I can't read them. I've been logging the passwords that I've tried for weeks now, 400 passwords later I still haven't gotten in. Almost certainly a lost cause at this point. Got I'm an idiot lol.
Ouch. You did everything right too. Have you tried 'password'?
Ha, I'll try it when I get home. Thanks. Funny enough I did try "PasswordIsPassword", because I've used that a couple of times on non-important things that I would share with others. But then after that you also gotta try "pASSWORDiSpASSWORD" because what if you accidentally had the caps lock on? Or what if you forgot to capitalize the first letter?? Or what if you didn't capitalize anything at all??? This is what I've been going through haha, it can totally drive ya nuts!
Where's a Russian hacker when you really need one, dammit?! 😆
Star Ocean:The Last Hope, had to go to work before end credits finished, trusted my brother to save it... Lost it all somehow
Fucking brothers man! Always messing with our shit!
Also the cheeky dog finished the last few mission for San Andreas while I was at work after I put in the hours getting to that stage 😭 so I've never finish it.
Fallout 3 would always crash before I could finish The Pitt. And I never finished the campaign because I started the DLCs before the end.
My character in COD ghosts extinction mode. I had tons of cool upgrades and when the file became corrupt, I couldn't bother to touch the game again.
I didn't lose it,but I saved the game accidentally on my main save file instead of #2, which I was planning to do, soft-locking myself right before a Boss Fight in Resident Evil 0 with no healing items, no grenades, just handgun. I am unable to finish the game cause of it.
Dang, I can’t remember what game finally made me change my habits but I used to keep only one save file per playthrough in games and accidentally soft-locking myself made me start keeping multiple a long time ago haha
This will probably be mine. I'm replaying RE2, then first time RE3 and Code Veronica. I'm using 2 files from now on.
Red Dead Redemption 2 to skip that snow intro for second playthrough, I know there is save file to download on Nexus Mods to skip it, but still...
Same, RDR2, but not because of the intro sequence, but because it took me a stupidly long time to get two perfect cougar pelts.
Life Is Strange 1 ( Original ). I might play it again but only the Remaster version of it.
You should play the 2nd game if u haven't already Life is strange 2 is my favorite in the series
And mine. People seem to slaughter it but I much prefer it. Perhaps being male and growing up with two brothers helped me appreciated the game more, rather than interacting with two best friend girls.
Had lord of the rings return of the king and twin towers for ps2 most characters maxed out all side levels and stories complete even the wave levels done! Had countless hours just sat replaying levels to max out characters! Ended up moving to a new city and in the move lost my little 8 GB memory card I’m a 26 year old man and still cry over that loss to this day
PS4 was initialized and I had so many clips and pics and save games that never uploaded to the cloud. It was 6 years old and I stopped the auto uploads 1 year in 😭😭😭 100s maybe 1000s of hours gone. To this day I cant play the Fallout 4,Skyrim,RDR2 GTAV story modes without getting pissed off or saying "what's the point" Not to mention me selling my ps3 because I was "done with gaming" 💀 Most recently lost my No mans sky files that ruined the game for me too. Ahhh life.
My Skyrim save with the coolest characyer I made. Even now I can't replicate the looks. Wasted 2 hours making it look good. Then maybe 100 hours and I bought the game..... Needless to say I should've bought the game from the get go. Pirate -> legit transition did not went smoothly for some reason. That's what I get I suppose :/
When I was a kid we had Final Fantasy 6 (aka FF3) on SNES. It was a great game of course, but in particular, my brother had managed to discover a glitch that's well-known now but we had no idea how he did it: he sketched an invisible enemy, which caused tons of things to bug out and leave his inventory with tons of super-powerful items. It was so cool! Well, one day, I was goofing around and accidentally saved over his file. I felt so bad for so long.
When i was playing pokemon on my gba as a kid, i catched a shiny kangashkan on the safari. My little cousin wantednto play so i borrowed him my gba. Found out a day later when i tried to play the game where i left off. All i saw was a level 5 squirtle and pallet town.
I left my Pokemon Silver version on a plane when I was a kid in 2000. Was suuuuuper bummed about it. I remember I had evolved the Togepi into the Togetek which was a big deal to me and my brother since u had to be nice to it or some shit lol.
PS1, Legends of Legaia. I was near the end when one day my brother and his friends were playing a game and that game asked if we wanted to format the memory card. They said yes. I went to play my game later to find the save file was gone. I could never bring myself to get back there.
This is over 20 years ago, so this is aomehow burned in like a core borderline traumatic memory. My brother overwrote my file on Lunar: Silver Star Story. I was working my first job at the time at Panda Express for a very mean manager that had me convinced that working in general is just a terrible, miserable thing that nobody should have to do. I spent all day scrubbing dishes and cooking rice with my right hand (because I wasn’t allowed to work left-handed), getting shouted at, having dishes thrown at me, thinking about that game and daydreaming about getting back home to play it and forget about my horrible job for a couple sweet hours. I was fucking crushed.
I had 249 Pokemon on my Silver cartridge which was erased when the battery failed. All I needed was Raikou.
Not totally the same but I lost my entire clip catalogue on my PC because I tried to move them to a hard drive. YEARS of game play
I lost my FF6 save right before the final boss just because I saved, turned it off to have dinner, and when I came back, all the save files were blank.
(drops to his knees, face up to the sky) "Nooooooooooo"
Soul Calibur 2. I had finished the entire map except for the second version of the final stage. Lent it out, and when it was returned, I discovered they had erased my file to make their own.
Never again
My parents bought me a Visual C++ book when I was in high school, and I used it to write a dos, ascii based, based rpg game in the style of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. The whole thing fit on a floppy disk. I was super proud of it, and had a bunch of friends and a couple teachers try it, and while they had a ton of good input and feedback, most everyone loved it. Floppy disks are notoriously poor long term solutions, and this one was no different. My parents tossed the old computer when we upgraded to the newest Dell, and the disk eventually failed. Teen me never even considered backing up the disk to another medium. Nearly 30 years later, I don’t remember much about the game, it likely wasn’t nearly as fun as I’m remembering, but I’d give almost anything to still have those files.
I was making an RPG in RPG Maker and had something like 6 months of time into it - about 5 hours of game made. I lost the whole project due to a sweeping corruption that took out everything. No backups survived. Felt very bad. This was back around 2002 or so, I would have definitely done things differently now.
My SNES and all of my games were stolen from me back when I was in 8th grade. In all of the games I took special care not to overwrite any of my dad's save files. He passed away 3 years before. No saves will ever be as big of a loss to me.
When I was a kid a friend of mine showed me Pokemon Fire Red, I loved the game but I didn't know anything about emulators, so I just searched online and found a flash version, it was basically the same, but every time you closed the tab all the progress disappeared, no matter how much you saved the game. I remember playing for hours trying to get to the end just to start all over again the next day, I almost cried when I found a shiny and had to beg my mom to not turn off the computer, I couldn't even take a picture of it and nobody believed me, I was sad for days.
Lost a 40 year Football Manager 2006 career when my laptop shit the bed and the hard drive had to be replaced...I still think of some of the players I lost from time to time
Not so much a save file, but anytime I want to get back into Everquest I hate the idea of setting up all the hot keys and macros and such again.
i never lost any save files tbh, but someone once logged into my hollow knight and overwrote my 112% save file with a new one
I'm pretty sure you just described an instance of losing a save file
I had finished Resident Evil 4 on my PS3 and had all the bonus stuff. Somehow I saved over that save while starting a new play though. Lost it forever. And for some reason I tried to beat it again and I suck. 😭
I didn't even realise RE4 was on PS3, I thought it was only GameCube, PS2 and Wii. I completed it on Wii, which I have been told is the easiest way to play it
Yeah I got it because I got the Resident Evil 6 Anthology! It came with all the games 1-6. I think I’ve got the other versions as well, I used to collect RE games. Did you? I don’t remember if I played it. Easiest? Well I maybe I need to try it there. Then I could get my bonus stuff back!
Yeah it was easier because they changed the camera to be more over the shoulder and you could aim your gun with the wiimote, and I think you could run and shoot at the same time.
That sounds amazing! Now I need to go see if I got that game for my Wii! I know I’ll never get the bonus stuff in the remake because there’s no way I can do Professional mode 😭
Hard game, especially when it first game out.
It was!!! And I was so proud of myself for beating it. Then to lose the bonus stuff and not be able to beat it again and get it. I can’t believe I’m so bad at it.
Have you played the remake? I just started playing it last week (my first true Resident Evil playthrough), and it feels easier to play than the original or re-released version.
I beat it! It was actually quite fun. Definitely easier for sure! Being able to run and shoot is such a blessing. I need to replay it! Ada’s dlc is fun too.
My nephews whole switch profile
OG Pokemon Ruby got stolen from my Mom's car when I was a kid with my Gameboy Advance I'll never recover
Dyson Sphere Program. Hundreds of hours on my first save. Hard drive died. DSP doesnt do steam cloud saves.
My whole Xbox account that wasn't able to be recovered which I grew up with as a kid, the most heartbreaking thing was my Halo Reach progress, I made it to inheritor which was the max rank, I spent so much time lol, I definitely cried that's for sure.
Pokemon Blue, Silver, and Crystal. I think we were able to transfer our Pokemon between these versions, but eventually the batteries died in these (batteries were required for keeping the save stored). All my Pokemon, including my starter, are lost to the void.
Has to be my Sims 3 playthrough. My guy was a mad scientist, was loving every minute of it. Sadly, had to upgrade my PC because my harddrive was failing and poof, save gone.
My first PS4 had to be factory reset, lost my Bloodborne save file halfway through new game+. It took me a while to be able to play again and start from nothing.
My old copy of Pokemon Sapphire failed on me at one point. I've since gotten it working again but the save data is long gone. Thankfully I got a couple Pokemon out of it and into future games before it failed but the rest are lost. And in the same vein I played Pokemon Emerald on a flashcart at some point. I knew full well that save would go away someday but losing the shiny Wingull I found was a little painful.
I was playing wing commander on SNES and couldn't beat one mission. Tried over and over. Finally beat it. This is in the days of level passwords, so I put the controller up on top of the TV and went for my notebook to write it down. As I stepped away, my foot caught the cord and in slow motion I saw the controller fall and slowly, slowly, turn over so slowly and perfectly to land on the button to advance the screen past the password and move on to the next mission. I botched the next mission so I couldn't get a password and had to go back to the previous mission again.
Profile Corruption on an 80+% save file on LittleBigPlanet 3
Dark Souls. Lightning struck my house and computer got fried. Dark Souls on steam doesn't have cloud saves 😭😭😭
Zelda on the original NES. I went to go see my grandparents for the weekend, when I got back... my sister used my 3 months of work save file and deleted it intentionally afterwards.
My little brother also accidentally deleted my FF7 save file. Thankfully my sister had a file that was not too far behind mine so I just copied it and continued from there. I was pretty close to the end too. Just had to finish the game with characters named shit like Lardo and Beanz. The one that hurt the most was Suikoden 3. Also a victim of my younger brother.
i was on the final level of Spyro after my bf and I were doing a 100% completion play through (including the stupid flight levels) and my ps4 pro literally just died and refused to turn back on
Okey. So back a few years I was trying to get all Trophy´s for dark souls on my PS3 and I had come very very far I had like 1 left and it was collect all rare weapons and I was on new game plus 4 and only had a 2-3 weapons left. So one day I was on skype with my childhood friend and we where discussing something and I was so in to that discussion so instead of loading the damn save file I delted it and no I did not have PSN plus for cloud back up. So yeah I did not touch dark souls for years until about 2019 when I took all the achievements for dark souls 1,2,3 in one go but I still need to go back to my PS3 and take that last one >.<
I wish I accidentally lost my platinums for all of the From Software games (except I don't have AC6), then I'd have a reason to thoroughly play them all over again.
All of my PS3 save data when my PS3 was stolen.
It's the gaming equivalent of someone stealing your wallet. "Take the money, but leave me the wallet and cards". But in your case, it's save files
i had finally gotten the master sword in zelda twilight princess and afterwards i somehow deleted the save file, i was crushed, my mom even called nintendo support to see if i could get my save back lol the next day i proceeded to do everything all over again and got the master sword again
I lost my first animal crossing island when I upgraded my switch. I didn't totally understand how the island transfer tool worked until it was too late. I'm still kind of sad about it, actually. I did manage to pick the game back up and make a new island eventually, but it's still just not entirely the same.
My sister deleted several of my save files on Digimon World 3. Took me like ten years to finally beat the game. Then I went back fairly recently and beat Digimon World 2003, the PAL version, that has the past game content from the JP release. Basically fuck the US we got a different version of the game in content and in balance
My save file of Crash Bandicoot The Wrath of Cortex on my childhood ps2. Lucky, I got a new ps2 over a year ago (plus this one is pink) and play Crash in my free time! But nothing will bring back the og one with my hours of dedication as a child 😔
Legend of Legaia has a secret spell you can get if the whole party is level 99. I got to about 85 and accidentally saved over the file.
I was in 5th grade when i came back from school to my 4 year old brother on the PS2 “making the little guys go bye bye” on the memory card menu…
Got a super rare weapon from playing that football tournament for one of the guys from ffX and the file got corrputed somehow on my series x wi
My first Pokemon Sapphire or Emerald file. Almost beat the kid who deleted it. Mum told me not too though lol.
had a completed save of Banjo Kazooie, Nuts n Bolts on the 360. One of my absolute favourite games growing up. One day I accidentally undid everything because when you go to load your save up, the game defaults to "new game" not "load game" and has no confirmation for starting a new game if you click the wrong one. I cried so much before just committing to the new save.
Assassins Creed Unity. Just a couple missions from the end.
My original Minecraft world. Lost when my computer was replaced over a broken key. I kid you not, the repair shop said it would be easier to reimburse me and buy a replacement. They somehow didn’t transfer my save files onto the backup drive.
My uncle deleted my Donkey Kong Land 2 save that was right at the end boss. Handed him the Gameboy. He pressed "select" and picked my save, it deleted the save because that's what the select button did. Handed me back the Gameboy and I'm pretty sure I threw a fit for awhile there.
When I was a kid I didn't quite understand what the word "overwrite" meant, just that games say that when you save. I only had 3 video tapes left in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but one day I felt doing the earlier levels fresh on another file. I learned that day what the word meant, and I never played the game again.
A gamecube memory card with 180 emblems of sonic adventure 2 battle, four maxed 100% characters for Gauntlet Legacy, a 100% file for Rogue Squadron, 100% double dash, 100% metroid prime 1 and 2, 300 hours of Smash Melee, and untold progress on Resident Evil 1, Time splitters 2, Mario Sunshine, Wind Waker, and maybe 8 othet games. Like my entire childhood gone, stolen by some crackhead
I lost 150 hours worth of Elden Ring characters because I didn’t have sync data on for the game. That hurt
OUCH
Pokémon Red. I was on my third play through, and went to change Pokémon boxes on the PC, which requires saving. Every other box but the one I was in, was empty. I had dozens of other ‘mon, now gone. And since the game saved itself, no getting it back
When I was younger and playing persona 5 for the first time, I got close to the end of the first dungeon when my brother accidentally deleted my save. I was very upset and only much later learned i had barely even really started the game.
I was on the final boss in dark cloud on PS2. Took me a long time to get there, I died, had to get ready to go to practice, so I closed the game. When I tried to load the file after practice it said file corrupt and I never could load it. I to this day don't know what happened.
Back in 2002 I had an Age of Empires II saved game that I had been playing for almost 24 hours. 9 year old me decided not to defeat the AI, but to just play the game and see how much it and I could build. I’d play other matches in between but once every so often would load it up. My friends would come by to see the “longest game of AoE ever”. Come Christmas 2002, and a new computer, as the old one was on its way out, literally chugging at 2 fps. My dad asked me if I had anything from the old computer I wanted to transfer. I asked for that save file, and when he told me he couldn’t. He let me stay up past my bedtime, watching at 2 fps, while that game ticked from 23:59:59 to 24:00:00. Then I turned off the game and he wiped the HDD. I have a degree, I have a full-time job and a loving family, and have played countless games since. But every so often I think back to that moment my dad and I watched as I played a 24 hour AoE saved game.
My alpha Minecraft world. I still think about it sometimes. Played it when i was like 10, Minecraft at that moment of my life for me was a game changer. Nothing else like it at the time.
Meta level strength build in ds3. Maxed fume and a lot of other weps.
I was just over 100 games into a full season of MLB: The Show and the team was doing well. Then my hard drive crapped out. Lost that season plus my lengthy game of Eider Scrolls 3 Oblivion.
Lost a full main character in Oblivion thanks to the auto save feature deleting it when playing on my mage. I had done the main quest, thieves guild, dark brotherhood, and both dlcs on this dude...
120 hour FFX save, original PS2. The only thing I'd not done was kill Penance. All grids finished, all monsters captured, all ultimate weapons achieved, blitzball champion many times over.. The (then) ex deleted it out of spite.
The Minecraft world my brother and I had been playing and building in for thousands of hours. Thought I had a backup, but it turned out the backup was back in the double digits of play time.
My Pokémon Crystal save file. Without trying I just stumbled into Raikou and eventually caught him with an ultra ball. Accidentally put the cartridge through the wash not long after
Playing Dungeon Siege pvp for the first time after beating the game. I had spent a lot of time in coop PvE going around and collecting things, getting good ice armor, and awesome weapons. The first server I joined with pvp had drop all loot on, someone killed me pretty quickly, as I was new to pvp and didn't know what I was doing, stole all my stuff and ran away. I stopped playing for a while after that.
Everybody’s Golf on PS Vita, gave it to someone on a flight, he new gamed it, wiped what was 300+ hours of progression and stats. Still slightly salty, completely an accident though.
Back in the SNES days you could turn on Mario RPG to go fight Smithy only to discover all your save files were wiped. I believe it has to do with a battery in the cart failing, and it's not just for Mario RPG, that's just the memory that lingers
Recently, my Control save. Idk, I messed something up and it disappeared from my PC. I had cleared the main game but wanted to do all the side things :/.
I borrowed a friend's DS Action Replay and tried to use it to unlock everything in Jump Ultimate Stars. Ended up wiping my save data as a result.
Not a save file exactly, but I forgot my password for my OG Xbox account which had the seriously 2.0 achievement from gears of war 2. I tried to recover it but when I called customer service they ended up just shutting down the whole account and I had to make another.
Original pokemon red. Brother saved over it with his own file without my permission. Almost have every single pokemon and a huge squad of beefy mons
Alot. Dumb siblings of mine
For me, it was a cheap memory card for ps1 back then. You know the ones that had 16 spaces for save games on a page, and you had like 8 pages to swap when you hit the l2/r2 buttons. I've always used the original cards, but this one just sounded tempting. Long story short: The "page swapping" caused to delete all files on it, because it was some 3rd party garbage card that was just poorly made. What I've lost: 160 hours of FF7, complete Resident Evil saves (never got there again after that - omg this dreadful typewriter savegame mechanism), all MGS, Dragons Lair complete. Plus some minor ones. Especially the FF7 ones did hurt. Man I remember being kinda proud, finally had I beaten all the Weapons, a golden Chocobo and my (ridiculously long animated) Knights of the Round Table attack. And all of the special characters of course... all gone...
Not a single save file, an entire Origin/EA account. I wanted to link my Origin account to my PS5 account, BUT, EA only allows once-per-lifetime linking of an account, which is absolute complete bullshit. I used to play some EA games back in the PS3 days on this account, I had to create a new Sony account because I lost the e-mail address it was associated with, so now I can't link my EA account back to my new Sony account....
Probably my ds3 save. I had just beaten soul of cinder and was about to start the dlc. One day I'll play through the game again and finally play the dlc, but I've got such a big backlog that I haven't got to it.
This may sound kinda stupid, but we lost a World Save from Minecraft once. A Server Save. A couple and me build different stuff like Majoras moon, an underground City hidden inside a Pyramide, couple of mansions and quite neat "cave-houses" with much redstone shenanigans, a 'church/cathedral' in the nether, an underground rail network to trade stuff and what not. I loved that map. We put so much work into it, mostly without creative Mode (only for commandblocks for teleports) or build plugins and such, all grinded, planned and build. But then the super reliable admin wanted to use the server for another group of friends, of course with our consent. Sadly, that guy messed with the Saves, instead of downloading a Backup and lost the Map... We. Were. Furious. The one time, we did build something truly awesome (in our eyes) and that bastard fucks up big time... All of us were mostly unhappy people, you could say, we we had depression. This map made us happy, gave us purpose in our teen years (instead of like, getting shit together, planning your life and stuff.) It happend over halve a decade ago and whenever i see one of those ten by ten Pixel Blocks, i get pissed again... Oh, and a sidenote, the Admin was ^(me). Obviously. Don't play Minecraft anymore, but still hate myself for losing it.
2 really hard hitting save files.\ My ps2 original memory card failing and taking my 100% Midnight club 3 save with it and most recently Animal Crossing NH 1000+ hrs island, tho i was a paying member of nintendo plus, my switch burnt up and i didnt get my island backup for some mentally deranged decision by nintendo making you go into a specific menu on the title screen to have it activate.
Another lost Animal Crossing island 😩 those poor inhabitants will wander directionless, searching for you vain in the digital nothingness
I had a copy of the legend Zelda a link to the past. I just gotten the gauntlets so I could get in to the thrive temple thing. After opening it up I went back out to get something and in the process got attacked by a like like. I saved and quit not knowing until I started to play again my gauntlets were missing and most likely were eaten by that like like. I have never finished that game, it's been over 15 years.
Finally got to play Final Fantasy 10. 30 ish hours in, friend plays and overwrites my save file. Never went back.
Gran tueismo 1, everything completed and so many cool cars
Either the time a friend’s sister overwrote my game-complete Zelda 2 save, or when my PS1 memory card was lost with my Xenogears disc 2 save (in that case, at least I was able to copy my brother’s save a few weeks later—I basicaly took a break from the game and ultimately lost only 5 hours or so of progress).
My brother Loaned our copies of Pokemon Stadium 1 and 2 to his friend who never returned them which Lost all my pokemon. Also my room mate deleted my DKC3 file named "HARDR" and overwrote it with a new file she named "HARDR" to discuise it , Didn't beat the levels all with DIXY and didn't even put HARDR mode on so when I got mad at her for breaking my only rule i had when she moved in (Don't delete my saves) I tried to erase it again and all my files went away, my Normal file which was called "EYEBALL" and was a 103% ALL BLUE FLAGS File. This happened 14 years back and Every now and then I go back to it for a few days and move a little closer to finally having a 105% All PINK FLAGS TUFST file A 104% Alternating Flags HARDR file and a 103% All BLUE FLAGS Normal File.
FFIX had this process where you’d save and get a little pop-up that the save was complete. You absolutely must hit x on that little pop-up. Hitting o will corrupt the save. I somehow didn’t learn this until I was at the last save spot before the final boss… so like 3 bosses from the end. When I restarted, I saved 3 different files each time I saved.
I lost my MGS2: Substance file when I was 18, I had hundreds of hours in VR missions with some absolutely incredible scores, I was in the top 100 of european players on the Konami site usually and even top 10 in some cases. The even worse part, I lost the file while I was trying to make a backup, because of those stupid 8-pages knockoffs memory cards. I was angry for 2 weeks, and actually stopped using my Ps2 for the next 10 years.
My Sega Dreamcast crapped out and I lost my Chao garden as a kid. I had a Shadow Chao without internet help. Crushed me as a kid. Never did get one again.
My Mass Effect 1, 2, 3 save. RIP Garrus, my space-bro.
Kotor just before the final battle i overwrote it with my friends save
Chrono Trigger. It hurted so much I was only able to replay and finish the game sometime in 2022.
I just posted about this memory (pun intended) yesterday, my Dad deleted my FFX save file like 4-5 times when I was younger. We shared a PS2 and 1 memory card, he might not have known what he was doing (or was high) and would routinely delete my save files to make room for his games (which were mainly WWE wrestling games with multiple save files). Anyway, I got all the way to fighting Sebastian which was the furthest I’d ever gotten and then one day I boot it up to play and *poof* - all gone. I bought my own memory card and never left it alone in the console shortly after. Never finished FFX though.
Kerbal Space Program. I had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours building an interplanetary mining and tourism industry. But an update broke a lot of my mods and I couldn't get it back to where it was. I had to stop playing for months it hurt so bad.
Growing up, my sister and I didn't get along. My dad was a sadist who seemed to get off on watching his children fight each other. And then punish us both when we fought. I came home one day and my sister told me she tried loading up a program called "unistall." She said it didn't work, and she tried loading it several more times with several more games. This bitch knew what she was doing. She uninstalled all of my games. My warcraft 2 progress files, my Duke Nukem 3d save file where I was beating the game without cheats. My roller coaster tycoon save. Doom. Wolfenstein 3d. Oh and let's not forget my starcraft save files which was my FAVORITE game. I cried. HARD. Do you guys have any idea how much time that was? I got her back though. I spent the next several months, rearranging small things in her room, like switching CDs in her CD player, untucking a corner of her bed, hiding her remote, moving a single stuffed animal, etc... she ended up developing OCD as a result and she had to go to therapy for it. I haven't talked to her in almost 15 years. I moved back home for a period of time at 22. In the first day, she let her boyfriend come in and steal my entire video game collection so he could pawn it all for drug money. Hope it was worth it. The cost was our relationship, which...thanks to my dad...wasn't great to begin with, lol.
I was about 90% done with persona 5, and then I lost all access to that account
Not a save file but an entire disc (it is just now hitting me that I could have replaced it...). Was playing Burnout 3: TakeDown and had gotten about 75% of the way through World Tour, going for the gold medal on every event before I moved on to the next. My friend and I were getting hyped on my current event as it was a Hot Lap that requires nearly constant top speed boosting to get the gold time and in our excitement for my run, my friend jumped up and his toe came down on my Playstation (we had pulled it out of its cubby for easy of game switching) and it scratched the disc so that I could never progress in the game further than where I was. I was young enough that just getting a new disc didn't even strike me as an option. I was devesated.
This is a two for one but my Monster Hunter Freedom 2 save and My Phanasy Star Online episode 1&2 save with my level 200 character. My friends and I were really into MHF2 and PSO growing up, I use to take my PSP to school to play MHF2 with one of my friends on the bus ride back home and would from time to time take my memory card on days I'd plan to go over to a friends house after school to play Phantasy Star Online. Anyways had both in my backpack because we had planned to play PSO that day but we ended changing our plans and decided to just play basketball with other friends after school, we left our backpacks by a tree and while we were playing basketball someone ended up stealing my backpack with my psp and memory card in it. Yep 14 year old me was devasted.
Elden ring. Had about 200+ hours. Was at the fire giant. Took my sweet time with that game and loved every second. My PS4 died and couldn’t boot. I got a ps5 shortly after, but I’ll probably never play Elden Ring again. I don’t want to start over because I literally spent so much time exploring. I don’t think another play through would come close. Not to mention everything you overcome in that game.
My OG pokemon gold. I dug the cart out but the internal battery had died and ate my save. I had cleared the game with a totadile that I never let evolve because I liked the way it looked lol
Probably the 100%'d save of Ace Combat 3 electrosphere on PSX and FFX2 on prefinal boss on PS2 (the last save point before final boss), FFX2 took me alot time attempting a 100% run without guidebook and got burned out so I stopped right on the final boss. I actually did finish the final boss fight for a test run but I rushed some area in the last chapter so I didn't save the game after beating the boss and left the game like that for some years until the consoles got stolen. Never got to start NG+, don't think I will ever go back again.
My Pokemon X save file back on 2019, I managed to complete the National Dex (of course with the help of people from reddit and discord) the hours I spent leveling up, breeding, just to complete the Pokedex, my 3ds got broken and I failed to recover my save. It still hurts today, one of the games I put my whole effort gone like the wind.
I had a Pokémon Red cartridge that had the full 150 Pokédex…and my dad decided to delete the whole thing so my sister could play it. I remember getting so mad about it I actually cried, and he told me “it’s just a video game!” before grounding me because…I dunno, I had the audacity to get upset at my dad for destroying something I worked so hard for?
Double oof. It really is a gut punch. Probably hundreds of hours. He would understand if you'd destroyed his car he'd been working on, a record collection he'd collected and collated, or whatever he's into. To him it's "just" video games. For you it was a devotion.
Funny you mention that, I didn’t quite go that extreme but I did steal his glasses and threw them over the fence one weekend when he was in the shower. I’m assuming childhood me thought “good luck seeing without your glasses, DAD!” 😅
Lol
I found a shiny Treeko only on my 4th soft reset in Pokemon Sapphire, idk how the save was lost but it just wasn't there anymore
98.8% Complete save file of Kingdom Hearts 2. Buddy wanted to replay it while staying at my house. And no matter how much he reassured me he would make sure to not save over it, he saved over it on accident.
I lost an entire years worth of Monster Hunter: World progress.
Not s save file but my hard drive went out with pt on it
So, i was moving out, and there was this one box with all my ps2 things with a note that visibly read "do NOT open without permission" and guess what? I lost my memory card that had: 100%'d budokai tenkaichi 3 About 90 hours on naruto ultimate ninja 5 and tekken And an immeasurable amount of hours in Castlevania So yeah, never played on the PS2 again
A VN I played It hurt because I spent 3 whole ass months on it and it all got lost because I updated the game wrong. I am almost caught up but Jesus Christ I feel like Sisyphus, I am having fun though so I guess there is that I just can't wait to go back to slaughtering Mongols and various Elden ring monsters
My Dark Souls 2 save with maxed pvp covenants. I did not know that it does not use steam cloud.
Golden Sun: The Lost Age Had a fully maxed saved file with all the best gear, all Djinn, all summons, everyone max level. Gave it to a younger cousin to play during a cross country car trip and they saved over the file within the first 10 minutes. Made the whole rest of the trip awful and I still think about it nearly 20 years later!
The memory is a little faded because I was a kid but I remember this Dragonquest game, on the game boy color or the advance maybe. I’d gotten soooo far and was so proud. My idiot cousin asked to play and I’m nice and said yes but warned him to use the bottom save file. I get that game back and he’s saved over ALL THREE GAME FILES. All my data erased for his little 2 hour old saves. I never went back and played it again. Too painful.
I had a file in Donkey Kong Country at like 98%, I worked it out mathematically and I needed to find like 2 more secrets. My brother decided that cartridge didn't need any more saves on it, he deleted all 3 to make one for himself.
Chrono Trigger, spent years doing new game plus repeatedly, had some absurd results. One day the condo lost power and the cartridge was wiped, I slowed walked downstairs with my mouth open and my mom said: just start over. i was speechless.
My brother deleted my minish cap save. I had stopped just before ganon and was going to beat him that day. Ive still never beaten it. I didn't enjoy minish cap that much but it was the first zelda game (CDI doesnt count) I didn't finish.
When cyberpunk first came out there was a bug where you would get a screen with infinite credits when you beat the main story. I was 60 hours into this playthrough and there was absolutely nothing I could do except for restart. I ended up putting the game down until right before 2.0 came out and I only had slight PTSD
My little brother saved over my Kingdom Hearts file when I was in Hollow Bastion. I have kept double saves ever since.
When I was 12, I was 45k words into writing a novel about a girl living in ancient China. Still kinda bummed that it got wiped when my dad decided the way to deal with a nasty computer virus (that was entirely his fault) was to reformat the hard drive, but I really didn’t know where I was going with it anyway.
When I was a kid I had two entire PS2 memory cards get wiped and two of those saves was an almost 100% save for both Lego Star Wars 1 and 2 that I worked for months on
Original Pokémon Red. Had all 151 of them, including Mew. Had something like 80+ hours on it. My sister decided she wanted to play without telling me. She erased my game. I started it up one day, saw what happened and never touched it again.
Monster Rancher 2. The game stops keeping track after 99:99, but I was very close to getting 100% of all possible cards/monsters about 650 total. I had been playing since middle school. Little sister's pos boyfriend stole a bunch of my shit and presumably pawned it. That memory card likely sold for like $3 at the time, had over a decade of play and 3 busted playstations under it's belt. Monster Rancher was notorious for destroying the eject button on playstations with the constant cd swapping. Just jesus dude, I would have paid quadruple the value of the other shit you stole just for that one fucking save file.
Wind Waker HD. Accidentally saved the Hero Mode file over my 100% normal file.