If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen today that I sort of freaked out because my Xbox 360 gamertag became corrupt due to a terribly programmed game, and more importantly, my flash drive that I store every game save since I’ve started playing the Xbox 360 stopped working correctly.
Due to user error, I had to remove my thumb drive from my Xbox before it deleted everything. In doing so, somehow it put my Red 5 Studios-emblazoned thumb drive into write-protection mode. (Yes, I’ve tried everything on Google!) Luckily, it still had all the data!
While I was backing up the thumb drive to my computer, it got me to think: is it really okay to rely so much on a volatile piece of plastic and metal to save all of my progress in my games without a way to back it all up somewhere safe?
Then I decided, why not reflect on the history of saving games and possibly look at where it’s headed, so here we are! Throughout this, I’ll be speaking for consoles, not computers, which had multitudes of different floppy disks, tapes, and other now-archaic means of save storage. We’ve come a long way in both respects, when you think about it, but I’m a console gamer, and that’s what I’m most familiar with.
I started playing video games in the cartridge era, back when game saves were saved with a watch battery welded into the cartridge’s wiring, but after the time of writing down passwords. This method wasn’t ideal, because those batteries did die out every so often.
The PlayStation was the first console I’m aware of to use memory cards for all storage. Remember when those were $20 a pop? Fun fact: they only stored 128 kilobytes of data. By comparison, today, you can buy an 8 gigabyte flash drive for about $20. That’s the equivalent of 65,536 PlayStation memory cards.
The Nintendo 64, while continuing to use battery backups in cartridges, was Nintendo’s first system on American shores to use an external memory pack. While Game Boy Advance and DS systems still saved data to the game medium afterward, the N64 was the last home console to save progress to the game cartridge.
The Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube continued the tradition of memory cards, though the Xbox was the first console on the market with a built-in hard drive and memory cards seemed more of an afterthought. Not many games explicitly used them. Sony later released a hard drive for the PlayStation 2 for several online games.
And now, with the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii, we’ve come to the point where, for the most part, you don’t have to spend a lot of money for portable storage. And it’s become somewhat standardized. I say somewhat because consoles use standard memory devices that you are able to use in any computer.
The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 both come with built-in hard drives (though the Xbox 360 hard drive is enclosed in a proprietary housing) and allow you to use USB memory devices (the PS3 doesn’t save to one, but you can copy to and from them), while the Wii uses standard SD cards that you might use in a digital camera. The 360 did have proprietary memory cards, but finally phased those out when the new hardware and software allowed you to use USB devices. And there was much rejoicing!
With a new console from Nintendo rumored to be appearing at E3, it’s anybody’s guess as to what sort of storage medium they’ll be using. But with Microsoft and Sony both saying that their consoles still have another few years of life in them, I doubt there’s any more improvements to be had there, hardware-wise.
That being said, with Portal 2 released this week, the PlayStation 3 version received the full compliment of Steam features, including Steam Cloud, a system that puts your game saves on their servers. This is the first console title to fully utilize cloud-based storage that I’m aware of.
Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come. It’s my dream that perhaps not this upcoming generation of consoles, but the one after will offer a complete cloud-based save game solution as the Internet becomes even more ubiquitous.
Until then, we’re at the mercy of moving parts, magnetism, and memory that slowly degrades as data is written and overwritten. Local storage will never go away, but knowing you have a safety net elsewhere on the Internet will be a good state of mind to have when it becomes a reality.
So remember, whatever happens, thou shalt not remove thy storage device.
