Have you ever saved before trying out all of the possible in-game dialogue options? Or before you took a risky move—trying and failing to save Roggvir in Solitude, for example? Maybe you really wanted to dropkick that character you hate just to see what would happen? We often take the humble game save for granted but it’s very often integral to any of today’s gaming experiences.
Many were frustrated at Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s save system. The already-demanding action-RPG requires players to use a limited consumable (Savior’s Schnapps) to save their progress.
Developer Warhorse Studios’ restriction of ‘spam saving’ was an attempt to increase risk, immersion and thus, replayability. The resulting backlash showed how reliant we’d become on saving and the ‘unique playthrough’ door that saves opened in the past.
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More recently, Returnal made some waves exposing a more casual market to its roguelite game save purity. Though it must be noted that Returnal autosaves a player’s meaningful progress: bosses slain, gadgets gathered and the like.
The idea of leaving a game and coming back to a game, frozen in time, is ingrained in what the public imagine when they think of video games. Without it, one can feel as if they can’t play the game on their terms.
We owe some of our best moments to saving, too. As alluded to in our opening paragraph, game saves offer the freedom to experiment. Be it roaming risk-free in an area you shouldn’t even be in, or testing the limits of a game and the patience of its NPCs.
But it wasn’t always so…
Getting Your Swears on the Leaderboard
From the 70s until at least the early 80s, arcade games and therefore most popular video games were very instant, simple and exclusively disconnected from the household (think Space Invaders or Galaxian). Arcades were practically the be-all-and-end-all for people seeking their gaming fix.
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As household gaming hadn’t yet seen its proper boom, games were designed on your typical ‘get your swears on the leaderboard’ type reward system, so saving still hadn’t seen the light of day. This wasn’t due to a lack of creativity on any developer’s part—there’s no denying that game development with such limited resources and tech for such an unstable and initially niche market was a huge undertaking.
Replayability and competition were arguably more important than they are now. There was no upfront cost or ‘keep’ aspect to games, so profits for arcades were solely reliant on a steady supply of pocket change.
The rewards for beating your top score (your swears on the leaderboard) or progressing into the (likely very difficult) game you were playing via checkpoints, were crude ancestors of saving. They were invented to be integrated sales mechanisms. Checkpoints were just a natural progression of leveraging money for a second shot without having to start from the beginning.
The Birth of the Game Save
This simple competitive arcade style began to unwind with the arrival of the 80s and with it, affordable PCs like the Sinclair ZX80. The Brown Box had demonstrated that the market wasn’t there yet for a specialised console in the 70s, so investing in the production of a broader usage and low-cost machine in the 80s was destined for success even if home-gaming wasn’t. With a new platform, cheap tech and a bunch of new users… who knows what could happen?
As everyone knows, when interesting tech becomes widely accessible, progress accelerates. The arrival of Sinclair’s line of affordable microcomputers and the many systems inspired by it kicked off a golden age of innovation.
It took less than a year for saving to take a leap from scoreboard to actual ‘save’ or, at least, save-like. In 1980, text-based computer game Zork I was released (similar shtick to The Hobbit from 1982). The adventurous multiple-choice aspects of this game made it particularly innovative for its time.
The Adventurous Types
As anyone who knows their ARPGs from their JRPGs will tell you, saving is something which goes hand in hand with role playing games, looking back. RPGs have always been much larger than their counterparts—they feature all sorts of nooks, crannies and choices to overlook/redo.
The link between the role-playing game and the game save is natural. In the physical realm, dungeon crawlers of the pencil & card variety can simply walk away from the table, the game: frozen in time.
Not Quite a Game Save
If we are to take the pedantic angle, Zork I’s save wasn’t quite a proper game save. It was more of a password system. This was a rather clever bypass of the period’s technological limitations, as storage space was and always has been an uphill battle. The save files of today and their ilk were completely out of the question. If we consider games like Zork I as a tree with branch forks representing a choice path, passwords allowed the game to access specific forks without having to actually remember.
Nonetheless, this was to saves what Spacewar! was to arcade games: something of an eye-opening legacy to follow. Zork I opened doors. Take risk-taking, for example. Until this point in time, huge risks in arcade games lost you your ‘insert region specific coinage’.
Footloose and Risk-Free
Finally, those who had meticulously kept their spoils safe from unnecessary risk and every gamer between now had never-before-seen freedoms out on the horizon. Players would be able to play at their own pace, try all decisions out rather than just those which made the most sense to them and experience a different ‘version’ of an RPG in each playthrough. This individual playthrough idea later spread across most popular genres and arguably inspired in-depth customisation as we know it today.
Stemming from the save’s invention and its supposed removal of consequence, saves were either wholeheartedly accepted or outright dismissed. A certain BYTE magazine took a stance against this new function in their Zork I review back in ‘81.
The word ‘cowards’ was mentioned and it didn’t age well. InfoWorld provided their rebuttal to BYTE in that same year, righteously defending these new freedoms as an asset to gamers and gaming alike. How right they were.
Regardless of journalistic tiffs, the seeds of large-scale story and character-driven games had just been sown with Zork I. Just as the Lord of the Rings book series is too thicc to finish in one sitting, games were getting larger, the need for saves was growing and technology wasn’t far behind on delivering its own end of the bargain.
Proper ‘Save’ Saves
Just as PC games, PC game tech and PC game data storage was evolving, so too was the console scene. The Legend of Zelda had its debut on the Famicom Disk System in 1986, rendering Zelda (allegedly) the first official console game to ever have included a proper save feature.
This type encompasses most game saves of the modern era, known as a save state. A game save of this type captures details of significance, and those details depend on the game. Prior to this, basic ideas such as checkpoints (as far back as early arcade games) and the aforementioned password/forks featured in Zork I had been employed so as not to waste precious bytes.
Photographic Memory
Today, a game save in the form of a save state are best compared to a photograph. Pretty much all the details you would want to be saved, are. While alternatives to save states were the obvious solution in the beginning, their inability to capture details about the player’s individual playthrough alongside the success of complex RPGs meant gaming was doomed to outgrow them.
With new sets of armour, weapons, multiple choice options and even the amount of arrows present in your quiver, for example, games before The Legend of Zelda were missing the ability to store and recall the soul of a playthrough.
Not Quite Forever
With reportedly more than a year’s wait for international players, the game was released in the US with battery-backed memory in cartridge format. The technologies involved were far from new but also further still from becoming obsolete.
These battery supported cartridges use technology identical in concept to that of later DMG Gameboy cartridges. The batteries themselves are similar to watch batteries, though their purpose is to allow the SRAM chips inside the cartridge to keep save data rather than time. If the battery dies or is removed, all data is lost.
Luckily, due to the low power draw of their surrounding components, it’s been calculated that in the case of NES games, for example, cartridge save data batteries could actually live for around 70 years or more from their date of manufacture. This of course comes with the option to sacrifice the data and change out the battery to keep the cartridge alive.
Sprawling Worlds to Spend Days in
Since then, state saving has evolved into the almost seamless system we use and experience today. We owe that to advancing technologies, making starships out of triangles and arcade gaming’s need to maintain its replayability (checkpoints/creative systems/graphics/scale) and personalisation (swears on the leaderboard/character choice/topscore).
This ultimately bred large scale games with rich, complex battle systems, huge maps and even in-depth character development. Trying to imagine large-scale RPGs without a game save. Dark Souls, Zelda, Final Fantasy, or Oblivion would seem like torture and there’s a reason for that. RPGs are diminished without saves and vice versa.
Thanks for reading our latest article on the history of the game save. Do you think you could live without saves? What’s the earliest game you remember playing with a save feature? Let us know in the comments!