I was driving a Mac at a graphic design, printing press, scanning service bureau. We had massively expensive printers and scanners. The color correction scanner genius guy had a $20,000 super Mac.
Step 1. Scan a negative on a $100,000 laser drum scanner.
Step 2. Color correction guy would bring the designer into his office for expensive Photoshop magic.
Step 3. I would crop the image to fit in a magazine.
Step 4. I saved the next project with the same filename as the one we had worked on for days.
Step 5. Go to Step 1.
Not a loss but many moons ago, some friends and I had tons of fun playing Conflict: Vietnam on xbox. Even with its brutal 2-saves-per-mission system, we didnât realize we could save, and played each mission through without saving at all. It took hours, but it was a blast. Eventually, I discovered the save system and finished the game on my own; however, we spent an entire night on the first level. We must have tried 50 times before we beat it.
My cousin came over and it was the first time I ever played a co-op multiplayer game, Quake 2.
Multiplayer Q2 had no save option, I think.
So we stayed up for 2 days, only taking a few naps and finished the whole game in a marathon session.
We were terrified that the PCâs would get turned off or there would be a power outage.
Some games actually have easter eggs hidden in them if you get to certain points before you first saveâŚ
@Positron yeah I remember doing similar things even as recently as the first halo on xbox, you got checkpoints that worked if you die, but if you turned off the system you had to restart the level. Lazy dev design decisions where they didnât think about the possibility that punishing players for a system crash worse than dying wasnât a great idea, but ti did lead to some interesting cases of marathon play.
Interesting that I did a backup of my games just before finding this.
I had 2 games where my efforts were thwarted. The first was Final Fantasy 2 on SNES. I got to the very end of the game and the battery died and wiped everything. A couple years later I got another cartridge and practically the same thing happened. I tried again running the machine 24/7 but the power died while I was at work after maybe playing 2/3 of the way through.
The worst one though was Dragon Warrior 7. I had picked it up and put in some obscene amount of hours and had a game breaking but where one of the pieces to open up the end region somehow disappeared. What made it worse was there were so many freaking pieces that it was near impossible to figure out what happened. I bought a book to try and help me retrace every piece and it was just gone.
But that wasnât the real story. I went back and put in over 100 hours to get almost to the end. I decided to pick up a PS2 so I could get Gran Tourismo 4 when it came out. I bought one from my friend but the game refused to play. I decided to go out and buy a new slim PS2 for $150 or whatever it was (+$50 for game and $50 for old PS2, so Iâm $250 deep to play one game), and it still doesnât work! Apparently they disc was just messed up and I got it exchanged and I finally got it working by the end of the weekend.
Then my sister had some ultra retarded cat that would flip out and it started breaking shit, so I went to toss it in my sisterâs room and the bastard clamped down on my right thumb. I was bleeding all over the place and missed a week of work. To make it worse, I couldnât really play GT4 like that either. I went back to work the next week and one of my sisterâs piece of shit friends stole my system with disc 1 of DW7 and the 100+ hour game save!
I havenât had a major loss like that ever since abandoning consoles. Iâve gotten better about making backups, so I donât see it becoming a major problem for me unless it is a game breaking bug.
I feel ya, my brother had pokemon emerald played up to groudon vs kyogre, then he spent loads of hours accidentally over-leveling his swellow.
Then he lost the cartridge on a family trip
europa universalis 3 with mod (so game never ends at all, and research continues etc)
gog ran update, making my save incompatible - loading it crashes the game; worst part when i tried to re-roll version it states it cannot open it since its not compatible. (was at years 2700âs)
Canât recall an actual disaster; since even though it has certainly happened to me, thatâs a time when you realise whether the game is really good or not. If it isnât worth starting over, then chances are good that it was near time to stop playing anyway.
One thing though happened with Skyrim. Not that I lost the saves when reinstalling Windows, but that I lost track of the precise combination of 30 something mods I used to make it worth playing. Never came back.
Soul Calibur 3 on the PS2. The game had this bug that would corrupt your save file if itâs not the first save file created on the memory card. I had almost everything unlocked and then I had to do it all over again when the save file got corrupted. Luckily it didnât take as long to unlock all the stuff the second time around and the game is insanely fun to play. And I was in high school so I had the time and the energy. I still play it using PCSX2
