Save Your Progress?

Video games these days are HUGE. They really can take an amazingly large amount of your time to complete, and some of them I'll just turn up my nose and laugh at the mere concept of completing them. But that's not a bad thing; I love to play a game I can't finish, simply because it feels like I got my money's worth from them. Case in point? Fallout: New Vegas. New game, but it would probably take anybody over a hundred, maybe two hundred hours to see everything. I intend on stretching that out as long as I possibly can, to enjoy the sights of a post-apocalyptic Nevada and really feel like I'm living in the world.

The very reason we can have games this big, however, is in the design of the save game system. It's an old concept by now, but in the earliest days of the video game industry, saving your game was unheard of; it was seen as unnecessary, or even a strange privilege that you don't really deserve to have by some game developers.

The earliest video games were single-screen affairs, designed where each screen was a different level; level 1 was blue, level 2 was green, and had a different layout. Donkey Kong was like this, for instance; each level was just a different challenge for "Jump Man" (Who would later become known as Mario) to overcome, in order to save the princess at the top. Did this game need a save system? Nope! Why would it? Most of the challenge in the game is simply surviving the early levels so that you can climb to the upper levels, and being able to save the game in this instance was not only impractical from a gameplay perspective, but it was something that game developers hadn't even figured how to tap into yet. Why should they have? Arcade games weren't designed to keep you there for hours; they were designed for you to be able to feed some quarters into the machine, and keep you challenged for a few minutes at a time until either your pockets were empty, or you got the highest score.

When the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in America in 1985, video games began to take on a new meaning and dimension. The design philosophy shifted (albeit very slowly) from the arcade mindset, and began to realize that a gamer sitting on the couch at home wanted to be entertained for a longer period of time. That was one major reason why games like Super Mario Bros. were so popular; they not only were longer, but they encouraged discovery and exploration. You could spend minutes or hours beating Super Mario Bros., just finding all the warp zones and hidden 1-up mushrooms, or racing as fast as you could to the finish. It was all up to you, really. Even then, Super Mario Bros. was set up as the kind of game that did not require saving. Half the fun was derived from getting as far as you could, and yet the game was not actually long enough for it to truly be a nuisance when you died, and the Game Over screen heralded your return to the very beginning.

As games became longer, their challenge never quite waning, developers began to picture your average gamer getting frustrated at the concept of playing a long, difficult game, and being unable to finish it because of the combination of length and difficulty. Thus came the advent of the password.

It was simple, really; put in the right combination of letters and numbers, and the game would allow you to jump to a higher level from the beginning of the game. It was a crude, rudimentary system of "saving" the game, but it at least made it possible to begin from level 50 in Bubble Bobble, for instance.

One of the earliest games on the NES to use a password system was Kid Icarus, and this password system was not used as a cheat to jump ahead, but rather as a genuine attempt to let the player save progress. After dying, the game would present the player with a 24-digit password that, when written down and entered into the game's Password screen upon bootup, would allow the gamer to start right from the point that they died. It was seen as revolutionary at the time, and yet by today's standards, we can't help but wonder what they were thinking with how this sytem was implemented.

Passwords are meant to continue the game after the game has been turned off, and yet Kid Icarus, like almost any other early game that used a password, actually forced the player to input the password in order to continue, even if the game hadn't been turned off. You die, the game gives you a 24-digit password that will take FOREVER to put back in, and the game will then go back to the title screen, where you can choose to start over fresh, or put in the password you were just given. If the passwords were intended as a way to continue the game after the game was turned off, then why do they force you to put it in anyway, even if you intend to keep playing? These passwords took an eternity to enter, and some of them, like the oft-maligned NES title Deadly Towers, actually enforced a TIME LIMIT on entering them. That sure sounds like fun! Typing in a 30-character password with a 40 second time limit?

This is just bad design, really. A good idea...but implemented poorly. I mean look at this screenshot from the NES version of Rambo, and imagine yourself typing this in every time you died. You have to ask yourself, "Is it really necessary to have a full set of upper and lower case letters, along with numbers AND punctuation marks??" That is a 32-character password system, and if you accidentally type even one letter wrong, the entire thing is erased, forcing you to start over again. I have to wonder; what in the hell were they thinking?

The first game to get it right, however, used a then-new technology to get things done, and in the process it helped to define what a save game system would be from then up until the present day. Enter The Legend of Zelda, a golden behemoth of beautifully-designed gameplay magnificance from the minds of the men who brought you Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid, and a host of other favorites.

In 1986, The Legend of Zelda was released, and it was a gigantic adventure for the time. Nine sprawling, animal-shaped dungeons contained fragments of the legendary Triforce, and when combined they have the power to defeat the tyrant Ganon, rescue the princess of Hyrule, Zelda, and restore peace to the land.

The developers must have wondered how any sane person would be able to tackle such a huge, puzzle-filled adventure and actually be able to finish it in one sitting, and wisely concluded that it just wasn't going to happen. At the time, there was no internet for people to be able to look up solutions to the game's puzzles, or the locations of all the game's items and dungeons, and such information was passed almost exclusively via word of mouth. All of that had to be found manually, and that took a considerable amount of time to do! The game needed a real, genuine save system, and there were just too many variables (Amount of money, what items you did and did not find, what dungeons were and weren't completed, etc) to include a password system. Their solution was to use a "battery backup" system, which at the time just blew our minds.

How did it work? In other games, bits and pieces of information the game would use (Such as how many arrows you are holding, or how many enemies you killed in the last room you were inside of, for instance) were stored on the game's RAM. When you turned the console off, the power supply to the RAM would also shut off, and all information stored on the RAM would then be lost. To counter for this, other game makers would store the game's passwords permanently onto the game's ROM, which is where all of the permanent data for the game was stored. When powered off, the ROM would not lose its data. The solution the designers of Zelda came up with was to include a small, flat watch battery on the inside of the game's cartridge (Which you can see in the image above), that would provide a small amount of power to the game's RAM, where the game would store data used in loading a saved game, even after the game had been shut off. Thus, the saved game had been born...and it was revolutionary.

After the saved game had come, games gradually began to get longer, and longer...and helped to drive a bigger and bigger wedge between console-type games and arcade-type games. Games became lengthy adventures that could be stopped and started at will, and the games therefore became more complex and intricade. The ability to save the game enabled developers to create more engrossing titles, from RPG's like Final Fantasy where saving your game was a critical necessity, to adventure titles that could take weeks to explore completely.

Of course as time went on, the technology changed and the saving of games had to evolve along with the times. With the advent of CD-based games came memory cards (Like the PS2 memory card to the left), small pieces of memory that were inserted into a system and used to keep game save records. By now, even those have been rendered obsolete by technology that crosses over to other formats, the compatability for different machines differentiated only by filetype, rather than by hardware. I can, for instance, put a USB drive into my PS3, transfer all of my save data onto it, and place it onto my computer. From there, I can copy the data, share the data with my friends, burn the data to a CD to store for when I need it, etc. With game save data like Zelda, however...well, batteries don't live forever; it is very rare to find a copy of The Legend of Zelda for NES with the battery still able to hold a charge. The result is that most copies of Zelda can no longer actually save your game, unless you were to crack the cartridge open and solder in a new battery. Even if you do, there is no way that I know of to be able to remove the save data directly from an NES cartridge and save it somewhere that it won't get lost.

With how ubiquitous the saved game has gotten in recent times, the ability to save has overcome technological hurdles to actually become a part of the way you play the game. A case in point where the save system can become a part of the gameplay is in the Dead Rising series, with Dead Rising 2 having just recently been released on the PS3 and 360. In Dead Rising, both 1 and 2, the character you play as has just three days in a locked-in environment (A shopping mall in the first game, and a casino city in the second) to figure out a conspiracy theory, and rescue as many people as possible from thousands upon thousands of zombies during a zombie outbreak. The thing is, it is impossible to actually do all of this in one run; you must make very careful use of the game's save system in order to do this. In Dead Rising 1, you only have a single save slot to take advantage of, and in Dead Rising 2 you have three. You have to save the game by visiting a bathroom and relieving yourself, which in itself is a creative approach...but the real interesting thing is that at any point in time, you can restart the game from the very beginning, but with all of your current experience points, skill points, items, and abilities carried over into the new game. The result is that each time you play the game from the beginning, you are more capable to actually survive the three days, and get more things done in the short time you are given.

Dead Rising, interestingly enough, is one part of a curious dichotomy that has arisen between Japanese-developed and Western-developed games; their save game systems are different. The way it was during the Super Nintendo era, when all of the greatest games were coming out of Japan, is that save games were handled with the usage of a save game spot. You had to guide your character to one of a number of specific spots in the game, that were considered "safe". There were all kinds of different kinds of save points, such as a colorful box with the letter S on it like in Super Mario RPG (pictured above), telephones in offices or in utility closets in Parasite Eve, or even the lone and singular save point in the apartment "hub" area in Silent Hill 4. Japanese games have even integrated strategic saving, such as in the Resident Evil series, where saving the game was handled through the use of "ink ribbons". You had to find ink ribbons, and there were only so many of these ribbons in the game. These ink ribbons would then be used on typewriters in safe rooms, and one ink ribbon would let you save your game one time. Saving your game in Resident Evil was something you could only do a finite amount of times, and those ink ribbons would end up becoming a valuable commodity.

The part where that dichotomy I mentioned comes in, is that Western-developed games emphasize more freedom in their save game design. The game Fallout: New Vegas (pictured) that I had mentioned at the beginning of this article will let you simply open the pause menu at ANY POINT in the game, and save the game. That exact moment in time will be frozen, and can be recalled whenever you like. Worried about what might be around the corner, or worried that you might do something you didn't intend on doing in the game? Save the game beforehand, and if you find out you made a mistake, just load up the game and fix your mistakes. There are no save points, because literally any point in the game can be saved at. The other common way the game is saved is based on a checkpoint auto-save system, used primarily in story-driven games (Like Halo, Call of Duty, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, etc) where the game will automatically keep your game saved as you progress further along. If you manage to get to a checkpoint, your game will be saved, and if you die, then you are brought back to the nearest checkpoint. You can, of course, also restart at the nearest checkpoint in the pause menu if you feel you've messed something up.

The really fascinating thing with this difference in save game systems is that it reveals the differences in Western individualistic and Eastern collectivistic thought processes. In Japan, you are told where and how you can save. It is controlled for you, and the developers worry about giving the player too much freedom as to where and how you are able to save your progress. In Western games, the save systems allow for freedom and room to breathe; you are able to dictate when is a good time to save your progress, because you are ultimately the one who wants to have fun in the way you choose to. If you want to make things hard on yourself by only saving while in a town, then you can do that. If you want to make things easier by saving whenever you think there may be trouble up ahead, you can.

In the end, there are advantages and disadvantages to both styles of saving, but the end result is that we all have a great time playing lengthy games, and are able to live our lives without worrying about how much we're driving up the electric bill by keeping the system on while we go to school or work. And thankfully, we don't have to keep reams of note pads and waste gallons of ink writing down inane and ridiculously long passwords every time we make a mistake.

I can only hope that more games make innovative use of save game systems, like the Japanese-developed Metal Gear Solid. Did you know that there is a point in Metal Gear Solid 3 where, if you save the game and then boot the game back up, you are treated to a "deleted scene" in a video game that never finished production, shoehorned into Metal Gear Solid 3 as an easter egg called "Snake's Nightmare"? I love things like that!

The real point here is that the way you save the game can provide some seriously interesting wrinkles in the fabric of what makes a game fun or frustrating; it's all in how you interact with the game, and how it adapts to your life in the real world. Sometimes, the thing that makes all the difference is how we are allowed decide when we don't want to play anymore, even for just a little while.