This whole thing started around November of 2023 when a friend and I were taking a look at PlayStation memory card icons. I was certain that someone had already done this work and an archive of every icon was out there hiding but all that I could turn up were a few small, but nonetheless fantastic efforts. Chief among them was VGCartography’s illustration on DeviantArt featuring icons from some of the most popular games and franchises. NatSpectrum’s recreations on SteamGridDB were also an early inspiration. But loads of these icons were animated and I wanted to see them in all their glory along with the special little oddball titles whose icons I could still picture in my mind.
I started poking around forums and subreddits to see if anyone had made further progress on an archive and I took a look at the debugging tools out there. It quickly became apparent that this would be a one-by-one, labor intensive endeavor…. so of course I put it on the back burner for a while. We also took a two-week trip to Japan at the end of 2023 which sidelined all my personal projects and websites. But around early February of 2024 I got properly started working on this crazy thing!
Initially I went through the entire collection of save files on GameFAQs and The Tech Game, downloading and opening up over 1,000 files with the fantastic little tool, PSXGameEdit. I also dug up all of my own memory cards and used the PlayStation 3 Memory Card Adapter to dump a small handful of personal saves. A few folks on the wonderful PlayStation-Library.com Discord server also pitched in their collections of save files. It was a great kickstart to the project and got the count up to around 450 icons in a surprisingly short amount of time. But with nearly 1400 titles in North America alone there were still plenty of holes to fill.
Phase two started around March of 2024 when I took Wikipedia’s list of international PlayStation releases and turned it into a spreadsheet to keep track of things. Focusing first on the remainder of the North American library, I sorted by release date and began checking in chronological order. For the remainder of 2024 I worked in batches, spending a few days loading up games and gathering save files, then processing them into GIFs and gathering details and tidbits to post them on the site.
By the start of 2025 I had around 1400 games live on the site and had completed my first pass through the North American lineup. Rarely a fan of sports games, I skipped most of those titles and have been going back to fill in the blanks while starting in on Japanese and European exclusives. Along the way I made a surprising number of discoveries about PlayStation development, contributed icons to Darren Hupke’s 32 Bit Library book series, found other folks archiving PS1 and PS2 icons, and shared lots of PlayStation tidbits on Threads (now Bluesky isntead) and YouTube.
MemCard.art
Capturing these icons is great and all but I knew that I wanted some way to share them with the world. Unfortunately, modern social platforms don’t treat these tiny animated GIFs with the respect that they deserve and apply some really gross filtering and stretching. They were unbearable to look at on the likes of Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Not to mention that those platforms could disappear at any given moment and the icons would be tough to search and organize on social media. Enter good ol’ WordPress. It took a few weeks of hosting headaches but I finally got the site up and running in late March of 2024.
To be honest, there have been more hosting headaches throughout 2024 and I’ve had to cut back on some of the features I originally envisioned, but the icons are still here and there are plenty of ways to organize and find what you want to see. There’s even a way to view ALL the icons all at once which is something I didn’t think would be possible.
So go and dig in: be it from a specific company, franchise, genre, or region of the world. Rediscover your childhood favorites and leave a comment if something stirs up your nostalgia. I hope you enjoy the site!
If you’d like to reach me you can contact on Bluesky or email cardist [at] memcard.art
