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 vividly 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 threw all my little personal projects out of whack after we got back. 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, downloading and opening up over 1,000 files with the fantastic little tool, PSXGameEdit. I also went through the save file collection at The Tech Game but it was largely just a copy of what was on GameFAQs. I then dug out 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 from 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 an approximate 1300 titles in North America alone there were still plenty of holes to fill.
Phase two started around mid-February of 2024. 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 have been going in chronological order ever since. Most nights I’ll make it through 10-12 titles, loading each one up and sometimes having to play for an hour or more to get to a save point. Thankfully, many games let you save right from the main menu and then I’m free to move on.
MemCard.art
Capturing these icons is great and all but I knew I wanted some way to share them with the world. Unfortunately, modern social platforms don’t treat these tiny animated GIFs with the respect 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. 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.
The design was partially inspired by XboxGamer.pics, a new endeavor to catalog all of the Xbox 360’s GamerPic icons — a fantastic effort by methodw. I really liked the idea of being able to “Like” the icons and I was happy to find a WordPress theme that does the same. So go and dig in: be it from a specific developer, franchise, genre, or region of the world. Rediscover your childhood favorites, leave a Like and a comment with your memories. I hope you enjoy the site!
