Before CD-based consoles the option to save your progress largely came down to whether the publisher splurged on a cartridge with a battery backup or internal storage option. This could increase the price of the game and so it was usually reserved for role-playing titles and some sports games that were designed to take dozens of hours to complete. Everything else relied on passwords: a string of seemingly random letters, numbers, or symbols that informed the game of things like the number of lives you had remaining, power-ups you’d unlocked, or what level you had just completed.
System-level storage first appeared on consoles in the early 90’s with platforms like the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar followed shortly after by the Sega Saturn which offered the $50 Backup Memory cartridge to accommodate game saves. But it was the PlayStation that shrunk both the size and price of storage options and had them readily available at launch. While Sony’s official memory cards cost $25, third-party accessory makers were quick to offer a variety of options as low as $19.99. Despite the widespread availability however, developers didn’t automatically support memory card saves, especially in the early years of PlayStation.
There are plenty of titles that simply carried the password systems from the 8 and 16-bit eras forward (see some examples above) but there are even more that supported both passwords and memory cards. I was an early adopter of PlayStation and I loved the tiny form factor of the memory cards so I was quick to scoop up a small handful for myself. It was such an immediate thing that I honestly never questioned using a memory card until revisiting the PlayStation library today.
It got me wondering if there were more frugal holdouts in the mid-90’s that would rather put their $20 towards a new game and continue writing down passwords on paper instead…
So, were YOU a password purist or did you also embrace the portable storage lifestyle of PlayStation Memory Cards? Let me know in the comments
