If you’ve come to the site or ever caught a post of ours on social media you might be wondering “what’s up with all of these little GIFs?“. They’re memory card icons and back in 1994 the PlayStation introduced them as part of a plan to revolutionize save game management. Pocket-sized physical memory cards held all of your data and each game was represented by these unique and oftentimes surprising pixelart icons.
That’s the TL;DR of it. But as is often the case there’s a lot of interesting history that got us to this point. Start exploring our collection of memory card icons now using the search page and the Icons menu or keep reading for more.
By the early 1990s console game cartridges with built-in memory and batteries were already well established. Role-playing, adventure, and sports cartridges regularly carried volatile RAM memory so that players could more easily return to their play sessions later. But not every game needed those expensive additions just to retain simple level progression or high scores. For the majority of titles a simple (or not so simple) password system would suffice until consoles started growing more complex.
With the advent of CD-based gaming — starting as early as 1989 with console add-ons like the TurboGrafx-CD and later the Sega CD —Ā the question of saving game progress started to get complicated. Extra chips and batteries obviously can’t be grafted onto a CD so the storage on these early platforms was moved inside the console itself. But this internal memory was often complicated to manage or even to simply find.
For example, in the early days of the 3DO you couldn’t see all of your saved games or free up storage space without buying a disc that included the ‘memory manager’ utility. Most problematic of all for these early consoles, there wasn’t a reliable way to get your data off of the hardware if you wanted to show something cool to a friend or take your progress with you. A few backup options did exist but they were expensive and hard to find even at the time of release.
It seems like the idea of a system-wide memory interface was an afterthought for these early CD-based consoles beforeĀ the PlayStation came along. The introduction of portable memory cards and the visual, block-based save system might secretly be one of the platform’s most influential innovations. Memory cards have long since been usurped by internal storage and decades of advances in speed, capacity, and price, but the PlayStation set the stage for many consoles that followed it, including Sony’s own.
In simplifying memory management on the PlayStation, Sony did away with terminology like kilobytes and megabits. Where older consoles represented save data as text on black-and-white screens, Sony sought to make things visual, colorful, and even playful. They boiled data management down to the concept of blocks with a single memory card able to hold fifteen blocks in total. It’s not an even amount but it still feels good: it’s a small enough number that you don’t have to think too hard about it and it’s neatly represented on-screen in a simple grid.
The majority of games used a single memory card block to save game progress and other details, but if they were really ambitious they could require up to an entire 15-block memory card for themselves. All of these blocks were represented in-game and on the PlayStation dashboard as small icons where their unique visuals would help players quickly tell one game from another. Each icon is a miniscule grid of pixels, 16×16 in size with up to 3 frames of animation. Even by mid-90s graphics standards that was a tiny amount of space to create an identifiable image, let alone a fun, stylish, or clever one.
Over the lifespan of the PlayStation this unified system of memory cards and blocks resulted in thousands of icons from hundreds of studios and publishers around the world. Some teams took full advantage of these tiny canvases. Some simply slapped their studio logo on them. Some clearly did the bare minimum of work. And a select few hid secrets and surprises on the memory card. But in the decades since, they’ve been cast into shadow and largely forgotten about. If anyone brings them up nowadays it’ll be a one-off post on a subreddit or a tweet from someone who just unearthed their childhood memory cards.
And with all that said, here we are: putting the spotlight on these often overlooked icons, attempting to gather them all in one place, and exploring the original PlayStation library from the unique angle of its save system.
P.S. Before you ask, I’d love to also feature PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, GameCube, and Xbox save icons but those will have to be projects for much, much farther into the future
