Over the years there have been a lot of major improvements in the game industry that have helped reshape it. For this series, I’m going to turn back the clock and examine four of them that I feel have been the most influential starting with something that today a lot of younger gamers definitely take for granted: The act of saving.
Passwords and Batteries:
Technically saving your game was possible from almost the beginning of the home market with computer games having the technology to read/write built into them thanks to hard drives. However the consoles weren’t that lucky. The pre Nintendo era had no saving whatsoever as games had no real sense of permanence or depth. They were meant to be time wasters and nothing more.
It wasn’t until Nintendo with games like Mario, Zelda and so on that we started to see titles that offered more than just a few minutes of enjoyment. In fact, Zelda has been credited as the first game on a console to feature saving in the form of a battery backup. However, the functionality of saving your game did not become standardize and was limited to games built around RPG mechanics.
For everything else, you had to get through the entire game in one sitting. Many titles did offer a password option but this was no substitute for the easability of just hitting “save.” Thankfully as we entered the mid 90s with the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn and Playstation 1, saving became standardized across all genres.
Nintendo 64 titles continued the battery backup feature seen on previous consoles while Playstation introduced the memory card system to allow for portable saves. The 3DO from my memory was the first console to have internal saving as opposed to having it on a cartridge or on a memory card.
Most action titles before the Nintendo 64 era had no saving whatsoever. It was pretty much all or nothing back then.
As an interesting side-note, Sega tried to do something different with the Sega Dreamcast’s Virtual Memory Units or VMUs.
By allowing you to install mini games on them and download and upload content from them. However, limited battery life and very basic mini games prevented this from taking off.
It wasn’t until the last generation with the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 where every console manufacturer had internal saving available. Another evolution that has taken place has been the introduction of cloud saving: Where your save files exist on a cloud server that gets transferred after playing a game. The point of this is that it allows you to effectively continue your game from any computer that has your online profile on it.
So I could uninstall all my games on one computer, install steam on a brand new computer and install the games and my original save content without losing any time spent.
Saving has become a major element of video games not only for the accessibility of being able to continue playing another time, but some games factor it into the design. Titles like Rogue-likes challenge the player with either limited saving or no saving during play to add to the risk factor.
With so many games being released on a daily basis and the simple overload of content, it is becoming harder to dedicated solid chunks of time to a single game. Making the act of saving even more important as no one wants to be forced to play past their time limit or worse lose progress due to not finding a save point.
The use of cloud saving allows gamers to have their available games and progress across multiple computers as long as they have their digital client set up.
This is yet another time where I get to feel really old having grown up during the age of passwords, something that I never want to do again.
For our next part, is a major change and one that has impacted everything about the Game Industry.
There is one other important element of change in the Game Industry and that is the standardization of controller design. However I already talked about this in previous post.
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