The year was 1998 and I had finally saved up enough money to get a used PlayStation and a copy of Final Fantasy VII.
I got a ride to the local game store and went home with a huge smile on my face. Soon after returning home, two issues surfaced.
The red, yellow, and white cords didn’t plug in anywhere on the old TV in my room, and the game was prompting me for a memory card
that I did not have. This meant that I couldn’t save my progress and I had to take turns using the TV in the family room. It took
two weeks to finally get an RF adapter, and another two weeks to finally get that first memory card. Finally, I could progress
past the Train Graveyard.

Here at 1UP we’ve spent some time recently talking about the ’90s. Saving your game progress on a cartridge or external card isn’t
exclusive to that decade, but now it seems almost archaic — something few gamers will miss. Nowadays our consoles have
built-in storage and cloud saves, and you don’t normally worry about those things called “memory cards.” Let?s take a look at some
of the 1UP Community’s ’90s Video Game Problems.

3rd Party Memory Cards

…when I first got my PlayStation, I let the dude talk me into getting a Mad Catz memory card, ’cause you know, five bucks cheaper.
Penny-wise and pound foolish is more like it. I got Valkyrie Profile and Final Fantasy IX at about the same time, made it halfway through
both games… and my memory card simply quit working. The PlayStation wouldn’t recognize that there even was a memory card inserted. After that,
I stuck with Sony memory cards. — San Andreas

No Data

During the PS2 days, i got a demo disc in the mail from Sony that had a bug in it. If you played to the end of the Viewtiful Joe 2 demo,
it would reset and erase EVERYTHING on any memory card that was inserted in the system. Unfortunately, I did not know this at the time, so I lost a
lot of stuff. I did complain about it, and they sent me a free game (I think it was Sly 2), but somehow that didn’t seem to make up for it.
To this day I’m a little more leery about Sony products. — Cary Woodham

The A-Team

My little brother was possibly the most dedicated Final Fantasy Tactics player ever. He grinded through every job for every character. His
characters were so powerful that he could only play for 10-15 minutes at a time before the game would crash. He gave a copy of his “B-Team”
data (only halfway through capping every job) to our friend who was a Square Enix QA Manager. He said my brother had hit levels that nobody
in the company had. Which made it easy for his team of testers to fly through the game. My little brother laughed, “You should see my
A-Team data.” — BigMex

That One Friend…

My very first experience of losing my game progress came from Breath of Fire II for the SNES, one of my favorite games of all time (if you
haven’t figured that out yet). I was seven years old and quite proud of the four or five hours I put into the game after I got it for my birthday.
My memory?s a little hazy, but I recall letting a friend borrow the game while I borrowed his copy of Donkey Kong Country 2. I distinctly remember
telling him not to copy or erase my save, to just use his own slot and stick to it. Fast forward a few days later: He comes to my doorstep with
his mother, who tells me that my save game got accidentally deleted when he tried to copy a save. He brought his mom over because he was afraid
to tell me the truth himself. — Nuka_Cola via his
feature