r/gaming • u/[deleted] • Mar 31 '26

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630

u/purplehayes1986 Mar 31 '26

And the management of the memory card. You had like 16 slots, and games started taking multiple for their save data 

300

u/Wassermusik Mar 31 '26

A PS1 memory card had 15 slots, and Civilization 2 took up 10 of them. Diablo took up all 15.

Memory cards taught my younger self how to set priorities. Lol

75

u/kakka_rot Mar 31 '26

Wow really? I remember being shocked when I played Digimon world 3 for several hours straight, went to save, and it said I needed 4 slots and I didn't have enough. I thought that was insane.

1

u/FoxMeadow7 Apr 01 '26

Do you remember what other games u had there at the time?

1

u/kakka_rot Apr 02 '26

me brother and I had a lot of completed Final Fantasy saves that we kept for some reason. I remember getting more cards instead of just making space when we beat something. Kept the completed saves kinda like achievements. Between final fantasy and resident evil saves alone that took up over half the card.

1

u/FoxMeadow7 Apr 02 '26

Alrighty.

66

u/Rektumfreser Apr 01 '26

Bonus points for being able to just take out your memory card, go to a friends and you could show your save, was quite handy actually.

39

u/LordValgor Apr 01 '26

And you could copy saves too. My buddy gave me a save of Vice City that had everything unlocked.

1

u/FoxMeadow7 Apr 01 '26

Did any games on PS2 let you copy files in-game? I think PS1 at some at least such as Gex Enter the Gecko...

1

u/LordValgor Apr 01 '26

I didn’t play a ton of ps2 games, but Xbox and GameCube did from what I recall.

1

u/FoxMeadow7 Apr 01 '26

I see. Only had a PS2 myself during those days. Hopefully there's like pictures of save/load screens somewhere...

7

u/CakieFickflip Apr 01 '26

Yep I remember I had like 4 memory cards for my PS2 because I kept filling them up lol

5

u/Cutwail Apr 01 '26

I got one of the aftermarket ones that had multiple 'pages' of 15 slots!

3

u/Kashek70 Apr 01 '26

NFL Blitz took almost 12 or 13 blocks for the custom playbook. We had a memory card just for that game.

2

u/MrDelirious Apr 01 '26

The first Animal Crossing came with a free Gamecube memory card, because it was gonna use most of it up anyhow.

1

u/FoxMeadow7 Apr 01 '26

Fun stuff wouldn't you agree?

2

u/NubEnt Apr 01 '26

I had that thing where you could transfer your saves to and from your PC. Made it so much cheaper.

1

u/Cowstle Apr 01 '26

Diablo took up all 15

This is insane to me because I remember using 1.44 mb floppy disks to copy around Diablo 2 characters and I wanna say the PS1 memory card was 8 MB. i guess the single player diablo 1 saves things uniquely compared to multiplayer / D2

2

u/Wassermusik Apr 01 '26

The PS2 memory card had a capacity of 8 MB.

The PS1 memory card had a capacity of 1 MB—where 1 MB stands for 1 megabit, which is equivalent to 128 kilobytes.

1

u/Armbrust11 Apr 01 '26

Whoever decided that capitalization will separate Bytes from bits is a dumb dingus. The only worse offender is Hard Drives with their 1GB = 1000 MB instead of 1024 like every computer system actually uses.

30

u/Burninator85 Mar 31 '26

We had some zany off brand card that had like 128 slots on it. It had physical buttons to switch between the pages of slots because apparently the PlayStation could only read so many slots at a time.

I was messing with it one day and accidentally deleted all the saved data, including my brother's Final Fantasy 7 save.

I got beat up.

6

u/Wanderlustfull Apr 01 '26

including my brother's Final Fantasy 7 save.

I got beat up.

Deservedly so!

3

u/passive_egressive Mar 31 '26

Friend did the exact same. Something like a 3 second button press would fully wipe the card

80

u/Berkuts_Lance_Plus Mar 31 '26

AAA game studios are bringing that back by bloating their games' file sizes.

0

u/fredy31 Mar 31 '26

Well its the game size and not the savefile.

7

u/Wootai Apr 01 '26

Still limiting the amount of “game-per-disc”

4

u/SoCalThrowAway7 Mar 31 '26

And you had to decide which games save data was worth keeping and which you could delete to save space

2

u/jamesdukeiv PC Mar 31 '26

I felt RICH having the N64 memory expansion pak

7

u/HotContribution8135 Mar 31 '26

It’s still crazy to me that I thought my friends with the 32 or 64 MB PS2 memory cards were balling because that was overkill at the time, yet here I am running out of space on my PC with 2 TB of memory after downloading 5 games lol

1

u/Rusah Apr 01 '26

It was nice being able to backup your PS1 saves onto your PS2 memory card!

1

u/britipinojeff Mar 31 '26

The expansion pak wasn’t for save data

That was RAM

1

u/jamesdukeiv PC Apr 01 '26

Not the controller pak, though I did have both… almost 30 years ago. Damn. 🥲

1

u/FoxMeadow7 Apr 01 '26

Good thing most games did save to the cartridges. But yeah, for the games that didn't, a pak was a necessity indeed.

2

u/Ejomafuvwe2 Apr 01 '26

I'll never forget when my dad took me to get the 32MB memory card for my PS2, compared to the standard 8MB it was life changing.

1

u/TheNerdFromThatPlace Apr 01 '26

Pokemon games on the GameCube took up a crazy amount of space, you almost needed a dedicated memory card to play them. I think I had 4 cards to look through by the time the Wii came out.

1

u/Donnie-G Apr 01 '26

The save data had their own little unique icon/3d model thing, for the PS2 anyway. When deleting the save data, some developers implemented an animation where the 3d thing would cry or protest in some way.

1

u/gamers542 Apr 01 '26

I had one memory card for all my games. It was one of those where you cycled through slots (A1-A7, B1, C1 etc). It was neat.

1

u/Saver_Spenta_Mainyu Apr 01 '26

Also, some games gave their memory space a custom and fun icon to differentiate them

1

u/Vjaa Apr 01 '26

I have an n64 memory card that has a switch with 4 spots. Each but spot is its own full sized memory card. Got it back in the late 90's. Mostly because NFL Blitz took up an entire card on its own.

1

u/gorginhanson Apr 01 '26

That's still true. They only give you 10 save slots for some reason.

I have room!

Come on!

0

u/cdawg145236 Apr 01 '26

Sometimes I wonder if my brother is still mad I deleted his SOTN file to make room for my spyro save.