We didn’t always have savegames. In times gone by, there was no such thing as keeping context between play sessions. Galaga, Asteroids, Space Invaders (hmm, lots os space games back then), River Raid, and even Pitfall — a game that required exploring many levels collecting precious stuff, and therefore naturally prone to saving — did not require or provide the means to save more than your highscores, if that. Technology was more limited and, anyway, games were simpler as far as videogames were concerned.
Computer games, of course, were far quicker to break this barrier. Even the Infocom adventure games would let you save your progress. Text-based interfaces allowed people to make far more complex games — requiring way more play time — and saving was easy anyway, once you had a hard disk or even a floppy ready.
Technology evolved, and two things happened. First — game cartridges allowed more content to be put in. Mega Man, Castlevania, The Guardian Legend and Faxanadu, for example, were long games that no sane kid would be able to finish in a single sitting. A sense of context, of persistency, was required. And that’s when passwords made their debut. Long strings of seemingly random characters that would appear on the screen at certain points of the game — sometimes between levels, sometimes when you pressed START. These strings could be written down to be entered in later, their codified information “reminding” the game of the player state so far. As long, of course, as you could get them right. I hated systems that had both 1 (one) and l (the letter ‘l’), or zero and O. Few things were worse than entering that precious code only to get an error message.
(Actually, passwords were available much earlier for tape-based systems or for other ends. Dungeon Master (MSX) let you get a password for your character so you could type it into a friend’s computer and play the game there. It actually used a pretty inteligent protection so you couldn’t use it anywhere, if I remember correctly.)
The first Legend of Zelda didn’t have passwords, just as Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Ultima III. The first could even be made with passwords, but the rest were all very large games with dozens of hours to plow through, and a huge amount of possible configurations. Character classes, levels, equipment, items, position, world state… Thankfully, by now, cartridges could have state saved to them, and context could be kept. With that, games were free to grow larger and larger. Final Fantasy XII (PS2) – a gargantuan RPG largely descending from the above — can provide more than 120 hours of content for an aficionado, with infite combinations available of party member development, equipment choices and world state.
As I type this, I realize it’s time to go. This is bigger than a single post, anyway, since my original goal is getting to quicksaves.
I could save this just as a draft and continue later — but I guess publishing it as it is will be useful. The blog keeps context, anyway.