• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Your greatest ever loss of progress due to a game crashing, computer bluescreening, loss of power, etc?

R6Rider

Gold Member
Probably some saved data on the PS2 memory card being erased.

Otherwise my near 100% save file for Just Cause 2 was lost when my PS3's original drive died.
 

_Ex_

Member
When Vagrant Story first released I got halfway through it (15 hours or so) in one weekend. Coming back the next weekend the save game file had corrupted. That's when I learned the hard way never to use third party memory cards.
 
Saving at the final save in FF7 to go take a shower and get some snacks as a kid and coming back to my brother talking about how maddens season took up the whole memory card so he erased it on my first playthrough.

Then not really minding playing it again lol
 

Markio128

Member
I've lost progress due to Sony not supporting cloud saves as standard and me not knowing about it.

I had to start Ghost of Tsushima from 0.
Did the game not save internally as well? I always save to both the cloud and the SSD because it just does so automatically.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
Game breaking bug made me lost first 18 hours of lords of the fallen and like 24 hours in darksiders 2.
 

Holammer

Member
Right at the last stretch of Phantasy Star 2 my Megadrive suddenly reset and the save was gone. Never played it again.
For non-game related stuff, around 2010'ish (brain suppresses this memory), my main HD died taking two months worth of artwork with it. *TheScream.jpg*
 

Grildon Tundy

Gold Member
90+ hours on Death Stranding. I got a PS5 and by the time I remembered that my PS4 did not have cloud saves active I had already given her to a cousin.
None I can actually remember due to tech issue, but echoing the post above me, lost my almost complete Pokémon Blue save to an idiot cousin. I like him now, but it took a long time to repair that friendship.
- My cousin accidentally overwrote my Monster Rancher save.
I collected all the hidden packages in Grand Theft Auto Vicy City (in 2003 so I had to switch between my pc and consoles since smartphones weren't a thing then. So it was a pain in the ass

My little cousin tried to start to game but ended up in my memory card. He saw the Vice City logo and thought it started the game. Ofcourse he pressed 'x' for the delete option.

He never slept in our house ever since
my stupid cousin overwrote my Pokemon Red savefile..
I was a child and just beat the Pokemon League.. and then one day my cousin and his family came over and my parents gave him my GBC with Pokemon Red to so he does not get bored....

I was so mad :<

Cousins: Not Even Once
 

Roberts

Member
Tomb Raider (2013)

Unintentionally got into the area I wasn’t supposed to get in just yet. Couldn’t do anything and cutscenes didn’t trigger. Replayed the game and turned out I was right at the very end of the game.
 

Dorago

Member
I got Disgaea 5 when it came out on Steam. I played through the story and wanted to take a break before the mega grind. When I started playing again the cloud saves had done nothing. I was so demoralized I didn't try to replay it for another year and a half.
 

[Sigma]

Member
My PS3 hard drive crapped out while I was actively going after the Platinums for Vanquish and to a lesser degree Max Payne 3(I didn't have a recent cloud save for those). I was on the Tactical runs for Vanquish at the time. Realized I would have to play parts of the game over and lost all motivation to do so. Same with Max Payne 3. What's funny about Max Payne 3 is I only had "New York Minute Hardcore" left to do outside of the multiplayer stuff so that's what I focus on. But the game had a glitch which seems like I was the only one on the planet that was encountering it at the time where the enemies would simply disappear and I couldn't advance at parts without killing certain enemies.

This meant I had to watch the time slowly run out on me. This mostly happened at the airport. I loved the game but this was full rage for me as it happened without fail every time. It happened at least 10 to 20 times before I decided I would wait for a patch to fix it(only kept doing it over that many times because that's how much I loved the game at that time so it was nothing for me to make a run out of habit, similar to how I acted with Returnal) and the rest is history because as I said, I had to do things over in the game to get back to where I was. By that time I got that patch, I had also forgotten enemy spawns so I lost motivation to continue to do it all over again while being so active on Battlefield 3. Just couldn't make the time.

It has a good ending for Vanquish at least. The remaster came out on PS4 and that motivated me to buy it and go after the Platinum. And so I did.
Now Rockstar...where is that Max Payne 3 Remaster?
i-need-that.gif
 
Last edited:

ShakenG

Member
Motorstorm Pacific Rift - Game crashed while saving, i pretty much knew my data was fkd. Once i booted it up and seen for myself it was gone.. i never touched it again.

I was working on the Platinum and only had like 2 trophy's to go. Beat developers times or something like that. I found the game incredibly difficult so i was put off it bigtime.

Will never forget 😞
 

Nickolaidas

Banned
A power outage crashed my PS3 and corrupted my Demon's Souls save at 60% progress forcing me to replay it from the beginning.
 

stn

Member
The only one I can recall is my Arkham Origins save corrupting due to a glitch right after I beat the game and wanted to do NG+.
 

Aesius

Member
In 1991, my five year old sister erased my Zelda II save. I was very, very far into it. I never played it again.
My brother let his friend borrow my copy of Chrono Trigger, and his friend's younger brother deleted my end game save with a Bronze Fist-equipped Ayla.
 

CatLady

Selfishly plays on Xbox Purr-ies X
The only time I lost major time in a game was Far Cry 3 when I hit New Game instead of Continue when I was at the very end of the game. I quit at that point since there was NO way I was playing it over again since I didn't like it very much in the first place.

I'm so glad Xbox has cloud saves and now QR so it's highly unlikely to lose a ton of progress in any game unless you do something really stupid like I did with Far Cry.
 
I can't remember the last time I lost progress in something. It would have been before Xbox Live and Steam when things were stored online (cloud).
I did however have a friend step on my Nintendo while I was moving out of an apartment. We were both caring my couch out the door and CRUNCH my SNES on the floor with a game inside that did not survive. It was so long ago I don't remember the game, but I remember losing my SNES that day. :(
 
I had a Demon's Souls save back on PS3 get corrupted. I had put close to 100 hours in on a first-time play through (yeah I took it slow, lol), and I was right near the end - at the King Allant fight. I couldn't believe it. But I loved it so much, I started over right away and raced through it and beat it on a much shorter run. It's still one of my all-time favorites, and does some things better than subsequent Souls games.
 

Diseased Yak

Gold Member
One day I was over a friend's house on their family computer playing the very first Sim City. I played for about 8 hours straight, doing all sorts of things, without saving because it never occurred to me.

The power went out. All gone. That was the moment when I learned to do frequent saving.
 

Ridaxan

Member
I lost about 110 hours worth of gameplay on FFX when some trash person broke in to my house and stole my PS2 + memory cards. Thank goodness for cloud saves and digital games in the modern era.
 

wvnative

Member
Spent days learning the ORG 13 fights in the KH3 DLC and beating them one by one it took like a week to get down to the last two. I beat one of the last two, went to save my game, only one left...

Game crashed DURING the save, corrupting it, and I gameshare with a buddy on PS4. For those unaware, when you gameshare on PS4, automatic save uploads don't work, so you must manually upload saves, which I was pretty good at doing...

...But I got so engrossed in learning the fights that I forgot to do that during this part of the DLC, so I had to redo ALL 13 fights... :'(

For those who have not played the game, the ORG 13 fights are all SUPERBOSSESS that are insanely hard.
 

Kikorin

Member
Not a single bad losses, but I remember when my dad took me and my brother to buy the GameCube with Luigi's Mansion. He promised us this weeks before the release and obviously didn't remembered, than he come back from work in a bad mood and we were super excited and suddenly asked him to go buy it. He keep his promise, but was really angry and none of us has been brave enough to tell him we'd also needed the memory card.

Because of this, we played for days starting everytime from beginning, until we asked our grandma money to buy a memory card.

Now that I'm an adult I can only praise my dad for having keep his promise after a full day of work, thanks even if you are no more with us.
 
Lets share some horror stories. My worst was probably Dragon Quest 8 when I spent an entire afternoon grinding at the casino in order to get the Gringham Whip (Jessica's ultimate weapon) and had gone to test it out on the Dragovian Trials (without saving, off course). Then i got called away by my mom for something so i turned off the tv and left the PS2 running as you do and didn't return until a few hours later. And guess what had happened during the meantime? My dad had tried to use the TV and found the console running, so he had turned it off for me. Throwing all my progress down the toilet...

Another bad one i remember happened when i was quite young playing the original PS1 Harry Potter (philosophers stone) game. I had made it after many tries to the final showdown with Voldemort, and after yet more effort i finally beat the actual battle portion only to have the game freeze on the transition cutscene (its followed by a QTE IIRC). And since i was 8 or something i had completely missed the fact that there are save points in the corridors preceding the battle (they are behind hidden doors, a mechanic which the game is really bad at explaining and which i didn't discover until a later playthrough) so i had to no choice but to redo the entire gauntlet which had taken me a good few hours....

Obviously there are many more times that i have lost progress in a game, but those are the ones i remember being the most pissed about.

(edit) another great one i remember. Had played Dungeons & Dragons Online for quite a bit back in the day, only to find out the hard way that the game saves your characters locally when i had to reformat the HDD. I hadn't even considered backing up the save beforehand because you know, its a MMO....
•PC
•2 years ago
•Completed Doom Eternal on ultra nightmare difficulty
•Felt great until power went out all of a sudden while game was saving
•Whole save corrupted
•Had to start over
•Excitement turned to Complete disappointment
 
Last edited:

Mitsurux

Member
The Dreaded 3rd party PS1 memory card. Had FFVII save that I had spend a lot of time breeding Chocobo's, and decided to transfer the save to a brand new 3rd party memory card (to help clear out some space on my original). Save got corrupted. The pain was real.
 

sainraja

Member
Mine has to be GTA4. My PS3 died and I forgot to back up my saves. I had just finished the mission (which I had a tough time with) and it was all lost. Due to that, I have never finished that game.
 

YukiOnna

Member
I was in the final area of Donkey Kong 64. My brother got scared while watching and he pressed the reset button.
Man, I never finished it.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Nothing big on my end. I dont even remember any.

But I do remember my brother being pissed back in the day playing his Apple II. Saved games were done on a separate disk (old school 5 1/4). He was finishing up playing a season of baseball and some reason he had saved over that disk with another game or game save, so he had accidentally wiped out his progress.

LOL. He never bothered replaying again.
 

SSfox

Member
Can't remember one, maybe Soul Calibur 3, game had an aweful save corrpution thing.

Outside, i used to play games without memory card, it was kinda rough, like RE2 and TR2, specially the latest, i could manage to go to lvl 10 (level 1 Snow) without memory card, it's insane when i think about it, guess the games were just too good, or i would have the motivation power to do so. Also used to unlock all Tekken 2 character everyday for a while lol
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
Conker's Bad Fur Day bugged on me at the very end. At the end of that scene spoofing The Matrix there's an elevator that takes you to the final boss battle. For some reason the elevator never opened, and the game saves at the end of the Matrix battle, so my game was saved into an unwinnable state.
Luckily there's an option to play individual chapters from a menu, so when I found out about that I just restarted from the Matrix scene and this time everything worked. But this kinda soured the ending for me.

I'm sure there's been times when I lost or accidentally erased a save state, but I don't remember ever losing tens of hours of progress.
 

MiguelItUp

Gold Member
FFVII on PS1, got to the last Sephiroth battle, and my memory card became corrupted. Never had it happen before. First and only time it did. I never beat the game or gave it another shot after that.
 
To many to count 🙈

But any time I saved to a cheap 3rd party memory card on my ps1 or n64. It was just a gamble and blind luck if the game would load next time (especially on the n64 cards that were structured in ‘pages’) 😬😱

And still I would buy one, if I couldn’t afford the official version, or the cartridge didn’t have a save option 😭
 

Sleepwalker

Gold Member
My xbox account got banned permanently last week for "game sharing" with no possibility of appeal, I own 2 xbox and my brother has one, they all have the account there and I allow my brother to use the games I bought. Anyway,

I lost all my saves, my gp sub thatbl still had 1.5 years left, my progression on every game and all my digital library. I guess that counts?


Not even that mad, thankfully Sony released god of war and my xbox was more or less relegated to a fifa machine earlier this year.
 

Dr. Suchong

Member
Can't remember one, maybe Soul Calibur 3, game had an aweful save corrpution thing.

Outside, i used to play games without memory card, it was kinda rough, like RE2 and TR2, specially the latest, i could manage to go to lvl 10 (level 1 Snow) without memory card, it's insane when i think about it, guess the games were just too good, or i would have the motivation power to do so. Also used to unlock all Tekken 2 character everyday for a while lol
Man, I remember the Soul Calibur 3 one 😐
Couldn't it corrupt other saves on your memory card too?
Soul Calibur 3 is definitely my favourite of the series, so I was crushed when I realised all my efforts of progress were in jeopardy.
 

bender

What time is it?
PGR on XBox. I lost dozen upon dozens of hours because I let my little cousins play the game and deleting your profiles was just a few button presses away.
 

Jimmy_liv

Member
A few unpleasant tales of woes.

Me and my friend were playing the C64 version of Bubble Bobble.
Gets to around level 70ish and for some reason the sound disappeared.
I started pressing buttons and my friends pleading with me to leave it and just play.
Yeah, accidentally quit the game and lost all of our progress!

Same friend, myself and a few others were doing some marathon 120 lap race on the original Gran Turismo.
Were each doing ten or so laps and passing the pad along to the next person.
Gets to my mate and he's skimming the wall on the final bend.
Were all saying 'watch that wall' each time he passes it.
Final lap, final corner (about an hour of solid racing) and sure enough he hits the wall and the car just stopped dead!

Another time he lent a friend his Ps1 who managed to overright his Tomb Raider 1 save with a save of his own losing almost all of the games progress.

Gutted.
 
Last edited:

saintjules

Member
Has to be Legaia 2: Duel Saga. I was in a cavern somewhere. I think Lava based. Memory card save data corrupted.

Probably 30+ hours of gameplay gone. Never went back.
 
98-99% completion in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow on the DS. Booted up to fight the final boss and saw a "Your file is corrupted" message. Never went back to finish it. :(

Sad Arrested Development GIF
 

waquzy

Member
Approx. 67 hours of gameplay lost due to a friend saving over my GTA San Andreas save file. I was fuming.
 
Last edited:

nush

Gold Member
Acidentally pulled out a Saturn memory card with the power still on. 5 years worth of saves and unlocked content of about 200 games lost in a second.
 

mitch1971

Member
Finished FF13 story and boss fight; was onto the open world grind and 20 plus hours into that grind. Saved the wrong save to the cloud and months later came back to find it was a save from a few rooms before the boss. Couldn't be bothered to relearn the mechanics again after that.

Had a save from the completion of the old MOH that I got as bonus with the ps3 version of the newer medal of honor. Did everything trophy apart from the get all medals and finish on hardest difficulty. Ps3 decided to pack up and the save was copy protected so I couldn't save it to the cloud. (why would a save be protected from upload to a cloud save service on the same platform....arrrrgh!!)
 

Pedro Motta

Member
Lost a save with 40h of Kingdom Hearts 3 due to a power outtage right when the PS4 Pro was saving. Only time that has ever happened to me.
 
Top Bottom