The official Tomb Raider account threw this question on Twitter, and the replies are just a cascade of adamant-nostalgia-filled responses. They inquired whether there used to be worse things when it came to playing video games back then, and these are the replies that send an abrasive trip down memory lane. A little about retro games; everyone does enjoy the humor in them. We tend to forget, though, how these guys would ruin your day.
Memory cards, or rather, the lack thereof, faced the largest amount of redundancy ever. Horror stories about not having a memory card on their PlayStation lined the hundreds of replies. PuppyOnLeash recounts a painful experience involving a crashing memory card: “I started with TR3 and I didn’t have a memory card, needless to say I did not get very far.” This is quite the understatement. Imagine completing two whole hours of platforming and puzzle-solving successfully, your console turning off, and your progress all lost. Yah, it was torture.
And even if you actually had the memory cards? Well, they were absurdly expensive for how little they held. User eucheon remarked that they “could get a bit pricy, and only held 8MBs of data” so basically, games like Gran Turismo would simply devour huge chunks of that precious space. DarkRedshift went full rambling mode about PS1 and PS2 memory cards: “fuck all storage space instead of a decent hard drive” and honestly? They’re not wrong. Nowadays, we take internal storage for granted; back then, it was a constant battle.
Then came the scratched discs. That was the nightmare sprayed by a number of fellow gamers. User trevpoetics just said, “the scratched discs BADLY,” and you can feel the trauma in those words. MartianArtefact might just have given the most heartbreaking account: “My ‘Golden Mask’ disk shattering in my CD-ROM drive.” Actually shattering? That is an atrocity level-10. The number of games rendered forever unplayable by one tiny scratch… I still feel.”
Yet it gets further back in time. MacZidane lobbed a brutal time-warping loading story from the realms of ZX spectrum days: “waiting 20 minutes for the game to load, then just as it loaded, the machine would reset as either the lead at the back was loose or more commonly the volume on the cassette recorder wasn’t quite right so didn’t load the whole game.” Twenty minutes! And it could just fail at the last second! Download times, these modern gamers complain about.-untold.
About the cord thing: mentioned. Yep, real. “When moving the console by accident the game freezes. Fuck this shit” from AngainorG7X hitting that universal experience. The amount of games lost to some joker tripping over a cord… it’s a wonder there weren’t more broken controllers from rage throws.
And then this Oz-based save system; Rob180Brown cuts in: “The WORST part was not being able to save the game without save game crystals. Just got past a really difficult part, or had to do something else and not being able to save the game.” Those crystals were literally life itself. Find one at the wrong time and you’re just screwed.
Some really technical answers were popping in as well. DarkRedshift wrote massive thread after massive thread touching on everything from Saturn CMOS batteries dying and wiping your saves to PSP UMD drives making “screeching sounds” and thumbstick drift. They even told how some Saturn games like Tomb Raider weren’t thumbstick compatible which like… how did we even play these games?
But maybe the most intriguing were the non-technical ones. Jedi_Gris gave a wound I’ve thought about never before: “In countries where English isn’t main language (Latam for instance) we struggled to understand cinematics or even in-game instructions. Back in the day I had to play with a dictionary in hand and my poor listening skills.” That’s dedication right there, meanwhile usserxv shot the publishers: “Worst part of that era? Was Eidos Interactive and how they exploited developers with annual game releases.” Oof.
Well, for more positive vibe folks, we have: “There wasn’t really any worst parts. And it felt like companies made games with a much greater passion than they do these days.” Which is nice, but have you ever had a memory card failed? Joe said that in spite of all struggles: “Those were more memorable times than being bad. Miss those days.” Which pretty much means the struggles made the victories ever so sweeter.
There is the humor: how many of those problems are a foreign language for today’s gamer? Auto-save? Default setting. Cloud-save? Common. Controllers without cords? Everything wireless. Digital downloads that cannot bum rush your life? Standard etiquette. We have come so far, and there are those old tribulations that bonded so many players together. We all went through the trauma of blowing into cartridges, praying they would finally work.
Wait, was I saying? Oh yeah, retro-gaming was wonderful and terrible in a few ways, one that will probably be forgotten. The Tomb Raider tweet opened the floodgates of memories, and honestly? It is kind of beautiful in a painful way. We suffered through all this nonsense, and we still love discussing those games so many years later. That is the power of gaming-the good far outweighing the frustrated tech limitations.
But still… thank God for no more blowing on discs. Thinking about it makes me gag.
