Times you lost or almost lost all progress in a game.

[Specter Von Baren]

I have an example of losing everything and almost losing everything.

I still have yet to finish Ori and the Blind Forest because when I played it the first time my save data got corrupted because of the power to my house going out as I was saving. I was at the last area after doing everything else in the game and so I just dropped it for a long time (Like a year). So a year later I picked the game back up and played through it again and around the same point my power went out AGAIN and corrupted my save. I still have yet to finish the game.

My other example of almost losing everything is from Digimon World 1. The thing with this game is that your Digimon goes through a life cycle, so while you can get a really strong digimon, eventually they'll die and you'll have to train up their child. You're also trying to increase the population of the digimon village in the game and give it more facilities and once you get enough Digimon back you open the way to the final area.
The issue is that I ended up unlocking the final area while I was still training up my second Digimon and once you unlock the final area you get forced into a boss fight. So I ended up stuck with whatever items I had at the time and my Digimon in an underleveled state for this particular boss fight. At first it seemed like I had just ended up soft locking the game through no fault of my own because I was just getting run over by this boss and this game takes a LOOOONG time to do stuff so if I had had to do everything over again I was probably just going to quit. But somehow, through trial and error I managed to just BARELY squeeze out everything I could from my items and Digimon and played chicken shit tactics with the boss and was able to eek out a win.

 

[Worgen]

Persona 3. I was like 30 hours into the game and when I tried saving to my card something went weird and I lost the save file and it was my only one since the card was pretty full.

 

[DJShaddycat]

My brother deleted my 98% complete Lego Star Wars DS save file when I was a kid.

He also did the same with my 99.9% complete Starfy save file too.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

I lost all my progress on my bootleg copy of Pokemon Emerald by trying to play it on my DS. Kinda sucked since that was the most progress I'd ever had on a Pokemon game. I had just caught Feebas after a few hours too...

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I was playing a rented N64 game called Hybrid Heaven when it glitched out after the last boss and completely wiped out my Controller Pak. I had some primo Doom 64 saves on that thing.

 

[Dalisclock]

The first time I played Assasins Creed Revelations I somehow lost all my save data because the game saved to the cloud and then somehow the cloud lost my save data...and because Uplay is shit there was no local backup. I was about 8 hours into the game and fucking pissed. I finally played the game all the way through like a year or so later and did actually rather like the game a lot, but I was mad enough to not go back to it for at least a year.

I still dislike Uplay(or whatever the new name is) to this day.

 

[Dreiko]

Almost never, I'm very paranoid about these things so I take extra care. The only time I lost save data was when the battery in my pokemon red died and it just couldn't keep saves any longer. It was a near full pokedex with just Mew missing lol.

 

[laggyteabag]

I was on the last hour or so of Tomb Raider (2013) which is a <15h game, and then my computer crashed/we had a power cut. When I tried to reload the game, it said that the save file had corrupted.

I got it fixed - I believe that I had to scan and verify the game's files - but I was so annoyed when I thought that I had lost all of my saves. I think I was just going to watch the end of the game on YouTube, if it hadn't worked.

I wasn't quite so fortunate with my playthrough of KOTOR2, when I absent-mindedly reformatted my PC, and lost the save. I really enjoyed my time with it, but I have yet to properly revisit it, because I keep on bouncing off of the game during the tutorial level.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I lost all my progress recently in Immortal's Fenix Rising for PS5 when a gamebreaking and progression breaking bug broke my save about 20 hours in and that made me never touch the game again. Shame considering it was the only recent Ubisoft game I was enjoying at all.

 

[bluegate]

Losing a boss fight in Digimon World 1 would just teleport you back to Jijimon's house in File City.

Granted, your Digimon would lose one of his three lives, but that's just about it.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Losing a boss fight in Digimon World 1 would just teleport you back to Jijimon's house in File City.

Granted, your Digimon would lose one of his three lives, but that's just about it.

But that was the issue with this boss fight. It happens RIGHT outside Jijimon's house. So in order to do anything else I had to get past Airdramon first because he ambushes you.

 

[happyninja42]

I recall a bug with FO 3's The Pitt DLC that totally corrupted a save file back to stepping out of the vault. The thumbnail image was still of The Pitt where I was, had the right level, time stamp, etc. But when you loaded it, back outside Vault 101, lvl 1.

Only happened the one time, and I've never had a complete file loss like that with any other game I've ever played that I can recall.

The closest I usually get is me going too long without saving and losing several hours of progress as a result of death.

But actual game loss due to technical stuff? Just that once.

 

[SilentPony]

My brother deleted my 98% complete Lego Star Wars DS save file when I was a kid.

He also did the same with my 99.9% complete Starfy save file too.

Your brother is a dick.

 

[Mister Mumbler]

Well, I had the dreaded "battery in cartridge death" of my copy of Pokemon Crystal for GBC. I still have it and could theoretically replace the burnt out battery but eh.

 

[Piscian]

When I was 15 we were super poor and my mom decided to splurge for christmas and got a sears card with just enough credit to get us some nice things. She got me a Playstation and Final Fantasy VII which had just come out. Sadly I didnt know you needed a memory cards for consoles now, and no internal storage, so I didnt think to ask for one (fuck you sony for the cash grab btw). Anyway we ran out of money so I ended up just playing for 3 or 4 days without saving hoping I'd be able to steal one or trade for one. Power went out(Like that poor), lost like 20-30 hours. Literally like the next day one of my friends managed to get ahold of a set and gave me one.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

I got to the 2nd last boss in Xenoblade Chronicles 3D (Basically 2 hours away from the end of the game) and accidentally deleted my save file, losing around 60-65 hours of gameplay. That was fun

 

[Specter Von Baren]

When I was 15 we were super poor and my mom decided to splurge for christmas and got a sears card with just enough credit to get us some nice things. She got me a Playstation and Final Fantasy VII which had just come out. Sadly I didnt know you needed a memory cards for consoles now, and no internal storage, so I didnt think to ask for one (fuck you sony for the cash grab btw). Anyway we ran out of money so I ended up just playing for 3 or 4 days without saving hoping I'd be able to steal one or trade for one. Power went out(Like that poor), lost like 20-30 hours. Literally like the next day one of my friends managed to get ahold of a set and gave me one.

Mm, I know that feeling of memory card woes. I was only able to finish a lot of games early in the N64's lifecycle by leaving my system on for a whole night because of that.

 

[Catfood220]

WWF No Mercy on the N64 was a great wrestling game with one serious flaw. It would occasionally decide to wipe all your progress and created wrestlers for no reason what so ever. At first I thought it was my copy of the game and took it back and exchanged it for a different copy. But nope, this issue seemed to plague all copies of this game. I eventually saved all my created wrestlers onto a memory card and then one day the game decided to wipe that too. I was not happy.

And then there is Nier: Automata which literally deletes your game data after one of the endings so that it might go on to help other people. I'm still not sure why I agreed to that.

 

[Gergar12]

I literally had my entire PS3 PSN account hacked, deleted by a troll.

Now you know why I hate digital content.

 

[Agema]

The closest I usually get is me going too long without saving and losing several hours of progress as a result of death.

Pretty much the same here. I tend to let the autosave do the work with periodic backups, but sometimes you realise you've majorly screwed up and the autosave does nothing but revert you to a point where you were still majorly screwed, just you hadn't realised it at the time.