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

[CaitSeith]

For some reason sometimes the save data in my 3DS memory card got corrupted shortly after downloading a new game. So I had to repeat the beginning of a couple of games I bought from the eShop (like Braverly Default and Pokemon Y).

Also my PS3 is currently broken, so unless I manage to savage the hard drive, I lost all progress from those games.

Finally, long ago my memory card from my Gamecube just stop working, so a lot of game save files got lost. But at least that was a good excuse to replay my entire library.

 

[Sora383]

Final fantasy 9 on ps1 had a bug that could delete your save file which happened to me on the last cd. First time I swore as a young kid but it was well justified.

 

[Gordon_4]

I’ve actually been pretty lucky. In fact if one doesn’t count the days before non-volatile memory was able to be put on cartridges and the eventual move to internal storage in the PS3/360 era, I can’t say I’ve ever lost a save file outside of my own idiocy.

 

[FakeSympathy]

Happened with Pokemon LeafGreen.

Had my dream team consisting of Charizard, Gengar, Dragonite, Kingdra, Mewtwo, and Tyranitar. Between multiple trading, TM collecting, and raising, these six guys holds a special place in my heart. Beaten the base game pretty easily and player battles on gameboy.

....And then the save got corrupted

 

[Gordon_4]

Happened with Pokemon LeafGreen.

Had my dream team consisting of Charizard, Gengar, Dragonite, Kingdra, Mewtwo, and Tyranitar. Between multiple trading, TM collecting, and raising, these six guys holds a special place in my heart. Beaten the base game pretty easily and player battles on gameboy.

....And then the save got corrupted

Pressing F in the chat for this one.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I've played a lot of Nethack so I'm no stranger to losing progress. A game of Nethack can take upwards of 10 hours and I've lost a good number of runs in the endgame. One time I lost about 5 minutes from victory. That stung. Permadeath makes the game fun, though.

 

[Offworlder]

My cousin once kicked me off his 360 while I was playing Oblivion so he could. He accidentally hit save instead of load on his 30+ hour file. He paused, looked at me, then scrolled down to his backup file that was still good. Then physically threw me out of his room.

 

[Kyrian007]

I've been really lucky. Its really only happened to me once. Chrono Cross, I was playing through it fairly recently. I don't have a working ps1, but was playing it on a ps2. Backwards compatibility, it worked just fine... until I tried to load a saved game. You couldn't save the file to a ps2 memory card, but I still had a ps1 memory card... and that let me save. But the ps2 wouldn't load the save. I lost several hours of progress. Back in the day I'd lose an hour or so from time to time going into a unexpected area without saving first, but I'm guessing that doesn't really count.

I give up progress a lot more than I lose it. I'll come back to play a game, maybe years after I'd last played it... and rather than pick up where I left off I'll just delete the save and start over. I've done that a couple of times on Skyrim, Stardew Valley, Fallouts... any number of games.

 

[Inazuma1]

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.

How hard did you cave in his skull and with what object?

I remember playing through Soul Calibur 3's Chronicles of the Sword RTS mode and being about 75% of the way through. Problem was Soul Calibur 3 had a game save bug that caused the data to get corrupted if you deleted or copied save data from other games off the memory card. So I lost all my progress in CotS and the characters I had unlocked and had to restart from scratch.

There was one time my Final Fantasy VI cart fucked up and 'lost' the endgame save I had on it. I put the 'lost' in quotes because the next time I booted the game up my old save was right there like nothing had happened. I guess it was a temporary battery fuckup.

There have been times when I've played games via emulator and loaded up old savestates because I forgot how much progress I had made since making the savestate. I've done that several times in Shin Megami Tensei for example and didn't make a backup savestate to 'undo' my deletion of progress. And no, resetting doesn't help because the savestate acts as a time capsule of the game as it was then and rewrites the 'battery' save data on the fly.