Most devastating loss of a save file

[Keymik]

My computer just recently decided that it wanted to destroy my harddrive. So my 300+ hours of Skyrim. My 300+ hours of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. My Dragon Age Origins & 2 characters. And alot of other smaller games aswell.. All gone.. I could only sit there in silence and go ''Damn..''

 

[MoNKeyYy]

Hmm, in Pokemon Yellow years ago I trapped myself in a cave somehow. I can't actually remember which one, maybe the one with Articuno in it. No Dig, no escape rope, and I had pushed the blocks around in a way that made escape impossible. 100 hours maybe? Gone. Devestating for a, shit how old was I? 9? 10? Somewhere in there.

Or there was Oblivion. Not a fully lost file. But I went from a 90 hour save to a 40 hour save because I reloaded to play a fun bit then got fucked by my own force-of-habit stupidity overwriting the most recent file. Incidentally, I did end up going back to that one and turning it into a 120 hour file. We can rebuild it, I thought tp myself. So we did.

 

[dickywebster]

Ive got two as one isn't technically a loss.

Had to change my PS3 hard drive lately to a bigger one and the resident evil 5 save file i had unlocked everything in wouldn't let me copy it across...

But then I had a 90 hour ff12 game when there was a power cut while playing it and the entire memory card got wiped, but i had back ups of everything else...

 

[Jaeke]

Super Smash Bros. Melee

I loved that game and counted down the minutes for months when I was young. It was the first T rated game I could convince my parents to buy. And once I had it I played it nonstop for months.
I don't know what it was about that game, maybe it was my lack of understanding of computers back then as opposed to now, but I had unlocked EVERY character, EVERY map, EVERY challenge, EVERY race-to-the-finish... everything.

Then I lost it.

The first time it happened it devastated me. Hey, I was 7 years old, what could I do but just unplug and replug for hours on end.

A couple years later... I got back on, rebooted the system, restarted from scratch, unlocked EVERY character, EVERY map, yada yada yada.... everything.

Then I lost it again.

Eventually, after years of gathering dust, and several house moves later, after I had gained a much better understanding of electronics, consoles, and just gaming technology and the industry as a whole, I was rummaging through old things in old closets for some components to help a friend build a computer, and in an old half-broken cardboard box, I found the source of one of my most painful childhood memories...

So I kicked its ass.

Now I have everything, and I mean everything, again. I'll hook up the old GameCube and beat down some Master Hand ass with Link or maybe Samus and hell maybe I'll faceroll with Marth when I'm angry now and again but mostly, I just use it as a trophy for overcoming my childhood enemy .

I know it's not the most dramatic or serious story but I'm entertained by it.

 

[EquestrianGeneral]

Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Got it for PC off of Steam during the 2011 Christmas Sale. I spent the entirety of two days playing it, getting nearly everything, and completing it.

Third day, I booted it up. "Save File Corrupted." It took about six months before I went back to play through it again, I was so pissed off.

Luckily though, that's the worst that I can think of.

Of course, something worse might have happened, and I simply raged so hard that I suppressed it.

 

[Finbark]

Most definitely Pokemon Gold when my cart battery died a few years back. I've since replaced the battery, but the loss of my 300+ hour save was infuriating...
Another that comes to mind is Onimusha 2. I was just about at the final stage, when I decided it would be fun to replay the part at the beginning in the village area. I went to save my new file as the second slot, but I wasn't thinking and I accidentally saved over my main file. I realized my mistake as soon as I made it, and I expected a confirmation "Are you sure? YES NO" message to come up... I used to take those messages for granted ):

Edit: I recently lost my Terraria world when my computer crashed. My friend and I spent a solid 36 hours straight building huge structures manually. I was so proud of it too...

 

[Fijiman]

I've accidentally saved over my save file at least once on each of the first three Ratchet and Clank games due to me wanting to start playing as soon as possible. I also fucked up a save of a map I was working on in Halo Reach. I had gotten pretty far on the save I fucked up and the only file that had any of the map left was too far back and had way too many things for me to attempt to fix to even try continuing on it.

My little brother also decided that it would be a good idea to get rid of all of the "junk" files on one of "his" PS2 memory cards. As you can imagine it was actually my card that he had written his name on (without checking first) and then started deleting files on it without even thinking. What should have given it away that the memory card was mine was that we had stored all of the Jak&Daxter games only on my card (which included two corrupted files of Jak X [sub]stupid fucking autosave[/sub]) and all of the files for games like the Star Wars Battlefronts that he should have known weren't his. Thankfully I came into the room before he deleted any more of my files. It should also be noted that this same brother has sold: most of the Ratchet and Clank games that we've owned, both Star Wars Battlefronts, Bioshock, Oblivion, and a few other really good games that I can't think of at the moment.

 

[auron200004]

A couple...

Recently, I was playing the Witcher 2 on hardcore. My mouse had been acting funny all day. I get to a scene where I make a fairly simple choice. My mouse then decided to choose that exact moment to promptly spazz the fuck out. It clicked a different option. Now, normally it would be no big deal, just load the last save and continue on. Unfortunately, it happened to be the ONE damn conversation where making that ONE damn choice led to me getting shot with an arrow and killed. In a cutscene. On hardcore difficulty where it wipes your save if you die. /queue never playing the game again since.

My PS3 YLOD'd a few years ago and I had to get a new one. I managed to copy most of my PS3 saves over no problem (save the Assassin Creed games because fuck, apparently they're afraid of save hacking on a damn single player game that I freaking own. I'm not bitter, I swear. It's not like I had 100% on both the first and second one. But no big deal, really). The real issue was my PS1 and PS2 (for the early generation PS3's actually had backwards compatibility, shock and horror) memory cards. Multiple playthroughs of numerous games: Final Fantasies 7-12, Spyro 1-3, Crash 1-4, Jak and Daxter 1-3, Ratchet and Clank 1-3, Resident Evil 4, Guitar Hero 1 & 2, Sly 1-3, and many others all 100% completed and now 100% wiped from my system. Dammit.

Oh..and I had a bag full of Gameboy Advance games get stolen from my parents' car because my dad never locks the door...that sort of qualifies, as the data is saved on the cartridges, to my knowledge.

 

[shadowyuiop]

This is a Fallout new vegas one, I had struggled through dead money and come out on the other side with an actual liking of how it did it's environment and story. I had just finished the last part of the game that I needed to complete. I had everything done, no seriously everything that;s not repeatable (minus the ending) and I saved and quit. When I turned my game on the next day it was nowhere to be found, and sadly I haven't played it since because of it.

 

[FolkLikePanda]

Tekken Tag Tournament, I was about 8 or 9 and I unlocked everything (apart from the Tekken Bowl Jukebox thing which you get for scoring 200 on the Bowling game) and all of sudden I had nothing on the game and I got a bit angry and I think I kick my PS2.

Yeah, I was a bit of an angry little bastard when I was younger.

 

[Black Reaper]

Reading this thread is depressing
That said,back in the gamecube days,i had a friend over at my house playing mario party,when we started the game,it said something about "formatting" wtf is that,we said,we then selected yes,i then watched in horror as all the saves on my gamecube were erased

Another case of this i had was on my Wow account,i got hacked,while normally after getting hacked you end up as a naked hobo next to a mailbox,this particular douchebag decided to delete all my characters,what characters?,you might ask(or not),a level 74 Deathknight,a level 65 Paladin,and a level 51 Druid,while that doesn't sound as much,i really suck at leveling,and i had put lots of time and effort into my characters

A sort of related situation, though. A friend of mine was playing Resident Evil 4 and got to the final battle with Saddler. The final battle in the entire game. He couldn't beat Saddler (yeah, he's kind of not very good) so he decided to erase the save file and start again. That's right. He was in the final battle and he started the whole game again. I would have cried like a baby if something like that happened to me by accident and he did it on purpose.

Your friends balls deserve their own monument

 

[chozo_hybrid]

Budokai 3...

I had unlocked everything, but my save file got corrupted at some point

Oh, dude... I love that game and I unlocked everything. I'd go mental if that happened.

 

[NotSoLoneWanderer]

I accidentally deleted the first characters I made in both Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Both times they led to me playing the game about two months later with all the knowledge I learned in my 1st characters to do everything "right" and make a perfect character. That's "good" but I still lost a combined....ummm 360 hours between the two characters.

Edit: OH...final fantasy 12...beat the game, maxed out characters, nearly every side quest done. So many good memories and frustrating failure so much time spent. Still gotta make a new save but it feels so daunting.

 

[NEDM]

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Got a demo disk from sony, then a day later warning me not to play the viewtiful joe demo, or else your memory card would get wiped.... 2 missions away from the end, had all the side stuff done. To this day I've never beaten that game cuz I don't have the time.

 

[Toy Yota]

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles was a game that had a very bad memory problem on my gamecube. I usually save on all 4 save files to prevent the corrupted game from deleting my save files. When I finally go so far in the game, the corrupted game deleted all four of them. I went to gamestop to replce the game; it happened again. I replaced the game 4 times and it still kept deleting the save files for no reason.

 

[dfphetteplace]

Within recent memory, my Borderlands save. I thought it was in the Steam cloud thing, but nope. Lost it to oblivion when I reinstalled windows.

 

[gideonkain]

I was approaching the final dungeon in Final Fantasy 9 and after dying for the 10th time against the Nova Dragon I yanked my (pssh) wired controller in frustration.

The Playstation fell off the table, landing directly on the 256 slot memory card I bought and cracked it neatly in half.

To this day I have no idea how that game ends.

Tragic.

 

[Aris Khandr]

Extreme Warfare Revenge 4.2. I had about four years of progress in that game. People who I'd put in development at the start of the game were finally big enough stars to challenge for major titles. My heel power stable was about to three of the four titles at the next PPV, Sting was due to retire, and that event had the beginning of my build for my next major storyline.

And then the save corrupted. That really bummed me out.