BONUS: Video Game Saves

Video games create a marvelous world for players to live in and explore. But given the ephemeral nature of video game saves, these worlds can cease to exist in the blink of an eye. In today’s episode, we explore the aftermath of that loss, featuring our friends Matt Davidson, Josh Chandler, Matt Frederick, Kevin Kuhl, Anney Reese, and Trevor Young.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Ephemeral is a production of My Heart three D audio
for full exposure, listen What's that phones. This month on Ephemeral,
we've been talking about the evolution of video games, dating
back to the simple beginnings of Pown and Space Invaders,

(00:24):
all the way up to the supercomputers that power our
imaginations today. But in today's episode, we wanted to focus
on the world's inside those video games. Video games can
remove us from reality and place us in a magical
and surreal world. But given the ephemeral nature of video
games saves all of this wonder, amazement, and experience can

(00:49):
be gone in the blink of an eye, leaving this
world to exist only in our memories. I could probably
give you a story about me being involved in like
a lost save file from pretty much any time period
of my life. My name is Matt Davidson, and my
qualifications as a video gamer, I would say are pretty

(01:11):
extensive just because of the generation I come from. So
I was born in which puts me right in the
middle of original Nintendo era, and I stuck with it
enough through current times to where I played every different
era of video games on pretty much every different console
at one time or another. It wasn't necessarily me losing

(01:32):
a save file, but I played the Diablo series, so
both in Diablo Too and Diablo three, there's a mode
that you can elect to play called Hardcore Mode. In
Hardcore Mode, you agree at the beginning that if you die,
all your progress is lost, and what it does is
it resets you from zero, no matter how many hours
you've sunk into this character. The ones that really hurt

(01:57):
the most were when you would lose internet connection and
then you would log back in and your character was
dead and deleted. Right. So I had a few characters,
one in particular that probably had close to five or
six hundred hours of playtime just playing a very pedestrian
part of the game, and my internet cut out when

(02:21):
I got back on that character had died to some
you know, trash mob. I went through this period where
I actually had to stop playing the game for like
three months because it's like when a dog dies and
you like can't get another dog for like for a
few months because it's too painful. Like I uninstalled the game,

(02:45):
I had to completely walk away. I eventually did come
back to the game. I went through the whole process
again and lost another character and then I just had
to stop. I couldn't take the pain anymore. I guess,
like the funniest thing about it is like, it's so
painful to you, but anybody that doesn't play games, like

(03:06):
your significant other, like, has no idea how painful it is.
And my wife is just kind of like bewildered why
I was so upset If I'm talking to somebody that
doesn't play video games. I'm almost a little embarrassed to
tell the story because a the number of hours I
sunk into playing a video game and be I sort

(03:29):
of set myself up for that, right, Like if you
play high stakes like that, you're gonna lose at some point.
I almost feel foolish for thinking that I was gonna
be able to, you know, ride the lightning forever and
never have a fault. Somebody would call and my mom
would be on the phone for like half an hour,
and I'm sitting there, like, Mom, I thought my carriages die. Hi,

(03:55):
I'm Josh Chandler. Have been playing video games pretty much
on my wife. That's the I started playing card games,
and then I guess in my later twenties I got
very good at it, and I guess my biggest claim
to family is I got Top one hundred and Magic
to Gathering and her Stone and soon to be the

(04:15):
new You gear game. So you're good at video games,
card games, I've got a card games. Back in middle school,
there was a game called Rinscap and Rindscape was like
one of the first like MMO games where you could
go in and interact with other people. But that was
back in the time of dial up. It was pretty

(04:37):
bad when people would call, dial up would go out
and DSL was still not another not available. I'll never
forget this one instance. So I guess our friend Michael,
we were like out in what's called the wilderness where
you can kill other players. I was with him and
my internet went out, and then he killed me. My

(05:02):
friend that I was supposed to be like my ally
killed me and took all my stuff. And then when
I wrong in im just like, what how did that
make you feel at the time this is happening, and
how do you feel about it all these years later?
I mean I felt freaking angry at Michael. I mean
he was supposed to be have my teammate, he's like

(05:22):
my friend right now, I just have trust issues with
I quit ultim online that day because everything I had
fought for for years was it. God. This is Matt Frederick.
I am an executive producer on Ephemeral officially also a

(05:46):
host of stuff they don't want you to know. Let
me take you back to middle school. I'm playing ultim
online with my friend Victor. We're playing all the time.
He's got a couple of characters. He's really good at it.
And I've got one character. Character's name is Malachi. And
I'm doing everything I can to get my fame and
my carma up. I'm trying to make money. I finally

(06:08):
get there. I'm the illustrious something Malachi, and I just
got enough money to buy a boat, which was a
really big deal because in the game, you can either
have a house or a boat where you could store
all the stuff you've gathered, or you've got to just
put it in the bank, which is just kind of
you know, that's fine, whatever, But if you really want
to be somebody in ltimonline, you need a boat or

(06:30):
a house. I got this boat. I used all my money.
I took it over to the water, and I placed
my boat in the water, and I teleported onto my
boat and I started putting my best stuff into the
cargo hold of this boat, and I was so excited
and I was going to transfer that stuff over. I
was gonna get to see the world in ultimonline. Some

(06:52):
other character unbeknownst to me kind of walks over and
just hanging out on the shoreline, and then they just disappear,
and like, oh, that was weird. Well, it turns out
they had cast an invisibility spell on themselves and then
teleported onto my boat. All of a sudden, I see
all of my stuff coming out of my ship's cargo hold,
all of my most important, most fought for magic items,

(07:16):
my money, all the rest of the money that I had.
Everything just goes onto this guy, and I'm freaking out.
I'm trying to figure out what's going on. So I
try and take everything else out of the boat and
then teleport off of it, because if you do that,
you could double click on the boat and it shrinks
down and you can put it in your backpack, basically
like it's an item. But this guy had taken my

(07:37):
spare key from my boat out of my boat, and
he was able to click on it and take my boat,
and then he just got the kind of there. It's
not cool. I'm still to this day upset. I think
just a not knowing and the amount of energy you
put into something that you can never get back, where
it's like it's just gone. Those are the two things
that strike the deepest. Hi. My name is Kevin Cool.

(08:00):
I reside in Portland, Oregon. I've been playing video games
for over twenty years, and in two thousand and seventeen
on Madden Online for the Xbox I was ranked with
the top twenty three percent of online participants. So I
feel like I'm pretty good. I was kind of young,
so video games are pretty big. The game was on
the Nintendo sixty four console. The legend of Zelda, okerry

(08:24):
enough time, and if I remember correctly, you got three
safe files in Zelda. The one that it hurts the
most was what I'd call my master one. This is
one where I had beat the game, gotten everything that
all the little side quest you can save it right
before you beat the final boss. You can go back
in fight the boss continuously over and over. So that

(08:44):
was my third safe file, just because it was like
I beat the game, I had all my cool stuff.
So you know, when your friends come over, you gotta
show off, so it's like, oh I did this, like,
oh you got the mirror shi, oh you got to
have her boots. I don't know if it was like
a glitch or what, but the state was still there.
You could access it, but it just froze. It wasn't

(09:05):
the exact set point that it would freeze at, but
you always knew it was gonna glick. So it was
like the countdown. It is either thirty seconds, thirty minutes,
you know, whatever it is. You could load the save,
but you could never actually beat it and continues to
play it again. There's always a wish. We're just paused,
and it would just stay there and there's nothing you
could do. It was very painful, as most people are.

(09:26):
At first, I'm in denial. It's not broken, it's that's
whatever happened. So you do the old run around, takes
the game out, blowing the cartridge, lick the cartridge. Yes,
we went there. Lick the cartridge. I think even like
try to like put a fork or something metal on.
It's like remagnetize it, even though that didn't do anything,
you know, kid magic. And then I'm pretty sure I

(09:49):
went to Anger and ran around screaming and yelling at everyone,
and I hated the world for probably a week. I'm
gonna say a month. I don't really remember, but I
know I hated everyone because I was so mad because
I've spent so many hours and I could never do
that again, and that was the perfect file and nothing
would ever come close to that ever again, and nothing
in my life mattered anymore. And I was not gonna
pass the seventh grade, and my girlfriend was gonna dump me,

(10:11):
and my mom was gonna make meat loaf for dinner
for a week. Life, as I know it had ended
at that point, as you can tell, is rehash some pain.
There's that song that was playing when the barrow went out.
I still can't listen to it without getting like, Hi,
I'm Annie Reese. I'm a podcast host for the show's

(10:33):
stuff I've never told you and save her. My brothers
were notorious for just erasing my save file. So one
of my favorite games, Final Fantasy three Slash six, they
would just erase it before I could get anywhere, and
it would be heartbreaking every time. Once I was playing
Final Fantasy ten and I put hours into Final Fantasy tin,
I normally am not somebody who like levels up to

(10:55):
go fight the ultimate Boss. I did in that game.
It was Christmas. Eve had gotten this weapon that you
needed to fight this ultimate boss and all the stuff.
For me, it was a huge deal. I'd never done
anything like that. Power went out, Power went out, lost everything,

(11:18):
the entire hundred fifty hours gone, and I was right
at the part where I was going to fight it,
and I could have saved right after that, and I
was so scarred by I could play it, and I
never tried to do it again. It's not worth it.
Game Shark was a very attractive idea. Oh, I can

(11:40):
just use these cheet codes and I can get everything
I want in the game. This is awesome. But as
a youngster, what I didn't know is that what game
Shark really does is it goes into the game and
alters like the code in the game and like basically
screws the entire game. Up. Hi am Trevor Young. I
am a producer on Ephemeral. I was playing also Final

(12:04):
Fantasy ten And I don't know if you remember this,
but back in the late nineties early two thousand's, there
was the think called game Shark, and it would allow
you to install these sorts of like cheat codes and
all these other various ways to get items in the
game without actually having to do anything. I had this
final Fantasy ten Say file that I had dumped hours

(12:25):
and hours and hours into doing all sorts of stuff,
beating every bus, every endgame thing you could possibly do.
But there was still like a handful of things that
I was really frustrated that I couldn't do, like I
think a couple of ultimate weapons and some other things
that like are just like really hard to do in
that game, in the endgame, And so I used the
game Shark to get those few things. And what the

(12:45):
game Shark did was it like blitzed out my whole file,
so like it gave me those things, but like everything
else was like glitch out after that, Like I don't
know what it did to the code. It was basically
an unplayable safe in the game. Every time I would
log on, like the characters would just be like moving
across the map without me touching it. I'd have like

(13:07):
these kind of random encounters, and then like the random
encounters would just be like these monsters that would move
around a lot and like didn't do what they were
supposed to do. It was really weird. Basically, like the
game was unplayable after that, Like the game Shark just
completely screwed up this same file, and so I basically
just had to wipe the whole thing and start over.
Like there was nothing I could do. There was no
way to play it. Luckily, Final Fantasy ten ones itself

(13:27):
pretty well to replayability, but still I was pretty heartbroken.
I don't think I played it for like two years.
Last question, this is a quick one. Let's say I
knocked on your door tomorrow and said, here you go,
here's your system. Would you try to do this again?
The answer to that is yes, I fully intend to

(13:47):
when Diabolo four comes out. That's the kind of insane
thing about it is, even though I have so much pain,
the pain drives me to do it again. I don't
think I would ever try to do like what I
did in my example of losing it. I wouldn't try
to get every Ultimate weapon again. I would play it again.

(14:09):
I'm not going to try to get all those weapons
and fight all those Ultimate bosses ever again. I think
I would try, Especially now with the last two years
being a pandemic, that's an extra time on my hands.
So all things considered him like plotting out, I could
have easily done it over the past two years. It's
more so, like I said, the emotional investment. Do I

(14:30):
want to put that much energy into something where I
know it could be taken away in an instant and
there's nothing I can do. But I would probably say, yeah,
I would probably do it again. I quit playing with
him now I still have trust issues twenty years later
with him. Could you see yourself going through the wilderness
with him again? No, I would definitely try again, but

(14:53):
it would take a lot of time. I would need
some healing, some self reflection. I would have to like
take a solo trip to a cabin in the woods
in a mountains somewhere and really like think about my
life for a couple of months, and then I'd come
back to it and start a new game, a final
Fantasy ten. If you came up to me with the

(15:14):
old Dell computer and you had ultim Online loaded up
and it had a secure connection to the server, There's
no way in hell I would try and play Ultimate it.
This episode of Ephemeral was written and produced by Max Williams,

(15:34):
with special thanks to Jesse Funk. Those were the voices
of Matt Davidson, Josh Chandler, Matt Frederick, Kevin Cool, Any Reese,
and Trevor Young. Some of the great music in today's episode,
like the piece you are hearing now, comes courtesy of
the artist mon Plies here. If you have listened to
Ephemeral for a while, you've heard a lot of their work,

(15:56):
and we are happy to announce we will have an
upcoming episode in interviewing the artists for now here more
at loyalty Freak music dot com. What's been your most
heartbreaking experience with the safe tell us on social media.
We're at a federal show and check out the two
part exploration of the history of video games and other

(16:16):
podcasts from I Heart Radio by visiting the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.