It’s the late 90s, the jagged early days of polygonal gaming, and you’re playing a game on your PS1. You save your progress because you are a kid and have to wake up early for school, or are an adult and have to go to work. You think everything is fine, but suddenly the worst possible thing happens: you go to clear up space on your memory card and you accidentally delete the wrong file. It’s a sinking feeling I’m all too familiar with, but luckily there was a feature on the console to fix this horrendous mistake. You just had to be quick on the trigger (or, well, four of them).
See, by pressing all four trigger buttons on the PS1 controller at the same time twice, your deleted file save would return. It was a very cool feature, especially for its time. While memory cards were the norm back then and games were not the monstrosities they are now, they still required plenty of maintenance. Either that, or you went out and stacked memory cards like old VHS tapes; I had two during my days as a PlayStation 2 owner.
While you could recover deleted PS2 files, it was not as easy of a fix as it was with its predecessor. You had to have access to a computer, and also third-party software like Recoverit. It was a huge pain. One thing I will never understand about console makers, especially back then, is their need to ax helpful features that save consumers like us time and money. The feature on the PS1 really stripped away a lot of anxiety around our fragile little save files.
While I did not own a PS1, I used my cousin’s a lot, and would even save files to their memory card. One morning I was over there, and woke up to continue my playthrough of Spyro the Dragon, but the memory card I was using was almost full (they had two and one was more of a shared one). I wanted to delete my Crash Bandicoot data as we had beaten the game the day prior, and accidentally deleted our save file for Crash 3 Warped instead!
I panicked, forcefully practicing my best Shia LaBeouf impression, whispering “No, no, no, no,” while everyone else in the room was asleep. I then did what everyone in a fluster does with a controller in their hand, mashing all the buttons at once. Suddenly, the save file returned and all was, well, saved! Amidst my mashing I stumbled upon the precious L1, R1, L2, R2 combo, and all was well. I never said anything to my cousin, obviously, lest they banned me from using their PS1 again.
This feature is something that should really have been brought over to the PlayStation 2, and more should have been done by Sony to let people know about this game-saving trick. Remember this was the mid-90s – a world of dialup, AOL trial discs, and general lack of easily accessible information. Also, I was not the smartest 10-year-old and only was able to activate this feature in a panic, nor did I read gaming magazines back then.
Nowadays, we do not have to worry about deleting the wrong files or even the wrong games, as technology has advanced and external hard drives have made keeping track of gaming data and games themselves a lot easier and less stress-inducing. All we have to do now is just back up the files and that is it. The PlayStation 2 is still the best-selling video game console of all time with over 157 million units sold worldwide. While it’s possible that Sony wanted to ensure its memory cards sold as there were many games sold, to this day I have never had a library as big as my PS2 library, as it took up a whole dresser-style drawer in my entertainment system.
But there are likely other reasons why Sony didn’t bring the feature over to the PlayStation 2 – time constraints being chief among them. This was a very important feature, and for Sony to not include it regardless feels like an oversight we may never get to the bottom of. Either way, I am glad that it exists, and who knows, odds are it helped advance save technology to what it is today. All I know is that the 10-year-old me is very thankful for it.
