People's Old Saves Kinda Make Me Sad
If you grew up playing a cartridge-based game, or playing on a console that used physical memory cards, or even had the saves ON the console itself, you'll probably know what I'm talking about here.
Let me set a scene for you in a 2nd person POV. You want to get Nintendogs on your DS. You go to a retro game store and find a cartridge like the one you had as a kid, "Labrador and Friends" (you got it because you were obsessed with Corgis as a kid). You take it home, pop it in the cartridge slot, and turn it on. You're greeted by dogs you didn't buy, with names you didn't write. You check the trainer info, "Mollie" is the name on it. It has little hints that tell you this was a cartridge owned by a little girl.
It makes you weirdly connected to whoever this person is or was. Have you passed "Mollie" on the street? Did she cut you off in traffic? You wonder what she was like and who she is now. Do you think they grew up to be a good person?
It kinda makes me sad in a way. Here you are with some loose thread connecting you to some person's time capsule of themselves at a certain time. You wonder what was going through their head when they decided to put the game down for the last time. It's almost like going to a graveyard and seeing someone's headstone.
This was something that got lost as we transitioned to cloud-based saves, or saves tied to accounts. There's no stumbling on someone's past anymore. You're not going to dig up someone's old Minecraft Xbox One Edition world because it was tied to an account with login information you don't have. While I'm glad I don't have to buy $20 memory cards anymore in order to save my progress, in it we lost something.
Right now there's someone who found my old Nintendogs copy that I last touched when I was an 8 year old kid in 2007. I wonder if they kept my corgi puppy, Juju, or did they reset everything to start fresh? Someone has my family's old PS2, or my childhood cobalt/black DS. Do you think the person holding it now wonders what happened to the original owner?
It's such a stupid thing that I probably get way too sentimental over, but it's just a reminder that we are far more connected than we realize. If you happen to find yourself in this circumstance where you're now the ward of someone's old game files, whether you decide to play on or wipe it is up to you and there are no wrong answers.
Just maybe take a minute to consider who this person was and the life they lived.
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as of writing this...
After work today I'm heading up to Idaho to support my mom for her first chemotherapy treatment. I've taken the next 2 days off so that way I can support her. My family will stay at the house while I'm gone. I haven't been away from them for more than 10 hours and I already miss my girls like crazy. I guess the air mattress I was gonna borrow from my FIL got destroyed so he's mailing a new one to my folks house for me to use while I'm up there. A good night's sleep on the couch for a night doesn't sound too bad. I'm thankfully at a physical state where my body won't remind me how much I suck if I do.