Save game tragedies

I had a hard drive die which, beyond losing far more important personal data, lost saves for over 100 different games. That was before the advent of larger capacity hard drives, and once I had my hands on a 1TB drive, the problem of storing too much media in one place hit a critical mass. It still wasn't even backed up.

I....don't have have that problem anymore. With 18TB of unformatted space and the capability to survive two drive failures at once, my on-site plans are taken care of. Off-site is handled separately of course, because RAID is not a backup, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than my previous setup.

When I bought a 360 Elite and moved my saves over, my Super Meat Boy save was lost.

I managed to play through the main game over again, but finishing Cotten Alley again is just too stressful.

I spent a day playing Dragon Age Origins, probably logged a good nine or so hours into it, did a large chunk of the game.

The next day, Origin said I had exceeded my cloud save limit, and asked whether to use my hard drive saves or cloud saves. I accidentally hit the cloud save button, and started where I had been a good nine hours earlier.

I've hardly touched the game since.

I've got to say the most depressing was the 100 + hour save i had going in persona 4

The worst I've ever had was batman Arkham City on PC. I lost 3 saves, and the third one was at 98%!!!! What makes this so frustrating was watching others with the problem getting their saves back after the patch while mine was still missing. Oh and that patch.... it only took over a year to come out and a lot of good that did. Still a great game, but I will never go back to it now due to frustration. Great thread & question btw.

Majora's Mask locked up on me after I went back to a dungeon and spent an hour getting all the stupid fairies and thanks to the save system I lost that, a good chunk of money and other stuff. Haven't finished that game because of that. It was even the temple that made your hearts worth double. 
 
Harddrive failure like 5 years ago nearly lost me a 400 hour Oblivion save game but my dad got our data taken from the drive professionally because there was a bunch of tax stuff and important family pictures on it so I got it back on a DVD and just went back to playing Oblivion.

I jumped into a pool forgetting that my copy of pokemon silver was in my pocket and I transferred several lvl 100s over to it from Blue.

I can remember three really bad ones and one sort of bad one. The not so bad one was having about 12 hours of Dragon Quest VIII corrupted on my PS2. I struggled with that game a fair bit and just couldn't bring myself to go back through what I'd played, though recently have thought about giving it another go.

When I was going through the first Assassin's Creed game I was using a guide to get all of the flags. When I grabbed my 80th or so from the main hub area (had already finished other places and was about halfway through the story), my system froze while autosaving. Didn't play that game again until about 3 years ago, and I just blew through the story before playing 2.

When FF7 first came out I got one of those shitty third party triple capacity memory cards and it wiped my save. I was about to go into the North Cave.

And just last week, I found out I had over 50 hours of Persona 3 erased. It speaks to the quality of the game that I'm not even that upset about that one. It was my first time playing it and now I'm just curious to see how much faster I can go through it as it took me a while to understand certain things about the game.

This happened to me when playing borderlands, I have joined a player with a quest that I have recently finished. But to my dismay I got the same quest again and this time the NPC is no where to be found because I have already finished that quest. And what worse it that it Auto Saved, now I'm stuck on that quest forever.

Sweepy Dwags. I was enjoying the game well enough to progress the story along at a good pace, but I went out of my way to rank up my guy and do a ton of the side quests in the game. Which is so god dam rare for me as I usually hate that stuff. Anyway, ten hours in I do a format and re install of windows thinking that the game had cloud saves only to discover it did not. I have tried several times to get into that game since but I just can't do it any more. None of the side quests are grabbing me and everything just feels like a massive grind just to get back to where I was. Once enough time has passed and I have forgotten enough I will go back to it.

Not really a corruption of a save, but when I first got my PSX I couldn't afford a memory card for a long time so every game I played I would lose the progress every time I shut it down. I played Front Mission 3 for a day or two before I finally died and I have never gone back to the game. I felt like that was it. That was the ending to my story. I got to that mission, I died, and the bad guys won. Going back feels like it's cheating and would cheapen my memory of my time with the game.

Playing a game like that with no save was like perma death mode amped up to a whole new level. It made every fight this epic monumental feat that I had to over come. I still remember as if it was yesterday the mission where I was down to my last guy, a sliver of hp and the only thing not critical was the dam melee arm. I some how took out 2-3 guys with this one guy on the brink of death. I felt like the grand strategy master king of the multiverse after that. No game before or since ever came close to giving me those emotions and those highs until I did the same thing with Final Fantasy X with some friends when I stayed over at one of their places for the night and I forgot to bring the dam memory card for my PS2. Maybe it was because it was a group experience, but even that didn't match the highs of Front Mission 3. Though that night is easily my second best gaming memory.

I lost of GTA:SA save once, it bugged me so bad I didn't go back to play that game for about 3 years.

I have tried, on three separate occasions to beat Call of Cthulhu, but for some reason my save keeps getting erased after a certain amount of inactivity.

Besides that, and this one is entirely my fault, I bought one of those shitball multi-page Playstation memory cards before I knew better and had to restart my Xenogears game something like three or four times before I just bit the bullet and bought a first-party card. And there was the time I lost 2 hours of Fallout 2 progress because I was so engrossed, I was forgetting to save and the game crashed to desktop (as was its wont).

@Bane122: Your mention of Persona 3 reminded me of mine. I was around 5-10 hours from the end when it happened. I sat down, said to myself "Today's the day I finish Persona 3!" I reached over, turned on my PS3, heard an odd beep, waited about 30 seconds before it sank in that the TV screen was still black and nothing was turning on, and then I looked over and saw that god dam yellow light. My fucking PS3 that I had just paid $300 for a few months before had YLOD on me. About a month later and a $300 bill from Sony I had my PS3 back from Sony repair and everything deleted from my hard drive. I refuse to play through that entire game again just to see the ending, and I just have not been bothered to look it up on youtube.

Mass Effect 3 origin login bug - customer service at EA suggested wiping my cache and deleting all saved games. Can't copy ME3 saves, only move, so yeah I lost them all. Didn't even fix the problem.

I was very close to the end in inFamous 2 when my PS3 broke. When I bought a new one last year and got inFamous 2 through PS+ I beat the game again, from the very start.

Takes a while to get back into the groove with a longer game like that one.

Edit: Oh yeah and I almost forgot about Shenmue on the Dreamcast. That game didn´t work so well with my third party memory card and I had to get a VMU after losing the savefile about 3 times.

I was doing a no-death playthrough of Link's Awakening because I heard it had some extras in the ending. I was on the last bit and put it aside for the night. I got out of bed and saw that there was a single death on it and my mum had let her friend's kids have a go on it.

I also lost a whole Gamecube memory card's worth of saves most important on it was second runthroughs of Resident Evils... Urhhhh. After that I got another card and staggered saves.

I erased my brother's save on Pilot Wings 64. I wasn't really able to read at the time and the big E-Ra-Say (Erase) button was just sitting there... calling to me... I just wanted to know what it did...

It did terrible, terrible things. I was sad for a week.

150+ hours into Final Fantasy Tactics and my memory card died. I have never once touched the game since.

Even seeing the game pop up as free when I joined PS+ kind of made me mad.

I don't remember losing any saves but I was close this weekend.  
I was playing Virtues Last Reward on the 3DS, and there's a certain room that has bugs galore. Thank god I got stuck at one point and looked up a FAQ that had a disclaimer that told me to NEVER SAVE IN A PUZZLE ROOM, specially not that one room. 
 I saved just before entering and the game crashed 4 times. If I had saved there my 35 hour save would have been corrupt.

Someone accidentally saved over my twenty-hours in Final Fantasy V playthrough (which was a co-op playthrough with a good friend, too!) That was easily the most powerful moment of save game disappointment I've ever felt. I'm pretty sure FFV might still be my favorite Final Fantasy as a result.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin - I was close to collecting everything, fully exploring the map, ect. 
I decided to play new game plus on hard mode capped at level 1 just to check it out and see how hard it really was. I ended up overwriting my original save somehow (which I was still collecting stuff on), even though I swear I made a copy and then being left with the super hard game and the bonus type game with the 2 sisters. Didn't bother playing any more.

@gogosox82 said:

@EchoEcho said:

Most recently? Losing my lvl 47 character in Skyrim (Xbox 360) shortly after completing Dawnguard,

Damn that really sucks. I had my level 20 char bug out on me and i had to start over and i was bummed out over that. I'd be super bummed my lvl 41 char i have got screwed up

Every time I think I'm ready to just man up and power my way through the game again so I can enjoy Dragonborn from where I left off, I sit down, turn on the game... and immediately turn it off again. Someday! Someday...

Mario 64. I had 115 stars. Lent it to a friend. Got it back. 20 stars. His sister had "accidentally" deleted it.

yes a few times. for some reason a lot of my saves on ps2 died. here is a funny story of xbox 360 hard drive dieing. i go to play my xbox 360 to find out that i have E74 error. i was getting E74 and E68 (hard drive failure) i didn't really think of the E68 error. i go to call microsoft tell the my problem. i get that figured out. i go to my friend's house, put in my xbox 360 hard drive in. find out that i have E68 error. i have to call microsoft again in the same week. i had to argue with the guy to tell me get the warranty as it expired a few days before. they sent me a new hard drive. i ended up playing a few of the games that i had already beaten, or not finished.