What's your worst save lost/corrupted story?

i lost my 95% completation rate on brutal legend i even bitched about it to tim schafer and he actually apologized still sucked though

3 Lufia 2 saves all ~80 hours.

I once saved over a friends 90 percent complete Metal Gear Solid save on ps1 with a Cool Boarders save.

I was playing Phantasy Star Online on the Gamecube with a few friends, we all had characters near level 100. After accidentally choosing the wrong game mode in the selection screen when we were starting one day my buddy instantly rushes up and hits the reset button... while the "Do not reset or remove memory cards" prompt was on the screen. As we all started yelling at him he just says "What's the worst that could happen?". Upon turning the system back on and loading the memory cards, I reply "This is the worst that could happen," and see ALL of our characters erased. The rest of the night was quite a speedrun through as much as we could through that game from the beginning, and hey it only took another 100 hours of playing throughout the month to get back there....

I had beat Pokemon FireRed and had boxes full of cool, strong Pokemon that I cared for dearly. Once I beat Pokemon Emerald, I got the smart idea that I'd transfer all my FireRed Pokemon over. Pokemon Emerald waited just long enough for all my Pokemon to cross over, before corrupting and causing me to lose everyone of my good Pokemon. I was not a happy boy.

Both modern Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (and I'm sure the previous entries in the series) are fantastic games if you love to have saves corrupted and have it feel like the worst thing in the world. Hours and hours of content spent in quests, character interaction, exploring, collecting and leveling up can all be flushed down the toilet in the blink of an eye. Combat is impressively unsatisfying, ensuring that the time you spend to get to where your last save was will be incredibly tedious, and will make it easier to just put it down. I myself have lost hundreds of hours of saves, from not only a single character, but my brother's and father's as well!

Slogging through both games after having to start a new game is similar but at the same time varies in different ways. Fallout 3's incredibly made atmosphere and exploring a world where change feels meaningful will wear off as you repeat them, (sometimes over and over). On the other hand, Fallout: New Vegas' rich writing and fantastic characters, as well as a well-realized world will have you skipping dialogue and get to point A to point B as fast and as joylessly as possible.

There are 5 DLC packs to both games that add even more content, some of which not only make it easier to get saves corrupted, but add things like hard crashes and missing textures.

Get both games on the PS3 or Xbox 360 to corrupting saves easier, and get it on the PC to mod and make the game even more unstable!

When my PS3 yellow-lighted, I lost all my saves for all my backlog titles. Some accounted for tens of hours of gameplay...

When I first got my Xbox it wasnt online all the dime due to it not having built in WiFi,I got red dead redemption and was loving it I got up to mexico and came off it. I connected my Xbox to live to play something multiplayer and put red dead back in after, what I didn't know was my system clock was set to the future while offline and when I connected online it fixed that. When the game booted it started me off at the beginning and then autosaved lost everything really sucked traded the game in because I didn't want to do everything again and I never get to finish a amazing game

I think it was Oblivion where I lost a level 40-something character to some sort of bug/corrupt save issue. Given the nature of those games I was only upset about it for an afternoon or so. Most of my saved game issues have been me failing to save and then not having the heart to replay something.

Idiot brother deleted my FF7 save.

Was just about to fight that one winged asshole.

This one was entirely my fault: I accidentally saved over my FF8 Disc 4 (60-70 hours) save just prior to beating the game, with a save from Disc 1.

On PS2, I owned the Anniversary Edition of Street Fighter which included 3rd Strike which had an early "Replay" system, which shows it's age.

I always play with a buddy, and for nostalgia factors, we would save some of our better wins. I discovered something odd one day that would show the fighters just standing as the the timer ran out, in this case, he won. My buddy explained that one of us probably forgot to pause, and we left it at that, until recently we picked up the game again, and saved replays. A day or so later, I watched a replay of Chun Li vs Ibuki, and I realized that it was corrupted when they preceded to just... stand, and not fight.

And then it hit me, we DID Pause, and THAT was the glitch! Apparently, if we pause long enough, the Memory card registers the seconds we were idle, which explains why some of my other replays has mere seconds of us just standing while the clock is running. A few other "corrupted" matches would end with, and quote "End of replay" when there was still time on the clock, and oddly enough, would say who won when I checked out the memory card in the browser e.g. a match against Alex vs. Ryu, where the first round was won with a super, and the second lost to a time out, shows that ALEX won the match, even though it was 1-1 out of 3.

FF8, right at the final savepoint. I never completed the game after that. Watched the ending on youtube a decade after. Felt underwhelming..

not lost or corrupted, just stupidly handled... when i was getting into games, and i hadn't figured out yet the purpose of multiple save slots, i was playing Tomb Raider 2 on pc, was quite close to the end, and i hit save just as a ship's cook brought a wrench down on my head, killing me.

i must've reloaded it fifty times trying to roll out of the way, but in the end i had to start again.

i can still see the arc of that wrench.

I just lost a 500+ hour skyrim character with all the dlcs completed due to my brother deleting my ps3 account. I also lost a 60 hour fallout new vegas character

Saints Row 2, I had spent about 100 hours in it. I sold the disc at gamestop.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2: mentor run in chapter ...10? fighting Zed the first time. I had to make space and deleted the game. Which I wasnt aware also deletes the save file... Nowadays I always have ps+ save file backup switched on. Fool me once, right?!

Every single fucking time i've had a computer die on me. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. I'm almost numb to it now.

Since posting this I actually have had a more painful one. My completely full 16 gig memory card on my Vita was corrupted and I lost everything (nothing was saved to the cloud). Mortal Kombat on Vita was particularly painful as I had unlocked all but one of the costumes, finished the Vita specific tower and was half way through the normal tower.

Lost a 300 hour Dark Souls character after my hard drive crapped out. I stopped playing that game for a while after that.

I was playing Majora's Mask on N64 as a kid and got to the final dungeon. Took a break to go eat and when I came back and turned my N64 on my save was completely gone....Fuck that game, still haven't seen the end of MM or know what even happens.

Deus Ex on PS2 had a notorious bug where sometimes when you attempted to save it would just quit out to the main menu, losing all progress since the last save, so I lost quite a lot of progress to that until I learned to save every couple of minutes.

I kinda had the reverse happen with Deus Ex: Invisible War on PC, having the PC played it on crash, with the hard drive dying, and for quite a while I thought I had lost everything on that machine, and only 3 years later or so I found a backup of several of the user folders from that PC, and found the working save files for the game and managed to keep playing from pretty close to where I had left off.

It wasn't a ton of time lost, maybe only 10 hours, but somehow when playing the original God of War my save got corrupted so that during the final boss fight when you had to perform the final QTE the game would freeze. Literally the last piece of input in the entire game and I couldn't do it. I ended up not beating the game until it was rereleased on PS3. Not a huge amount of time but just for it to be the very final part of the final boss battle made it terrible. Since then whenever I play a game that allows you to keep multiple save slots I always alternate between two slots so that I never get into that situation again.

Also had a hard drive die on me when I hadn't backed it up in several months so I lost at least a couple hundred hours worth of saves on that.

I once lost a PSX memory card to a power outage, it was filled Final Fantasy 8 saves. TO this day I've never finished that game.

When the first Kingdom Hearts came out, I had made it all the way to then end when a friend came over. I had told him all about how great it was and decided to let him try it out. When he got to his first save point he "accidentally" overwrote my one and only save.

Ever since then I do the multiple saves in rpgs.

I played through the entire of Batman: Arkham Asylum on hard when my save got corrupted just before the final boss, making me lose my whole progress through the game. I never started over :(

I had a copy of Phantasy Star 4 back in the genesis days. This was a 25-30 hour RPG. My cart had a bit of a flaw though, all saves were corrupt and when you quit out of the game (yes even going to the main menu was enough) and relaunched it they would be deleted. So to beat the game I literally had to sit down one weekend and play it from start to finish non stop without ever turning off the system or even quitting to the main menu. Well that and I couldn't die if I remember correctly as that forced a reload of a corrupt save.

I was in 4th or 5th grade. Had a Pokemon Red file with all 151 Pokemon in the Pokedex (including a legit Mew my friend got from a kiosk event at the mall). My brother was four or five and couldn't read yet. My mom let him play my gameboy games. He erased my file. I never let him play any of my games with save files ever again. He's 17 now and is still conditioned to be paranoid of messing up my stuff ("Can I play [game] of yours? Will you come put the disc in or do you want me to do it?").

Don't think I've ever had a save corrupt. Guess I'm lucky. But very unlucky when it comes to game breaking bugs.

GOTY winner XCOM... couldn't even play it initially. I'd get to a character menu where there was suppose to be button prompts and there wouldn't be any and, thus, I couldn't play the game.

Also, ZombiU. Got near the end of the game to have a mission break and there was nothing I could do to fix it. Never finished it.

I lost the best version of I am the Walrus I ever heard, performed by Isle of Q, to a faulty hard drive.

I was level 30 in Borderlands 2 and had played the whole game with a friend. We were nearing the end, so he has to wait until I got all the way back up to him.

Thankfully it's never really happened to me. Although as a kid I never really adhered to saving my games. I would always play a certain way through a game and either just start over or forget to save. I eventually learned the merits of saving and from the age of 8 or so on ward I stopped that dumb bullshit.

Was at the final level of the second Digital Devil Saga game on PS2, when roommate needed to borrow the memory card to transfer some cheat files for the action replay thing he bought. Saved, quit, gave him the card that had all the RPGs on it, and turns out he accidentally formatted the whole thing.

My saves rarely get corrupted. Also, it is an issue that is crazy. Let me say that how it is: it's FUCKING CRAZY, if devs don't focus on a great save system where that stuff is impossible to happen. It is the absolute worst thing that can happen in a game, no contest. Shitty frame rate? That's shit, yeah, but at least you can play. Getting your save corrupted after 30 hours of play and basically having to start over? You're done. That's not going to happen. Ever.

It did happen for me though. XCOM: Enemy Within has a bug where your save gets corrupted if you save and exit during Ironman runs. Happened to me twice before I noticed where it went wrong. I was 18 and 22 hours in respectively. By the way, there is an easy workaround: just turn auto-save on and then dashboard out of the game instead of saving and exiting. Worked perfectly for me since.

Had limited save space on my 360 - in fact it was probably before I got a HDD - and I was juggling two characters on Oblivion. Accidentally saved my main character over my only remaining second character save. Lost 50-60 hours and ended up re-doing the whole Dark Brotherhood questline. Not the end of the world, as that questline was great, but still sad to lose my vampire assassin.

EDIT:

Haha fuck me, didn't realise this was a necro I had already posted in!

Lost my GTA Vice City 100% completion save when the disk skipped while saving or something and the save got corrupted.

Lost my first GTA4 100% completion (Pre Trophy) save when my first PS3 died and I couldn't copy it over.

Lost my second GTA4 100% completion (post trophy) save when I was backing my saves up onto a usb stick and PS3 decided to corrupt the save.

Lost all my JRPG saves from the PS1 era when a friend decided to wipe my cards for his own personal enjoyment.

Lost my THPS3 and THPS4 100% completion saves when that PS2 memory card died.

Lost my Pokemon Gold save file (All pokemon level 100 legit + 5 or 6 decent shiny's) when the battery kicked the bucket.

I lost all my save data on my GameCube memory card. It had that 4in1 Zelda Collection on it with Ocarina completed, and I was a good way through Majora's Mask. It also had a 100% save for Twilight Princess, 100% complete Super Smash Brothers Melee, and I was playing Windwaker. I was mostly bummed about Windwaker since I've never beat the game and I really wanted to see it through.

It's not exactly a "lost" save, but I got completely stuck in the Temple of the Ancients in Final Fantasy VII back in the day. I couldn't beat the boss for the life of me (the wall boss) and there were no random encounters after the save that I made, so no way to grind my level up. I lost 30-40 hours to that. Ever since, I make sure to keep multiple saves in any game where this I could potentially get stuck, especially in RPGs.

I also lost a probably half to 2/3rds completed Lunar: Silver Star Story save to one of those crappy PS1 "multi-memory" cards. I ended up spending the next several days blitzing my way to the same point in the game in about half the time I had spent getting there in the first place.

I almost 100% Budokai 3 when the data was corrupted. Made me sad. I lost a Game Cube memory card. Don't remember what was on it but I remember being devastated at the time.

400 hour Oblivion save to a dead hard drive. I actually did get it back eventually. My dad had our data recovered off the drive because he had a bunch of stuff he needed on it.

Had a 360 stolen from my home once. Lost my near 100% save of GTAIV, my near 'Burnout Elite License' in Burnout Paradise, and saves from Oblivion, Dead Rising, Saints Row, Skate, Viva Pinanta, and Eternal Sonata, among other early 360 releases.

In College my whole floor played Tiger Woods 2003. We all had careers on one memory card, Because only one person had the game. We all played together non stop. We had maxed dudes each personalized. Then the one guy who didn't play the game came in while the game was saving and unplugged the ps2. We lost everything. It was a bummer. So we went back to playing Empire Earth and Counter-strike on the LAN.

I've been mostly lucky with saves for the most part, there are two that come to mind for me. One is FFX, I was at the Seymore battle at Macalania when my save shit its self. I was so pissed and did the only sane thing, I marathon-ed that game for the rest of the day/night to get back to where i was and then some. I also lost my Batman Arkham Asylum save a few months ago and had to start that over which i didnt mind at all, that game is the best.

I had just build a new system and was getting ready to set up some symlinks between the drive they were on and the new system SSD. I was doing it by command line and typed the directories backwards and ended up wiping my entire backup folder with one press of the enter key. All my saves and config files gone in the blink of an eye.

I learned an important lesson that day. One copy of a file on a drive is not a backup, even if that drive is technically your backup drive. Oops. Also, don't try to craft symlinks from the command line unless you're positive you're doing it right.

Dark Souls. After I upgraded to Windows 8 it crashes whenever I try to load my game. Even with everything running in compatibility mode.

Near the end of Twilight Princess, I believe two dungeons before it, there's a bug where if you save at a specific save point, your file gets corrupted.

I saved there. I started from the beginning again, and beat the game. And it wasn't worth it at all.

Wild Arms

I played about 90 hours. Almost maxed each character and was exploring on a boat. When I came back to my save I found that the boat was, some how, in an inland lake. There was no way to get off the boat and no way to get out of the lake. I found a bloody glitch and it ruined my game. Never returned to it, nor the series, again.

The closest I can think of is having my Brick in Borderlands severely crippled by a bug from completing the game with a friend in split-screen, we came back from the credits and my backpack had been emptied, not only that but I'd lost all of my backpack slot upgrades.

In Dark Cloud 2, after beating the main game which consisted of 7 chapters, there is an eighth bonus chapter that takes away the tedium of city building and is simple dungeon crawling. After you beat the 7 chapters you can also start a new game plus kind of thing with unlocked stuff.

So in my 14 year old brain, I thought that I needed to start a new game between the beginning of chapter 8, and before the end. I did, but unfortunately saved over my original game save in chapter 8.

Dark Cloud 2 is a very long JRPG, I had put more than 100 hours into getting to that point and was never able to see the end of chapter 8 because I was too daunted by making it there again (the game for me was very gamefaqs reliant as I was a completionist, wanted to see everything and that would be impossible without reading a faq).

I tried once over the last year to get going again but that game is hard to jump back into chapter 2 where I had left off my new game plus. So many RPG systems...

I made a real, real dumb mistake with Ace Combat 6. I had each mission S-Ranked, I had all the planes and such unlocked and had beaten the game on every difficulty. I played the hardest difficulty and killed all the bonus Ace bosses and all that jazz, which was a pain since you had to be pretty fast at completing objectives or downing a certain amount of enemies in order to spawn some of them.

And then I decided to make a brand new save file to start clean and, in some fog or haze of stupidity, overwrote my original instead of choosing a second profile slot.

But honestly, after the first few minutes of realization and anguish, I decided to keep playing. I never got to that level of completion again but I love the game enough that I still play it from time to time.

Other than that, I've restarted Pokemon Sapphire and Emerald multiple times after the internal clock would run dry and stop any time-related stuff, some of those going into 60+ hours. I think I've also had Vice City and San Andreas saves get corrupted. But I don't think they have ever bothered me that much, simply because of how much I loved the games, so that I would just go back and play again.

Probably just losing a save file for Thousand Arms that was near the end of the game. Still haven't ever gone back and beaten it.