I just overwrote my save. I feel Jan's pain.

So here I was, happily leveling my arcane archer dude in Act II the PS2 classic Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, when I suddenly decided to start a new game with the dwarf warrior to see what he's all about. I suppose due to muscle memory and the sort of general repetitive brain patterns that come with playing a dungeon crawler, I just hammered on the "advance menu" button at a save point and completely destroyed my awesome shock arrow guy.

Maybe I'll just move on to Champions of Norrath since I've never actually played that one.

When was the last time you lost a huge chunk of game progress, and did you have the determination necessary to replay back up the point you were at previously?

I've lost my Okami save data multiple times on PS3 over the years. I still haven't finished that game. I think I currently have a save that's part of the way into the game. It's been a while since I checked in on it. I don't remember if I stopped playing because I lost the save again, or if I just got sidetracked by other games. But any who, I'd like to think I'll finish that game someday.

@brian_: Hmm, since I'm messing around with this PS2 emulator, I ought to give that a shot.

Gave my GBA to a friend once during a vacation. Forgot it still had Pokomon Ruby in there with a save with all the Pokemon...

You can guess how I got the GBA back...

I was playing Golden Sun on a friend's cart. I did something for him on his save, then accidentally saved it over my own file because of muscle memory. I think I eventually got my own copy, but I never finished it.

I accidentally saved over my Power Stone 2 VMU save, so ALL of my items got reset to beginning. If you know how painstaking it is to unlock items in that game you understand my pain.

Most recently a few years back I had finally made it to the end of the Dream Log in Pirate Warriors 3 and unlocked the final character. Because of the backwards way Bandai Namco games of that era handle saves/loads I accidentally over-wrote my save with a new file by trying to button through the opening file loading. I didn't even get to try Shanks, though his move set didn't seem all that special anyway. At first I was really upset but then it felt freeing as I now had an excuse to never play the game again.

I don't know about huge. I remember I lost all my progress in Machinarium, but it wasn't exactly difficult to get back to the same point in a linear point n click game. My ex's Diablo 3 character was lost when I managed around some save files on PS4, but I don't think it was too high of a level character (and it wasn't my character either). There might be some other examples, but I can't remember any at the moment.

@mezmero: Power stone 2 players here, awaiting the release in 2 years hoping for online play, and still think its a more fun pick up and play the game than the unfair comparison of smash bros (much like jeff said smash is fun when you really know how to play and then you play no items and its boring...for people who don't know how to play.)

Anyway I feel your pain, I lost mine before, and getting them back is a raffle, I suggest getting the power stone PSP game and finding a save to unlock all items. makes me sad when the ranking of fighters thought the game was bad (I think ben) due to just playing without items all unlocked. The PSP version has more items and extra characters.

My biggest save lost beats anyone else's merely by the fact that you all can download a complete save or just play the game over linearly, eventually you would get to the same spot even if it took 100 hours. My loss I can never get back.

I worked on a PlayStation 1 RPG maker game for months. Tinkering and making the most elaborate OpenWorld multiple dimensions clashing of my favorite different series, I had new york fully modeled, an item shop, parties, side missions, piece by piece, deleted all my game saves for memory for custom characters (took an entire stick back). Saved over it while trying to cancel out. Only got to play it a couple of times and showed a buddy or so...I cried.

When I was a kid, I had completed pokemon Blue version and was at like 140-something total in my pokedex. My brother had red version and was in a similar boat. Then one day my brother had a friend over, who he let play my blue version so that he could trade things over, I think it was a kabuto or something back before we had a link cable that you couldnt get otherwise. Anyway, when I turned on my blue version it had about 8 pokemon caught and my brothers friend had renamed my rival "Garry", which I think is the most insulting part. Overwrote my entire file I'd worked so hard to finish up. In the end I never finished my pokedex while my brother completed pokedexes for multiple generations after, using a fossil from my cursed blue version. This one will always sting.

Might not be game related, but I recently saved over an old art project with the new one I'm working on. Saved over both the work file and the png. T_T

At least is was something easy that could be recreated if need be. It was a small poster for a running event that the local Kiwanis was putting on, but it still sucks that I did that!

Oof that's a heartbreaker, but on the bright side you may have dodged an addiction there by passing it on!

Yeah I would certainly have cried as well, you certainly have the rest of us beat.

Sometimes I find the excessive save reminder messages in productivity software annoying, but all it takes is one instance like this to make you forgive them.

@topcyclist: That reminds me I had the PSP collection at one point and was working my way through the unlocks. Unfortunately my PSP got stolen at work with Valkyrie Profile inside of it. It was my first time playing through VP as well and I was nearly at the end when it happened.

I was somewhere around the last couple of levels of Shadow Warrior (2013) and then overwrote my autosave because I wanted to show my friend the opening level and how the graphics and swordplay looked. That was the first time I had encountered the game mechanic of a game creating a single rolling autosave and "new game" meant "overwrite the single save we've been making for you". I've still never gone back and finished the game even though I was quite enjoying it overall.

That happened to me once in the early years of my business and I suddenly saw the clear need for a cloud-based backup for my computer. In the years since, that's saved my bacon on a few projects where I have accidentally saved over an important design file.

@hamsorrow: Haha I was that kid. I was at a big sleepover for a friends Tae Kwan Do group and one kid had his gameboy with Pokemon on it and let me play it. Video games weren't really in the budget so all I had was the show. I started up a new game and played for awhile, and because I didn't know how this stuff worked at all, when it asked me to save I just hit yes. Little did I know I had just destroyed this kids entire full playthrough with all pokemon collected, including legendaries. I think he was being nice about it given my utter ignorance but I'm sure he went home hating me lol.

An ending A save for Nier Automata due to a Steam cloud save issue.

I beat the game and gave up my original save back in 2017, but that was a about 15 hours worth of achievement cleanup that I won't get back. Well, at least 21:9 works to an extent and the frame pacing issues are (mostly) gone, so that is incentive to play it again.

I was going for the Infamous platinum and accidentally overwrote my save that was at 98%. It was a horrible feeling. Speaking of Infamous, where is the remaster??

@stealydan: my overwrote save was me being lost as all heck in morrowind on red mountain at the very tail end. (xbox version if that matters) i got bored of going in circles so i decided to take a break n have some fun making a new character. sadly 12/13 yro me didn't apparently understand the concept of saving vs auto saving n when i went to go back to my save there at the end of the game after a few hours it was totally gone .......i still to this day have not beaten morrowind thanks to it .

@stealydan: my doing that was morrowind on the xbox , i was stuck kinda lost in the moutain fog for idk how long looking for the right way near the end of the game , so bored me said hey why don't i just screw around for a bit in the begining for a while n come back to this later , never made a hard save not realizing what a thing autosaves were back then ( just never thought about it) and welll i've never gotten that far since. i only wqent back to that xbox version once after that n that was about 6 years ago when i was trying to teach sticks to my fiancee who hadn't played games since snes ... needless to say he died to alot of rats n didn't get very far