Your worst game save data loss?

The worst one I had was about 15 hours into Resident Evil 4. My nephew was watching me play it and wanted to pick it up when I went to work. I very explicitly walked him through the process of using a save slot and how not to save over my game. I don't know where he went wrong, but when I got home, sure enough, he'd written right over my game save with his own. I was pretty irritated, but it wasn't really a big deal. I loved the game so much, it wasn't really a hassle to play it from the start again, but it was definitely deflating to lose the momentum for a while.

I never really lost too much but somehow my Arkham Asylum data got corrupted and deleted it. That kinda sucked.

I was 7 years old when my Dad bought my FFVII, I literally had no idea what i was doing at first but eventually after many a full start over got my shit together, which looking back I'm impressed with myself (despite pronouncing Shinra as Shine-Rah).

I made it to the third Disc by the time I was like 10 and felt so proud! My brother who is a couple years younger decided to erase that save to save his progress in Crash Nitro Racing........ God damn it. It hurts even now.

Super Mario 64 - 3 Stars to getting them all my sister deleted the save. Never got them all I was so mad.

Ni No Kuni - Fought the last boss died during the final transformation...turned the system off as I was annoyed. YLOD when I turned it back on. Never finished it.

Final Fantasy Tactics - Played it on my iPhone about 25 hours in...lost the save somehow when I got a new phone. Bought it for Vita, haven't had the time to start it again.

Those are the 3 worst I can think of, I'm sure there's some other older ones I'm forgetting about.

FF7, my first playthrough, on disc 3.

My brother was playing a game on the same mem card and left the system running for like 18 hours. When we got back to the system it was hard frozen. Upon reboot the memory card was empty.

I could have killed him.

I'm sure it's not the worst loss of save data I've ever experienced, but my most memorable lost bit of save data goes back to Final Fantasy IX. That game came out when I was eleven, and at the time I didn't have a PlayStation of my own, so I had to play the game in short sessions on the family TV, as and when I could. I'd made it as far as the third disc at this point (pretty sure I was in Ipsen's Castle when this happened), when my sister came in from playing outside and said she wanted to watch the TV. I made that old excuse you never seem to hear in this age of autosave ("I just need to get to a save point.") and started backtracking. It took me about ten minutes to get back to the save point, my sister growing more and more impatient all the while as she missed the start of whatever programme she wanted to watch. Finally, as I reached the save point and started to save my game, she reached out and turned off the PlayStation mid-save. I recall shoving her out of the way and turning the console back on, frantically wanting to make sure my save was alright. When the game booted back up the save file was there, but when I tried to load it I would just get an error message saying the save file was corrupted. It was absolutely heartbreaking, to see all those hours go down the drain at the literal flick of a switch. As I say, I'm sure I've experienced worse losses of save data, but that's the one that's stuck in my mind all these years.

PSO on gamecube. I had a guy around lvl 90 with some good gear and something like 200 hours played. My Mad Catz memory card got corrupt and I never have touched that game since.

Right before the release of Mass Effect 3, my 360 harddrive died along with my continued saves from ME1 and ME2. It was a blow. But it just gave me an excuse to play through both of them again.

FYI it is literally impossible to be underleveled (or overleveled) in FF8. You probably weren't acquiring the magic you needed or junctioning your stats properly (2 things which are not permanent and can always be changed, so there is always a way to go back).

ALL enemies in FF8 Scale to your average level and bosses give no experience points to prevent giving a player a level that they didn't want. A low-level run of FF8 is overall easier than a normal run of FF8 as the enemy does not have access to stronger magic. The only problem with a low-level run is that if you are intentionally trying to get as little experience as possible you need to use certain skills to defeat the enemies without killing them as this gets you 0 exp.

Lunatic Pandora is a point of no return, however all you needed to do was draw magic from the enemies around as they all have good level-neutral magic which can be junctioned to your characters stats well.

So yeah, neither of those things are the fault of the game at all.

It's definitely Pokemon Crystal for me. A few years back I'd got all Pokemon except for Entei, Raikou and Ho-oh. Plus a shiny Ditto, Charizard, Girafarig and a few others. This was the same file I'd had since getting the game when it came out. Turned it on and the battery was dead and my save file gone. I was so close!

Persona 4. Twice. Almost 100+ hours gone. I didn't see the ending till the endurance run.

The battery is dead in my Pokemon Silver version cartridge... :(

It wasn't so much the system itself dying that ended up making me mad but I SOMEHOW clocked over 499 hours playing phantasy star portable 2 on psp, and I ended up dropping my psp into a puddle while waiting for the bus and the memory stick got ruined.

My brother and I were among the few dumb bastards who bought Hybrid Heaven for the N64 back in the day--a muddled, stupid mess of a game with a fighting system not entirely unlike that of Bioforge, except it was turn-based, somehow. Being poor, we were not about to let the fact that the game was kind of terrible stop us from beating it, and soldiered through incomprehensible cutscenes and dim, foggy environments until we got pretty damn close to the end. It was at that moment that our memory card (a five-in-one deal we got used at the local Funcoland) arbitrarily wiped itself.

We started a new game, but never got more than 10 hours in after that.

I had tried for years to get my brother to play Skies of Arcadia: Legends and he never made it out of the tutorial dungeon. Finally he gave it another shot and got several hours in, and seemed like he was well on his way to playing through it. Since I hadn't played it in a long time, watching him made me want to play though it too. Thanks to unconscious muscle memory I overwrote the save in slot 1, his save, with a super early save of mine. I felt terrible and neither of us has touched the game since.

Dark souls 2 Ng+3 character

@alanm26v5 More like Skies of Arcadia: Ladders! Just give up, you'll never get me to start playing it again... Muahahahahahahaha!

Exact same here too. Dead batteries. Heartbreaking stuff but you know that it's coming.

Super Smash Bros. Melee. Probably my most played game ever. I unlocked every character, every stage, and had countless hours of multiplayer with friends....until my Gamecube memory card corrupted. I even had all the trophies (some of which are a total fucking bitch to get) which means I had to play classic, adventure, and all-star mode with every character AND complete every event match. Heart breaking to say the least.

It happen after I lend my Xbox 360 to a friend. He deleted a bunch of games from the console, and my save games with it. I'll never lend him again a console!!!

My younger brother deleted my 40 hour FF7 save when I was right outside the crater at the end. I've never forgiven him.

The only time I've had this happen in recent memory was losing about a dozen hours of Mass Effect 3. I was really finding that game a chore to get through by that point though, so I wasn't even that annoyed. Never have gone back.

I haven't too many experiences with incidental save loss that I can recall, but for a while I would delete saves after S-ranking a title.

100% Shadow Complex with golden guns.

Fable 2 with every property purchased, untold billions of gold (I didn't know about the clock exploit, it was all legitimate), and the whole hero doll set.

100+ hours in Fallout 3.

And I did once format and reinstall before realizing I forgot to backup my Torchlight 2 save.

@pandabear: I haven't tried this method, but it seems like a great way to swap batteries without losing data. With my Action Replay, it looks like it will work with Advance carts as well.

Mine was even more heartbreaking: my mom let my 4 year old brother (who couldn't read) play my Game Boy one day when I wasn't home. Came home and saw him playing it, took it from him, turned it off and turned it back on, and saw my char named a random jumble of letters with no badges or Pokedex. For years (like, a decade) I never let him play any of my games that had any type of save file again.

Has to be losing my main FF7-save due to a shitty third-party Playstation memory card with an LCD-screen on it.

PSO on the Dreamcast. I had a max level hunter with so many rare weapons and mags, then one day my save corrupted and he was gone. Hundreds if hour plus so many player details just lost. Damn them for not having server side saves!!

Diablo 2 with Lord of Destruction expansion enabled. Spent countless hours (months of sessions) working my way through Normal, Nightmare and Hell difficulties. Got almost to Act 4 on Hell diff, had my double swing Barb worked up to level 92 (and you KNOW how long it takes to level that high!). Ultimate goal was to beat Hell diff and get my Barb to max level (99). Hard drive failure, save files wiped. My dumb *** had not created a backup save either. Biggest heart break of my entire gaming life.

I must have crappy luck, because this happens to me all the time. My fallout 3 saves become corrupted all the time and when fable:lost chapters came out i used to do the silver key glitch that corrupted my whole xbox drive, but i think the worst file corruption was on Majora's Mask on the n64. i was working on getting the zora's temple done, sorry its been a long time since i last played and not sure what its really called, but i was in the middle of a mask transformation when my brother tripped over the controller cable jolting the n64 and causing the whole cartridge to bug out. Upon inspection i saw my file name was a random combination of numbers/letters and would freeze whenever i tried to load it. i never did go back and finish that game...

3 level 99 files, a level 92, and one early game I was excited about (I was trying something new) of Final Fantasy Tactics when my PSP memory card went. Then there was the time the small child of my parent's friends erased my Pokemon Crystal file with my level 100 Mewtwo and the Pikachu I had brought over from my Pokemon Yellow game. I was pretty furious with that one.

I picked up Demon's Souls when it was new (in 2009) and played it a TON, but never beat the game. About a month before Bloodborne was released, I thought I would go back and get through the remaining bosses. I managed to beat the final boss, and at that point you return to the Nexus and the middle part is supposed to open up. It didn't open up.

I have all the trophies for beating all the bosses, so I know I didn't skip any.

Turns out there is some bug that can cause this to happen. So I never got to really complete the game I started playing 6 years ago. There's no fix - you have to start over.

80-hour Skyrim save when my old PS3 got the YLOD. It took me a couple years to give that game another shot because diving right back in just felt annoying doing all the same stuff again.

I recently corrupted my 100% completion file of TimeSplitters 2 while turning off the console during the "saving data... do no remove the memory card" phase. Totally my fault.

MY FFIX save got busted when I had just flipped over to disc four. To date it's one of the only FF's that I haven't beaten (alongside FFXIII-2 and 3).

My OG phat ps3 (60gig) died on me at about 2011...12? and it had my Mass effect 2 save. pretty much instantly killed my drive to play 3. I still havent played 3.

Battery died in my Pokemon Silver. It had a Shiny Tentacruel. Evolved the Shiny Tentacool I caught in the wild. Was and still is the only random Shiny I've ever come across in my illustrious Pokemon career. Darksiders 1 file got corrupted right before the final boss on Apocalyptic difficulty three years ago. Haven't touched the game since. And my 1019 Gamecube memory card decided to be corrupt after using it on a Wii. First party card. Lost all of my childhood saves. That one still hurts.

I had put about 35-40 hours into the 360 version of Defiance shortly after release. Some additional content came out, so a few months later I decided to go back in to see what was up. During the course of trying to load stuff up I found out that my save data had been corrupted and i would have had to start over from scratch, so I said to hell with it. Not history's greatest tragedy by any means, but still kind of annoying.

I watched a very young cousin wipe out my gamecube memory card that had my %100-EVERYTHING-UNLOCKED Super Smash Brothers Melee save data on it. I weep for the food trophy.

Lost my skyrim save which was probably 70 or 80 hours worth of gameplay. For some reason cloud save got corrupted and I wasnt able to restore the save from my harddrive. Had killed all of the dragons and got all of the runes and was planning to dive into the dlc´s but guess steam decided otherwise.

I was towards the end of Super Smash Bros. Brawl's Subspace Emissary mode until my nephew decided to play it and overwrote my save file. Luckily those save files don't have an effect on any of the modes in the game.

I've had pretty good luck with my save data, but I was pretty sad when my copy of Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 stopped saving my seasons.

I put a ton of time into Harvest Moon 64 and a friend of my brothers saved over it. Lost several in-game years worth. Had a wife and kid and had my house just shy of fully upgraded. Was pretty bummed out about it.

Pokemon Emerald, Animal Crossing (Gamecube), and Persona 4 for me. I think the GBA battery went dead for Emerald. Cannot save a file ever on Emerald. Animal Crossing's data somehow got corrupted and disappeared. All those hours in an attempt to collect every bug, fish, and furniture all gone. My siblings data were safe in another file since we had 2 memory cards, so we could work things across towns which sped up collecting things more conveniently. Persona 4 for the PlayStation Network has some weird bugs. I should have saved 3 back up files at most. I could never save on file 1 for some odd reason after finding out the file was gone completely. Had to replay everything from the start. On my new game plus, I had 2 files saved at 2 different points: November (after the Heaven Dungeon) and December (with all social links done except Naoto and Temperance). The December file went missing. A lot of hours went into fusing the best Personas and hunting the reaper were wasted.

I lost a whole bunch of saves when a bookshelf collapsed on my memory stick in my 360 and snapped it in half. Was before the age of cloud saves too, lost a whole lot from that.

So, PS1 memory cards used to have cute little pictures that represented an individual game's save data, and if you don't look too close, Squall Leonhart and and Leon Kennedy have somewhat similar faces.

I wanted to clear space on my memory card to make room for something, so I was going to delete some Resident Evil 2 saves. Turns out they were my Final Fantasy VIII saves. Dozens of hours, gone.

I am a very smart man.

All of this just proves to me to be very cautious when someone uses my gaming systems.

I lost a bunch of PS1 saves on one of those 3rd party memory cards. The biggest loss was probably my Symphony of the Night save with about 100 hours and a bunch of rare items on it.

A couple of years ago I accidentally deleted my Dead Rising 1 savefile. Even though I hadn't gotten that far into the game it really sucked, as I had spent weeks trying to beat the Carlito sniper battle. Haven't found the courage to go back. :(

I had a game crash in Gothic 2 while saving to my only save file. This was a save just before the start of the final bit of the game(fighting the dragons or whatever). I never finished that game.

I lost my FF9 save like half way through, was really bummed because I was enjoying that game.

I lost my Pokemon Saphire cart a while ago, a game that (while I believe it to be one of the weaker in the franchise) I played for 100+ hours before trading my best Pokemon to my friend, deleting my save, then starting again and playing for another 100+ hours. Thankfully I traded off my shiny Tentacruel and level 100 Legendaries before I lost it.

There used to be an exact clone of this thread on GB years ago, and I think then I said losing my 70 ish hour second character in Oblivion was probably the worst loss (when I saved over it with my main character), and it probably still is. But recently I did lose a 1TB Hard Drive in my PC. I can't really think of anything on there I'm sad about losing, even my unfinished DSII save was in the cloud anyway.

The biggest for me was a corrupted save on Final Fantasy 8 on PC. I was near the end and I was so mad that I've never gone back to play it.

I've lost other save data due to dead batteries or data loss, but with FF8 I never went back to it.