BONUS: Video Game Saves

and surreal world. But given the ephemeral nature of video games saves all of this wonder, amazement, and experience can be gone in the blink of an eye, leaving this world to exist only in our memories. I could probably give you a story about me being involved in like a lost save file from pretty much any time period of my life. My name is Matt Davidson, and my qualifications as a video gamer, I would say are pretty

extensive just because of the generation I come from. So I was born in which puts me right in the middle of original Nintendo era, and I stuck with it enough through current times to where I played every different era of video games on pretty much every different console at one time or another. It wasn't necessarily me losing a save file, but I played the Diablo series, so both in Diablo Too and Diablo three, there's a mode

that you can elect to play called Hardcore Mode. In Hardcore Mode, you agree at the beginning that if you die, all your progress is lost, and what it does is it resets you from zero, no matter how many hours you've sunk into this character. The ones that really hurt the most were when you would lose internet connection and then you would log back in and your character was

dead and deleted. Right. So I had a few characters, one in particular that probably had close to five or six hundred hours of playtime just playing a very pedestrian part of the game, and my internet cut out when I got back on that character had died to some you know, trash mob. I went through this period where I actually had to stop playing the game for like three months because it's like when a dog dies and you like can't get another dog for like for a

few months because it's too painful. Like I uninstalled the game, I had to completely walk away. I eventually did come back to the game. I went through the whole process again and lost another character and then I just had to stop. I couldn't take the pain anymore. I guess, like the funniest thing about it is like, it's so painful to you, but anybody that doesn't play games, like your significant other, like, has no idea how painful it is.

And my wife is just kind of like bewildered why I was so upset If I'm talking to somebody that doesn't play video games. I'm almost a little embarrassed to tell the story because a the number of hours I sunk into playing a video game and be I sort of set myself up for that, right, Like if you play high stakes like that, you're gonna lose at some point. I almost feel foolish for thinking that I was gonna be able to, you know, ride the lightning forever and

never have a fault. Somebody would call and my mom would be on the phone for like half an hour, and I'm sitting there, like, Mom, I thought my carriages die. Hi, I'm Josh Chandler. Have been playing video games pretty much on my wife. That's the I started playing card games, and then I guess in my later twenties I got very good at it, and I guess my biggest claim to family is I got Top one hundred and Magic to Gathering and her Stone and soon to be the

new You gear game. So you're good at video games, card games, I've got a card games. Back in middle school, there was a game called Rinscap and Rindscape was like one of the first like MMO games where you could go in and interact with other people. But that was back in the time of dial up. It was pretty bad when people would call, dial up would go out and DSL was still not another not available. I'll never

forget this one instance. So I guess our friend Michael, we were like out in what's called the wilderness where you can kill other players. I was with him and my internet went out, and then he killed me. My friend that I was supposed to be like my ally killed me and took all my stuff. And then when I wrong in im just like, what how did that make you feel at the time this is happening, and how do you feel about it all these years later?

I mean I felt freaking angry at Michael. I mean he was supposed to be have my teammate, he's like my friend right now, I just have trust issues with I quit ultim online that day because everything I had fought for for years was it. God. This is Matt Frederick. I am an executive producer on Ephemeral officially also a host of stuff they don't want you to know. Let me take you back to middle school. I'm playing ultim online with my friend Victor. We're playing all the time.

He's got a couple of characters. He's really good at it. And I've got one character. Character's name is Malachi. And I'm doing everything I can to get my fame and my carma up. I'm trying to make money. I finally

get there. I'm the illustrious something Malachi, and I just got enough money to buy a boat, which was a really big deal because in the game, you can either have a house or a boat where you could store all the stuff you've gathered, or you've got to just put it in the bank, which is just kind of you know, that's fine, whatever, But if you really want to be somebody in ltimonline, you need a boat or a house. I got this boat. I used all my money.

I took it over to the water, and I placed my boat in the water, and I teleported onto my boat and I started putting my best stuff into the cargo hold of this boat, and I was so excited and I was going to transfer that stuff over. I was gonna get to see the world in ultimonline. Some other character unbeknownst to me kind of walks over and just hanging out on the shoreline, and then they just disappear,

and like, oh, that was weird. Well, it turns out they had cast an invisibility spell on themselves and then teleported onto my boat. All of a sudden, I see all of my stuff coming out of my ship's cargo hold, all of my most important, most fought for magic items, my money, all the rest of the money that I had. Everything just goes onto this guy, and I'm freaking out.

I'm trying to figure out what's going on. So I try and take everything else out of the boat and then teleport off of it, because if you do that, you could double click on the boat and it shrinks down and you can put it in your backpack, basically like it's an item. But this guy had taken my spare key from my boat out of my boat, and he was able to click on it and take my boat, and then he just got the kind of there. It's

not cool. I'm still to this day upset. I think just a not knowing and the amount of energy you put into something that you can never get back, where it's like it's just gone. Those are the two things that strike the deepest. Hi. My name is Kevin Cool. I reside in Portland, Oregon. I've been playing video games for over twenty years, and in two thousand and seventeen on Madden Online for the Xbox I was ranked with the top twenty three percent of online participants. So I

feel like I'm pretty good. I was kind of young, so video games are pretty big. The game was on the Nintendo sixty four console. The legend of Zelda, okerry enough time, and if I remember correctly, you got three safe files in Zelda. The one that it hurts the most was what I'd call my master one. This is one where I had beat the game, gotten everything that all the little side quest you can save it right before you beat the final boss. You can go back

in fight the boss continuously over and over. So that was my third safe file, just because it was like I beat the game, I had all my cool stuff. So you know, when your friends come over, you gotta show off, so it's like, oh I did this, like, oh you got the mirror shi, oh you got to have her boots. I don't know if it was like a glitch or what, but the state was still there. You could access it, but it just froze. It wasn't the exact set point that it would freeze at, but

you always knew it was gonna glick. So it was like the countdown. It is either thirty seconds, thirty minutes, you know, whatever it is. You could load the save, but you could never actually beat it and continues to play it again. There's always a wish. We're just paused, and it would just stay there and there's nothing you could do. It was very painful, as most people are. At first, I'm in denial. It's not broken, it's that's whatever happened. So you do the old run around, takes

the game out, blowing the cartridge, lick the cartridge. Yes, we went there. Lick the cartridge. I think even like try to like put a fork or something metal on. It's like remagnetize it, even though that didn't do anything, you know, kid magic. And then I'm pretty sure I went to Anger and ran around screaming and yelling at everyone, and I hated the world for probably a week. I'm

gonna say a month. I don't really remember, but I know I hated everyone because I was so mad because I've spent so many hours and I could never do that again, and that was the perfect file and nothing would ever come close to that ever again, and nothing in my life mattered anymore. And I was not gonna pass the seventh grade, and my girlfriend was gonna dump me, and my mom was gonna make meat loaf for dinner

for a week. Life, as I know it had ended at that point, as you can tell, is rehash some pain. There's that song that was playing when the barrow went out. I still can't listen to it without getting like, Hi, I'm Annie Reese. I'm a podcast host for the show's stuff I've never told you and save her. My brothers were notorious for just erasing my save file. So one of my favorite games, Final Fantasy three Slash six, they would just erase it before I could get anywhere, and

it would be heartbreaking every time. Once I was playing Final Fantasy ten and I put hours into Final Fantasy tin, I normally am not somebody who like levels up to go fight the ultimate Boss. I did in that game. It was Christmas. Eve had gotten this weapon that you needed to fight this ultimate boss and all the stuff. For me, it was a huge deal. I'd never done

anything like that. Power went out, Power went out, lost everything, the entire hundred fifty hours gone, and I was right at the part where I was going to fight it, and I could have saved right after that, and I was so scarred by I could play it, and I never tried to do it again. It's not worth it. Game Shark was a very attractive idea. Oh, I can just use these cheet codes and I can get everything

I want in the game. This is awesome. But as a youngster, what I didn't know is that what game Shark really does is it goes into the game and alters like the code in the game and like basically screws the entire game. Up. Hi am Trevor Young. I

am a producer on Ephemeral. I was playing also Final Fantasy ten And I don't know if you remember this, but back in the late nineties early two thousand's, there was the think called game Shark, and it would allow you to install these sorts of like cheat codes and all these other various ways to get items in the

game without actually having to do anything. I had this final Fantasy ten Say file that I had dumped hours and hours and hours into doing all sorts of stuff, beating every bus, every endgame thing you could possibly do. But there was still like a handful of things that I was really frustrated that I couldn't do, like I think a couple of ultimate weapons and some other things that like are just like really hard to do in that game, in the endgame, And so I used the

game Shark to get those few things. And what the game Shark did was it like blitzed out my whole file, so like it gave me those things, but like everything else was like glitch out after that, Like I don't know what it did to the code. It was basically an unplayable safe in the game. Every time I would log on, like the characters would just be like moving

across the map without me touching it. I'd have like these kind of random encounters, and then like the random encounters would just be like these monsters that would move around a lot and like didn't do what they were supposed to do. It was really weird. Basically, like the game was unplayable after that, Like the game Shark just completely screwed up this same file, and so I basically just had to wipe the whole thing and start over. Like there was nothing I could do. There was no

way to play it. Luckily, Final Fantasy ten ones itself pretty well to replayability, but still I was pretty heartbroken. I don't think I played it for like two years. Last question, this is a quick one. Let's say I knocked on your door tomorrow and said, here you go, here's your system. Would you try to do this again? The answer to that is yes, I fully intend to when Diabolo four comes out. That's the kind of insane thing about it is, even though I have so much pain,

the pain drives me to do it again. I don't think I would ever try to do like what I did in my example of losing it. I wouldn't try to get every Ultimate weapon again. I would play it again. I'm not going to try to get all those weapons and fight all those Ultimate bosses ever again. I think I would try, Especially now with the last two years being a pandemic, that's an extra time on my hands. So all things considered him like plotting out, I could

have easily done it over the past two years. It's more so, like I said, the emotional investment. Do I want to put that much energy into something where I know it could be taken away in an instant and there's nothing I can do. But I would probably say, yeah, I would probably do it again. I quit playing with him now I still have trust issues twenty years later with him. Could you see yourself going through the wilderness with him again? No, I would definitely try again, but

it would take a lot of time. I would need some healing, some self reflection. I would have to like take a solo trip to a cabin in the woods in a mountains somewhere and really like think about my life for a couple of months, and then I'd come back to it and start a new game, a final Fantasy ten. If you came up to me with the old Dell computer and you had ultim Online loaded up and it had a secure connection to the server, There's no way in hell I would try and play Ultimate it.

This episode of Ephemeral was written and produced by Max Williams, with special thanks to Jesse Funk. Those were the voices of Matt Davidson, Josh Chandler, Matt Frederick, Kevin Cool, Any Reese, and Trevor Young. Some of the great music in today's episode, like the piece you are hearing now, comes courtesy of

the artist mon Plies here. If you have listened to Ephemeral for a while, you've heard a lot of their work, and we are happy to announce we will have an upcoming episode in interviewing the artists for now here more at loyalty Freak music dot com. What's been your most heartbreaking experience with the safe tell us on social media.

We're at a federal show and check out the two part exploration of the history of video games and other podcasts from I Heart Radio by visiting the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.