The first game system to have a way to save your progress was the Magnavox Odyssey. But because it didn’t sell very well, the technology didn’t make it into most game consoles until much later.
The Odyssey was a primitive console by today’s standards, but it was revolutionary for its time. It used analog circuitry and was powered by six AA batteries. The console connected to a television set and used transparent plastic overlays to simulate the graphics of the games. The console came with 12 games, including a ping-pong game, a football game, and a shooting game.
The Magnavox Odyssey saved game progress on “game cards,” which are small circuit boards that you can take out and put back in. Integrated circuits, diodes, resistors, and capacitors were some of the parts on the game cards that let players play different kinds of games and save their progress.
When a game card was put into the game card slot, it connected to the console through a set of metal contacts on the edge. These contacts were used to keep track of how far along the game the player was.
When a player wanted to save their progress, they would press the “reset” button on the console. This would stop the game and show a message on the screen telling the player to take out the game card. The player would then take out the game card and flip it over to find a small switch that could be used to save the player’s progress.
By flipping the switch, the player would start a mechanism that would physically change the game card’s circuitry and store the player’s progress in the game. The player would then put the game card back into the console and pick up where they left off when they came back later.
At the time, saving progress on game cards was a new idea. It let people play longer, more complicated games without having to finish them all in one sitting. The game cards could only hold a limited amount of information, and players couldn’t change the games or download new ones.
Nintendo was one of the first companies to start using battery-powered memory to save game progress. The Famicom, also called the NES, came out in Japan in 1983. Its game cartridges were the first to have a memory that was powered by a battery. This meant that players could save their progress in games and come back to them later without losing their work. Before this, most console games had to be finished in one sitting or players had to use passwords to pick up where they left off.
As an add-on to the Famicom, the Famicom Disk System used rewritable floppy disks that let players save their game progress. Later, this technology was added to the Super Nintendo’s Satellaview add-on, which let you download and save games to rewritable memory cards.
When it came out in 1989, the Game Boy used cartridges with built-in batteries to save game progress. This was much better than using passwords or having no save system at all, and it made it easier for players to play games on the go. The success of the Game Boy helped show how important save systems are in video games.
When the Nintendo 64 came out in 1996, it used “Controller Paks,” which were internal memory cards that could be used to save game progress. These were like the memory cards that came with the PlayStation, which came out a year before.
When it came out in 2001, the Game Boy Advance had cartridges with flash memory that made saving data more reliable and last longer. The Nintendo DS and Wii, which came after the GameCube, also used this technology.
In short, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first game system to have a way to save your progress, but Nintendo was a big part of making it common for games to use battery-backed memory to save your progress. Since then, this technology has become a standard part of video games. It lets people play longer, more complicated games without having to start over every time.