18 years of games lost after PS3 crash

One of the pioneers of the gaming industry has lost thousands of hours of play time after the accumulated save files of 18 years were all deleted.

Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Nintendo icon Kirby, told Japanese magazine Famitsu that years of gaming memories were lost when his Playstation 3 crashed.

“The hard disk on my Playstation 3 has completely died. It’s a full crash. The end. Goodbye, Planet Earth.”

A little melodramatic perhaps, but we’ve all been there – that dreadful sinking feeling you get when you realise your save file has been deleted. I never did quite recover, Final Fantasy VII.

To make matters worse, Sakurai’s PS3 was a little bit special; his was one of the rare 2006 models to feature hardware-based backwards compatibility with both the PS1 and PS2.

“Which means that all of a sudden, I have lost all of my data for the PS1, PS2 and PS3. I’d like to say ‘All you can do is laugh,’ but I can’t! The first PS came out in the end of 1994, so that means I’ve literally built up 18 years’ worth of save data on the thing…this, that, and the other thing; every single bit of it is gone.”

It’s a pretty depressing thought, as anyone who has put hundreds of hours into an RPG knows the horrible realisation that you will have to start all over again or, more likely, throw the game against the wall and weep gently. Sakurai’s advice is fairly straightforward.

“If you don’t want to come face-to-face with this depressing turn of events, then it’s best if you back up your save game data as much as you can. Right now! Immediately!”

Duh.