Saved game

This naturally led to the need to store in some way the progress, and how to handle the case where the player received a "game over".

Games designed this way encourage players to 'try things out', and on regretting a choice, continue from an earlier point on.

Early examples include Moria and Diablo II's "hardcore" mode where the character save game is managed by the server.

The first game to save the player's score was Taito's seminal 1978 shoot 'em up title Space Invaders.

[citation needed] BYTE magazine stated in 1981, regarding the computer text adventure Zork I's save-game feature, that "while some cowards use it to retain their hard-earned position in the game before making some dangerous move", it was intended to let players play over many weeks.

[2] InfoWorld disagreed that year, stating that save games "allow users to experiment with different approaches to the same situation".

[3] Home computers in the early 1980s had the advantage of using external media for saving, with compact cassettes and floppy disks, before finally using internal hard drives.

The use of memory cards for saving game data dates back to SNK's cartridge-based Neo Geo arcade system and home console in 1990.

For example, in the GameCube game Eternal Darkness, the player can save at almost any time, but only if no enemies are in the room.

For instance, IGI 2 allows only a handful of saves in each mission; Max Payne 2 imposes this restriction on the highest level of difficulty.

For example, on multiuser Unix systems, NetHack uses setgid to prevent users from copying save files into the necessary directory.

Another technique is to use a deterministic, seeded pseudorandom number generator, so that undesired random outcomes cannot be avoided simply by saving and reloading.

It is possible to cheat the system by copying and reusing suspend save files in an act of what is considered to be a form of savescumming.

A respawn is most often due to the death of the in-game character, but it can also be caused by the failure to meet an objective required to advance in the game.

Checkpoints might be temporary, as they stop working when the player loses their last life, completes or quits the level, especially in platform games.

The advantage of quick saving is its low burden: The player only has to press a button and, if applicable, wait a few seconds.

Instead, everything needed to reconstruct the game state is encoded in and displayed on-screen as a string of text, usually comprising random alphanumeric characters, and the player can then record or memorize it.

Passwords were widely used by home console games before the advent of non-volatile memory and later internal and external storage.

[11][12] Save states have started to receive mainstream usage in the early 2010s with Nintendo's Virtual Console.

In Chrono Trigger, attempting to use a fake save point in Magus's castle can actually bring the party into battle.

Later versions of the games made this feature optional, as do franchises such as the Fire Emblem, Shenmue and .hack series.

With the growing popularity of the Internet, many people upload their game saves to help out their online friends.