It was not something you paid attention to and it was galaxies away from the reasons to motivate the purchase of a video game, but I doubt that there is a detail as banal, and at the same time as memorable, as the mythical saved game icons in the Memory Card of PSX Y PS2.
Static designs in 2D, 3D, the animated that could even change depending on the action you were to perform. Those little images became one of those curiosities that, despite not occupying covers or specials in the magazines of the time, did earn a place in our memory.
The legacy of memory cards
For those who do not know the evolution of saved games, the idea behind the Memory Card was to offer a place where we could save our progress in a game without taking up space in the memory of the console. One more excuse to sell accessories – at the time of the Mail Center it was sold for about 3,550 pesetas, just over 20 dollars – with the claim of being able to take your saved games to a friend’s house.
Despite how much it hurt us to complete the space of a Memory Card And having to buy another, or deal with the idea of deleting saved games, it is true that carrying around with memory cards from here to there to share progress – or even sell them – became commonplace.
But that is not what should occupy our head in this review -a story for another day, which is often told-, but how a detail without apparent importance happened from curiosity to identity sign, and from there to fall deeply into oblivion.
Although some try to recover and preserve them in the form of threads of Twitter and YouTube videos, it is still curious that we have a virtual museum dedicated to the soda machines of the history of the video game and that on the internet there is no similar project for saved game icons.
The lost art of memory cards
Although it is fair to admit that there were other companies that briefly kept the trend – Nintendo followed it with GameCube and Dreamcast also had a similar system -, they are the first PlayStation, and especially those of PS2, which have managed to mark us in a special way.
From those garish menus to seeing how the icons jumped from one side to another. From 3D puppets moving between spinning logos to experimenting with copying or deleting data to see if it would run a different animation.
With the jump to PS3, with a much cleaner and modern interface, those mythical save icons passed away and, although they could still be seen from the virtual memory cards of said system, Sony stopped using the idea in favor of traditional and self-explanatory icons, usually with the logo or the cover of the game.
And so, overnight, the icons of Memory Card they were evaporating without the great mass missing them. One of those details that seemed to have disappeared from your head and that, when you see images and videos like these, they get a thousand and one memories to surface again.
