Memory in Video Games

I recently rediscovered my Playstation 2 after coming home from school and after playing through Tony Hawk 4 for about five hours I realized that I needed to find the memory card to pull up my old game saves. This got me thinking about how we have become so disconnected from external memory cards in just one generation of systems. I thought it would be an interesting topic to take a look at the history of memory in games and to look forward into what may be down the road.

When games started in arcades the only real reason for memory was to record maybe the top ten scores on a particular machine. The arcade games were meant to kill you quickly so you had to keep putting quarters in the machine and because the experience was quick, story was not a big part of the game. This changed when RPG’s began to make their leap to video game consoles. These RPG’s (like Zelda) needed memory so the player could complete the game without sitting at the TV for hours and hours. The game itself held some memory but it was mostly seen as a thing that was only needed for those types of games.

Before external memory cards were introduced the password system was implemented in many games to allow a gamer to pick up where he left off. Usually at key points in the game the gamer would be given a code that they could write down and then enter when they restarted the game so they could pick up where they left off. The passwords were hit and miss; some were too long and complex (like using upper and lower case letters as well as numbers) and some were so spread out that it was easy to forget to jot down the password when it came up.

Eventually games began to become more involved with storytelling and it was necessary for there to be sufficient room to store the data. Passwords weren’t cutting it and something new was needed. Around the generation of PS 1 and N64, memory cards were a must have for most games. The memory allowed for more features like a franchise mode in a sports game, longer and harder challenges in action games, and much more. The cards had to be purchased separately so it was another strain on the wallets of gamers. The cards usually held a good amount of memory so you only needed a couple to cover an average size game library. The N64’s memory card plugged into the back of the controller, which stopped you from being able to put in a rumble pack which kind of stunk. The Playstation 2’s card plugged into the system itself, which was an improvement.

But at the same time that the PS2 was using cards Microsoft’s Xbox had a significant amount of memory built into the console itself so the need for cards went away. When the Xbox 360 came out in 2005 and then the PS3 in 2006, the idea of a hard drive with gigabytes of memory was second nature to gamers. Now gamers could save profiles, videos, and other features. This corresponded well with the push to make game consoles more of a “media center” and not just for gaming.

Now, the higher end hard drives have upwards of 120 GB of memory and can store a ton of information. But game developers are pushing to add to digital distribution with full length games. (The Xbox has about 20 titles that can be downloaded and saved to the hard drive) This will cut costs and if games eventually become a solely digital thing, the used game market will disappear however, before Gamestop has to worry about being out of business, memory on consoles needs to skyrocket. Each game takes up several GB and that is the smaller 8-10 hour experiences, not the massive 100+ hours of a game like Fallout 3. So, until hard drives hit the terabytes, I think it is safe to assume that our game libraries will not become just digital space. We will still have discs, boxes, and manuals.

Memory has always been a part of gaming in one way or another and now with hard drives built into systems it is easier to hold all kinds of information without remembering passwords or switching out memory cards.