Your worst game save data loss?

Today my 1 TB PS3 harddrive decided to kick the bucket after not playing it for close to half a year. The thing I'm truly sad about is not losing the drive or having to go through the hassle of redownloading stuff again. Nah, I think my biggest lost here is losing a 70 hour Persona 3 FES save I had on the console that I was a hefty chunk into. This by far is my biggest save loss in recent memory and has probably overtaken losing my Final Fantasy IX save when I was a kid all because I used those shitty Funcoland third party memory cards. Grabbed the original ps3 harddrive I had laying around and guess it's back to level 1 in the tower for Persona 3 FES.

Mostly Pokemon related. Basically Pokemon was my life when I was a kid and all my Japanese carts lost its saves last I checked.

I accidentally deleted my brother's Sonic Adventure 2 file where he got Rank A on every mission and unlocked the secret Green Hill Zone level... not once, but twice! I felt like such an asshole but it's Sega's fault for making it so easy to delete. :/

One time I left my prized Suicune that I got from Colosseum on a copy of Pokemon Emerald, and I ended up trading my friend that copy of Emerald for... I can't even remember what. I had that revelation RIGHT AFTER I traded it, so I was pretty much on my knees going "Dude come on just let me trade it back really quick" and the son of a bitch decides to start a new game, and save right in front of me. He kept telling me he'd just create me another one with his Action Replay. The nerve of that guy.

I have no idea how we're still friends.

P3:FES near complete compendium. Lost the save when my PS3 HD shit the bed while downloading Persona 4.

I can't remember ever losing much save data in the past that I didn't intentionally delete, including Minecraft worlds of probably hundreds of hours from when I used to be at university that either got abandoned or I deleted to stop myself playing when I had something else to do.

The two exceptions are maybe:

• Realising that the battery was dead in my old Pokemon Blue version cart that used to contain a save somewhere in the 60-80hr range.
  
  
• And the one that I'm still kind of sour about... Which was begrudgingly lending my OoT cart to a family friend's kid and explicitly telling him that he could delete any save but the first one (My only 100% file), and then it being returned about 6 months later with that one save deleted and the other two garbage files intact.

Pokemon Blue...might have been Yellow. Either way, when I was but a wee lad, I put in a fuck ton of hours into the game, finally had my "perfect" roster with dreams of being the next Pokemon master going to school and fucking up all the other kids with their shitty ass Pokemon. Went to turn on my precious Gameboy one day...nothing but "New Game" and "Options."

"...what?"

That shit was earth-shatteringly depressing as a kid,

My sister deleted my Pokemon Yellow save. This save had the rare Surfing Pikachu, Mew, and all 151 pokemon My Snorlax, Dragonite, Venosaur, Gengar, Gyrados, and Dugtrio were unstoppable when I battled at school.

I don't even remember what game it was, I just remember I was a kid, my mom accidentally deleted my save, and I flipped out way more than I should have. I was really young, but it was dramatic enough to stick with me, I guess!

I've probably had worse, but the one that comes to mind is Legend of Legaia. I was at practically the final boss and for whatever reason I decided to start a new game and promptly saved over the file. It took me several more years before I actually finished it again.

The only thing that comes to mind is when I was about to finish Super Metroid, and I or my brother (I don't remember) budged the SNES just enough for the game to lock up. I turned it off, and back on, and my file was gone.

I guess my worst experience with losing saves is The Walking Dead. It was a pretty common bug where every time you started a new episode, it lost all the old data. That means all the choices you made, which is pretty much the whole point of the game. I waited until the whole season was out to play through it, then never touched another Telltale game again (mainly because I heard they went downhill though).

The bad part being me playing episode 1 three times, episode 2 two times etc.

Dragon Quest 8. I was 85 hours in and had all the best rear for everyone and I was just about to start the final area. One day I go to load my game when I am told that the load failed, I went to the PS2's system manager to see what the problem was. To my surprise I found that my memory card had corrupted data on it and DQ8 was one of the corrupted games. I tried to save my file but nothing I tried worked and in the end the file ended up deleting its self.

I lost 85 fucking hours of that game and was so pissed that it took me 2 years before I was able to play and finally beat DQ8.

Pokemon Red save with full 151 in the Pokedex.

My fat PS3 lost its mind. I was unable to recover any of the saves. This included all my PS2 and PS1 saves as well because I was dumb enough not to back those up elsewhere.

When I was a kid I lost a late game save on dragon warrior 3 for the nes, because I didn't hold down reset when I turned the power off.

X-COM: Enemy Unknown was my saddest loss. I was about 3/4 through the game when something (no idea what) happened, and all my saves were gone when I loaded up the game. I tried to get back into it several times after that, but it just wasn't the same without my original team...

I lost like 40 hours of Rogue Legacy progression when I switched to a new computer. I probably could have recovered it, but I actually didn't mind starting over. That's the only instance I can think of off the top of my head.

@i_stay_puft: The Persona fan part of me cried when I read this. Damn shame.

My story is somewhat unique because the first part (which actually has no corrupted save data in it at all) is my fault, which compounds the loss. So, I played through 9 Persons 9 Hours 9 Doors a few years back and that game is awesome. So, I was super hyped for the release of Virtue's Last Reward. I ordered it through Amazon, it arrived the day before my birthday, and I played the Hell out of it. Right up to one near-end-game puzzle. I got stuck, and told myself I'd come back to it. But the more I put it off, the more I realized I was forgetting certain story beats of this heavily plot driven game. So, I decided to wait until I had forgotten MOST of the story and just start over.

So, a month or two after making this decision, I did so. I was about twenty hours in when it happened. Now, I happened to be playing on the DS, and had no idea of a crippling bug in this version. A few people probably realize where this story is going. There are certain rooms in that game where, if you save and quit, your file becomes corrupted and attempting to load it results in an infinite black screen. The Pressure Exchange Chamber was my character's final resting place. Losing the data was one thing, but the fact that a) I avoided all save bugs my first time and b) only encountered one because of MY decision to restart makes my blood boil. This was about a year ago and I'm only now just getting past that part on my third (and hopefully first complete) playthrough. On the Vita version, thank you very much.

Though, I'm still so paranoid that I'm rotating my saves obsessively. Probably should have done that originally come to think.

I unlocked every character in Jet Set Radio Future and it wouldn't transfer to my new 360. "Backwards compatible" they said.

It's not a save loss, but I remember playing for hours in Pokemon Silver trying to hatch my Togipei egg, then give it endless haircuts to get it to evolve. Right as it was evolving...batteries die. God damn it

Ninja Gaiden Black. When my first 360 got the RROD, I of course had to take the HDD off to send it in. Apparently, the digital version of that game corrupts all of your saves when you take off the HDD.

I was at the last boss.

I never touched that game again.

They say "you can't take it with you", but when my original fat PS3 finally keeled over it made sure it took my 500+ hour Skyrim save with it.

The sadder thing was that I only had 1 trophy to get to Platinum that game. One that to achieve now would mean an entire re-playthrough of the game (with a FAQ open). No thank you.

Still, that was years ago and it's pointless to linger on the past... but I still have that PS3's carcass stashed away in a box in case science eventually finds a cure.

All the way back to Legend of Zelda 2. Got all the way to the final dungeon, and the save got corrupted. To this day I've never finished that game.

I lost my first gamecube memory card. That had basically all of my Gamecube game saves at the time. My chao...

Lost a 100 hour+ Skyrim save.

Yakuza 3. A 40-ish hour save. I never returned to it.

My brother formatted the Wii's save data while I was in the process of completing Super Mario Galaxy and had unlocked everything in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

He didn't know what format meant.

Had my PS3 YLOD on me a few years ago, I had almost everything backed up except the game I was playing at the time so I lost 70+ hours of skyrim.

I also lost my resident evil 5 save that I had got the platinum on, that was 8+ playthroughts of that game lost because Capcom set the save as uncopyable to prevent cheating, thanks again Capcom

@ohnooh said:

I had a similar one. 120 stars in Mario 64, brought the game over to a friend's house and he wanted to start a new game. I told him very explicitly, "DO NOT DELETE THE 120 STAR SAVE, if you have to, then delete one of the other three". Instead of doing it for him though, I went to the bathroom and when I came back not two minutes later, sure enough the one deleted save was the 120 star file. We were only five or six at the time, and it's not like there's much to do in that game after you get all the stars, but I vividly remember being really upset about that.

The other two complete saves I've lost were a 100% save in Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 on the GameCube (my brother deleted this one), and my Persona 3 FES save on my PS3, which was lost when my launch PS3 bit the dust in January of last year. Outside of those, I lost my Luigi's Mansion save twice to corruption, my Full Metal Alchemist 2 save was deleted by my brother (I was only a few hours in, but I never went back to it), my Test Drive Unlimited 2 360 save, and most recently I lost three NG+ Dark Souls 2 characters because I formatted my drives without realizing that my Dark Souls 2 saves weren't in the Steam Cloud, and were in fact in an AppData sub-directory that I didn't bother to backup. I had just sort of assumed it was a Steamworks game because the multiplayer originally used VAC, but it's not, so there went about 90 hours of saves. With Scholar of the First Sin coming out in a couple of months and it not letting you import your old saves though, it's hard to be too upset by that loss.

Edit: I forgot about a particularly obnoxious one. I was about 18 hours into Rogue Legacy, trying to get every blueprint, and my save corrupted with only one left to get. Haven't played it since.

I got near the end of Splinter Cell Conviction and my flash drive got corrupted so I had to play it over. I ended up just replaying the game on Hard to earn achievements to justify my time playing it again.

I have the ultimate one! I deleted my entire 360 HDD by accident when trying to get rid of one save.....4 years of Xbox game saves I wanted to keep gone, 50 hours of the last remnant I was working on and 120hrs of Samurai Warriors 2. Countless other stuff...however the worst was...my 140 hours of Two human!

I post this every time one of these comes up. Tony Hawks 8. Upon completing the final objective on sick, 100%ing the game, the game crashed during the post objective save which corrupted the file. It still pisses me off.

Oh and I lost 6 or 7 years of all my Xbox360 stuff when the hard drive malfunctioned on that.

It's less "death of an empire" and more "moving the capital" but I bought the PS3 version of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 to play with my friend after sinking hours upon hours into my 360 copy. All my precious precious costumez.

There are a few methods you can try to use to recover your hard drive unless you got the infamous click of death. Have you tried plugging it into a different computer/or hard drive dock to see if it actually is the device that failed?

My pity me story is losing hundreds of hours of data on a secret of mana cartridge cause the battery that stores the memory died.

My yes I'm an asshole story is I overwrote all of my friends secret of mana data on that same cartridge once to spite him. (Yes Karma is a bitch!)

The first one that comes to mind is when my little brother accidentally erased my Neverwinter Nights save data that was 25-35 hours in. I also lost my Pokemon Blue save from messing around with the Missingno glitch.

When my PS3 fat bit the dust it lost a Killzone 2 save file that was half way through the hardest difficulty, and a level 43 Siren in Borderlands, among other things. It's why I pay for PS+; the cloud saves keep me safe from such loses in the future.

80 hours of Twilight Princess progress. Dang Nintendo and their 3 save slots, I accidentally save to the wrong one when letting a friend mess around with their own save on my game.

7th Saga for the SNES. Multiple times. I'd get 40+ hours in and the save data would vanish or one of my siblings would delete it (a common occurrence with a lot of games those days). To this day, I've never beaten that game.

Luckily I've suffered very few save loses, the worse was probably Okami on the PS2. I was a good 30+ hours into the game (at the time this was the longest I'd ever spent on a console game) and my younger sister overwrite my save with her 2 hour one

The battery failed on my StarTropics cart, still never beat it.

@i_stay_puft: Final Fantasy 7 when it first came out. That was the game that made me have almost 20 saves now if I can. Was almost towards the end and that is when I first experienced a corrupted save file. Man that was a heart breaker. If I lose a save now the furthest I am going back is 30mins or a hour and have the most current save in the cloud.

I got through all the 30 hours of linear bullshit in final fantasy XIII and finally got to Gran Pulse, and then my data got irreversibly corrupted.

Accidentally knocking the disc tray button on an Xbox while trying to take a picture of an obscenely high score on a Timesplitters FP challenge map I'd gotten due to a bug. :(

Transferring my data from my 3DS to N3DS resulted in me losing all my save data since the launch of the 3DS, all my game downloads, all my digital download save data, all my StreetPass tags, puzzle pieces, Miis and Find Mii hats.

It fucking sucked.

I had to re download 60 odd games since I went mostly digital on the 3DS. I did the transfer as per instructions from Nintendo but it failed at one step before the PC transfer part. After I moved my content from SD > PC > MicroSD nothing loaded on my N3DS, despite all game save data being there.

I had never had a problem system transferring before. I've done it countless times. Until this one time, where I got fucked over bad.

I had an awesome city in SimCity on the SNES.

Played that game for months and months.

One day it was just gone.

Also one time my friends sister was by my house and she played Chrono Trigger, i told her just to use save file 3, which was empty. She used all three for some ungodly reason, deleting my new game + files.

I lost a huge amount of progress in Rogue Legacy last week, about a 100 levels because of a save file corruption. I was really pissed and plowed through to get where I was.

I upgraded my old 40 gb PS3 hard drive to a 500 GB. I backed up everything to the cloud, or at least so I thought. Some time later, I found out that my LBP2, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls save files were not backed up to the cloud. I had some pretty baller soul levels too, close to 200 in both games...

Editing all the nonsense out from PES 2015 only for the first data pack to install and undo a heap of it.

Entire memory card fried during FFVII right after so so came down from the ceiling on top of such and such. So I lost all the progress for that as well as everything else that was on that card.

This may not quite be what you're asking for, but in the 90's I bought a two-game-box with Domark's MiG-29 Super Fulcrum and AV-8B Harrier Assault. Turned out to be a virus on the CD which infected my PC forcing me to reformat, losing the progress I had made in these and several other games, as well as losing the two games in full as I threw the CD away (in retrospect I could probably have returned it, but I don't recall exactly how long it had been since the purchase until I noticed the infection, and I was a kid at the time and didn't know about consumer rights).