Physical Is Forever: Booting Up an Old Save File

Physical Is Forever: Booting Up an Old Save File

Not bad for a device rated for a five-year life.

We’ve seen lots of talk late about the games industry’s move to an all-digital future and our adamant belief that physical media still matters. Physical media is great! Besides all the rights and logistics considerations—no one can delist a cartridge, and no one can stop you from reselling a DVD—it also has the benefit of lasting for years. Treat it well and even potentially fragile media can survive for decades.

Sometimes, it even outlasts its creators’ intentions! As is the case with this cartridge of The Legend of Zelda.

Now, it’s difficult to say precisely how long ago this cartridge rolled off the assembly line, but we can pin it down to probably 1988. The back of the cartridge has three screws instead of five, meaning this wasn’t produced in the initial wave of carts in 1987. However, it uses a round Nintendo Seal of Quality, which means it would have been manufactured before April of 1989, when Nintendo completed its transition from the circular to ovular seal on its packaging. So, we can safely say that this cartridge is at least 37 years old, maybe 38.

This matters, because The Legend of Zelda introduced a new feature to American console games: a built-in lithium battery. A handful of NES games included batteries as a special extra feature that allowed the cartridge to retain data after switching off the console. Not every game included that feature, but if you’ve ever struggled with lengthy strings of ambiguous characters while punching in a “mantra” in Faxanadu, you can appreciate what a boon the integrated save feature was for complex games like Zelda and Dragon Warrior IV! Back in the 1980s, flash memory was a very new and very expensive technology, so rather than using solid-state rewritable memory for their NES games, Nintendo instead simply tricked those cartridges into thinking the console never shut off.

Zelda and games like it included a special RAM chip specifically to hold player information like cash and quest progress. RAM is a fast and flexible form of memory, but it only retains information as long as it’s powered up. Turn off the power and this “volatile” memory blanks out. So, in order to prevent player data from zeroing out once they powered down the console, the Zelda cartridge includes a 3V battery that maintains a constant and extremely small flow of electrical current to the save RAM chip.

It is, in effect, an “always on” utility—a battery that constantly provides power to the built-in save RAM. Nintendo estimated that those batteries would save data for five to seven years, but many of them are still running strong. Like the one in this cartridge, which, again, Nintendo manufactured circa 1988. Turn on the console and it launches instantly! And when you hit the Start button, you’re taken to a save select screen, preserved dutifully by an ancient battery that was supposed to have given up the ghost about 30 years ago.

The files names and save data are not the most impressive, but that’s what happens when you snag games sight unseen off of eBay. In a best-case scenario, these old cartridge saves tell a story: some kid who lovingly stored and played their copy of Zelda for years until they finally beat Ganon after maxing out the 256-death counter on the save slot. A Sega fanatic who gave up on Phantasy Star II, heartbroken, after [redacted]’s tragic death. Someone who named their Chrono Trigger team after all their best friends and maxed out everyone’s stats through constant New Game+ sessions. Or, in this case, someone who named their characters while suffering a cataclysmic sneezing fit and never bothered to complete a single dungeon. Oh well.

Of course, it’s always possible that some kindly person could have swapped out the battery at some point during this cartridge’s lifetime, which would undermine the entire point of this entire exercise. But using the tri-wing screwdriver from the handy Bootleg Buddy kit sold by our friends at Pink Gorilla Games, it’s trivially simple to pop open this cart (despite Nintendo’s proprietary screws) and check the battery for ourselves. And....

...it appears to be a perfect match for the batteries Nintendo used in the three-screw round-seal variants of Zelda. That’s the kind of lasting power you just don’t get through digital purchases. Sure, maybe, but it’ll be a while. The oldest Steam accounts aren’t much more than 20 years old.

Nah. There’s something special about physical media that Zelda perfectly embodies. The deluxe golden shell that looks so good on a shelf. The arcane save file tech workaround. The fact that you can plug in a game from so long ago and maybe stumble across the fruits of someone else’s hard-earned labor. And the fact that you can even acquire a copy that another person owned, period.