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 such a banal detail, and at the same time so memorable, as the mythical saved game icons in the Memory Card of PSX and PS2 .

Static designs in 2D, 3D, or 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 Cards was to offer a place where we can 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 euros – with the claim of being able to take your saved games to a friend’s house.

Despite how much it hurt us to fill the space of a Memory Card and have to buy another, or deal with the idea of ​​deleting saved games, it is true that carrying memory cards from here to there to share progress – or even sell them – it became commonplace.

But that is not what should occupy our heads in this review -a story for another day, which is often told-, but how a detail without apparent importance went from curiosity to a hallmark , and from there to fall deeply into oblivion .

Although some try to recover and preserve them in the form of Twitter threads and YouTube videos, it is still curious that we have a virtual museum dedicated to the soda machines of video game history and that there is no similar project for icons on the internet saved games .

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The lost art of memory cards: The Lost Art of Memory Cards: The Mythical Save Game Icons on PlayStation and PS2

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-, it is those of 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 a different animation would run .

With the leap to PS3 , with a much cleaner and more modern interface, those mythical save icons passed away and, although they could still be seen from the virtual memory cards of that system, Sony stopped using the idea in favor of icons. traditional and self-explanatory, usually with the logo or the cover of the game.

And so, overnight, the Memory Card icons evaporated 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. The Lost Art of Memory Cards: The Mythical Save Game Icons on PlayStation and PS2