For those who weren't around at the time: The PS2 had a huge shortage of memory cards the first year or so. So you could buy games, but had to keep the console powered up 24/7 because you couldn't save your games.

I ended up buying a 3rd party card, but since Sony didn't officially allow them it came with a disc that launched an application that installed a driver in the local memory that allowed the card to function until the next power cycle. So you'd put in the driver disc, turn on the PS2, load the drivers, then swap discs to the game you wanted to play and pray that the game you were playing didn't make use of the same memory addresses as the 3rd-party drivers.

Before memory saves, we would be putting in random 5-letter codes to see how high of a level we could get.

I remember buying a cheap 4 pack of PS1 memory cards, I think the brand was pelican? I was shocked at the deal, until my saves wouldn't load.

Well, that's a reasonable outcome. But I have 4! So I'll just double save! Until both cards were defective and couldn't load.

I know, I'll go nuclear. 4 saves, per game, per memory card. 16 layers of redundancy. It worked. It worked beautifully, until one day when it suddenly didn't.

75% of the way through Final Fantasy Tactics, my save failed. And then it failed again, and again, and again and again and again and again and again, until I got to the last save file, and saw the message I had been dreading.

All. 16. Saves. Corrupted.

I thought I was flexing with my magnitude of available data, but it was all for naught. Turns out it's the quality of the data, not the quantity that matters

Whoa, that's a double nostalgia, all the way. Oh my god, whooo!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWTFG3J1CP8