A saved game (also sometimes called a game save or savegame) is a piece of digitally stored information about the progress of a player in a video game. This saved game can be reloaded later, so the player can continue where he or she had stopped. Players usually save games to prevent the loss of progress in the game (as might happen after a game over unless the game features permadeath, in which the save file is permanently deleted), especially when interrupting or ending a game session.

The use of saved games is very common in modern video games, particularly in computer and console role-playing games, which are usually much too long to finish in a single sitting.

History and overview

In early arcade and video games, there was no need for saving games, since these games usually had no actual plot to develop and were generally very short in length.

The relative complexity and inconvenience of storing game state information on early home computers (and the fact that early video game consoles had no non-volatile data storage) meant that initially game saves were represented as "passwords" (often strings of characters that encoded the game state) that players could write down and later input into the game when resuming.

Home computers in the early 1980s had the advantage of using external media for saving, with compact cassettes and floppy disks, before finally using internal hard drives.

On later cartridge-based console games, such as The Legend of Zelda, saved games were stored in battery-backed RAM on the game cartridge itself. In recent consoles, which use compact disc and DVD technology for storing games, saved games are stored in other ways, such as by use of memory cards or internal hard drives on the game machine itself.

Some games do not save the player's progress towards completing the game, but rather high scores, custom settings, and other features. This is common in older games.

Depending on the game, a player will have the ability to save the game either at any arbitrary point (usually when the game has been paused), after a specific task has been completed (such as at the end of a level), or at designated areas within the game known as save points. Save points are employed either when a game state is too complex to save at any given point or as a way to manage the difficulty level (i.e. a save point located before a difficult area, or one single save point before a set of difficult bosses rather than in between).

Integration of saved game systems into gameplay

Game designers often attempt to integrate the save points into the style of the game. Resident Evil represents save points with old fashioned typewriters (which require an ink ribbon item for each save), the Grand Theft Auto series uses representations appropriate to the era of the setting: audio cassettes for the mid-1980s (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City), 3½-inch disks for the early-1990s (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) and compact discs for the late-1990s (Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories). Many RPGs integrate the function of saving into the form of a journal that the characters can write into, or by auto-saving whenever the character stays at an inn or other resting place.