8 Video Game Revolutions We Don't Need Anymore
3. Memory Cards
It may not have been the first but The Legend of Zelda in 1985 saving a player’s progress was revolutionary. Forget all the new mechanics of the latest games, people overlook that the grandiosity of a game that was so big you were able to turn it off and pick it back up later was such a major draw for the original Zelda.
During the 80s and 90s, games with in-built save systems in their cartridge became more and more popular. It simply meant that games could become longer and more complex. For players this meant more bang for your buck. For consumers it was a big selling point.
But when cartridges were out and discs were in, hardware developers had to rethink the whole thing. Thus came the memory card: a small plastic pseudo-sibling to today’s USB sticks that were designed to hold the saves of a particular console. Whilst you could already take your save to a friend’s if you had your cartridge, the memory card made for more options. You could copy that save, share it with others and the device itself became a sort of fashion statement as PlayStation released coloured variants.
The memory card survived until the Xbox 360 era when USB became the standard format for data storage and then, forgoing the need for additional accessories at all, the Cloud.