The same way my barely legible high school handwriting has devolved over 25 years of PC word processing, so too have my instincts to pause and save a game. I blame the advent of autosave, checkpoints, Xbox Quick Resume, and games with such high stakes that I can’t help but save every two seconds in case things blow in my face. (Thank you, Baldur’s Gate 3). But I’m not perfect. I get lazy. And this week, I learned an important lesson eight hours into the newly ported Pokémon FireRed for Nintendo Switch: you still gotta smash that save button.
It had been years since I picked up one of the 2D Pokémon games — having missed the boat on the Game Boy Advance, 2000’s Pokémon Gold and Silver may have been the last mainline Poké-title I played. So I was pumped to pony up $19.99 for the nostalgic return to the Kanto region and a run collecting those original 151 pocket monsters, and I immediately snapped back to the glory days. Over a few successive evenings, I was catching bugs, picked up an early Pikachu, knocked out Brock on my first turn, gambled on buying the Magikarp from the Man at the Pokémon Center, and scaled Mt. Moon without a worry in the world.
The problem: I never saved my game! And never thought to.
Everything went wrong on a night where I didn’t play FireRed… and where my kid grabbed the Switch 2 for a swift 30 minutes of Pokémon Z-A instead, closing my game to do so. As we all know (as I should have known…) opening a new game on Switch will close your current game, so it won’t stay running in the background. Your progress is only safe if the game autosaved or you saved manually before switching. Whoops.
We should regard autosave, now so seamless most players barely notice it, as a genuine “next-gen” innovation. While PC text adventure Zork had one of the earliest save functions in a game, 1986’s The Legend of Zelda is often credited as a milestone moment for not feeling completely screwed by an in-game fail thanks to battery-backed saving on NES cartridges. Of course, you still had to remember to save. (And after one flub, you’d never forget.) Through the 1990s, memory cards on consoles like PlayStation made saving more common yet still fragile; forgetting to save (or losing a card) could wipe hours of progress, and games like Resident Evil even turned saving into a limited resource.
Modern autosave, the one that subdued my instinct to save my FireRed run like a dope, took hold in the early 2000s. The first Halo had its automatic checkpoints while Call of Duty refined the system to smooth difficulty and eliminate repetition. As the play grew longer — and more open-world — devs cracked the code on constant background saves and, eventually, the holy grail of suspend/resume.
Funny enough, the Pokémon series is a great reflection of that technological evolution. For decades, saving in a Pokémon game was manual: players were trained to hit “Save” before closing their Game Boy or DS, even as clamshell hardware made it easy to pause play without doing so. Starting with Pokémon Sword and Shield on Switch, the series introduced autosave (initially optional), marking a major philosophical change for one of gaming’s most tradition-bound franchises.
I can admit failure: Years of playing Breath of the Wild and modern Mario games completely dulled my instinct to save. I still know better in some cases — I won’t even gamble bailing mid-run in something like Hades 2 even knowing it autosaves after chambers — but whether it’s been too long since I sank time into a retro-style game or I’ve just been spoiled by modern autosaves, it didn’t even occur to me to hit save before redocking. Seven-year-old me would never have fumbled this badly.
I have not picked up FireRed since my save debacle. When I loaded it back up to see I had only Squirtle on my roster, I felt completely drained. Status condition: Burned.
Maybe I’ll go back… or maybe I’ll stick with the hundreds of new games dropping every day that kindly assume I can’t remember to save anymore. Still, my love for retro gaming isn’t dead. When I can pry my daughter away from auto-saving Pokémon Legends: Z-A, we’ve been tag-teaming Switch 2’s Super Bomberman Collection. Those early SNES games skipped saving altogether in favor of old-school passwords. So, even if I blow myself up, it’s not a total loss. For now, that’s comfort.