On Borrowed Games and Save File Ethics

There was an age when you could rent a stranger’s time; here’s how I handled those borrowed moments

Retro game purists, those dedicated types who insist on playing their favorite classic titles only on true hardware, will often find themselves in possession of something unique when they purchase a game: an old cartridge. This may come with old save files, the last record of its owner’s playtime some decades past. It’s a moment in time frozen in the battery back-up, a few hours of someone’s misspent childhood. Buy the cartridge, buy the saves locked within. It’s now yours to use or delete as you see fit.

Source: Hackaday.

What is to be done with these possessed cartridges? What do you do with the borrowed saves?

The high era of the movie and game rental market overlapped with the era of battery backup. This created an interesting situation for the renter.

When one checked out a title, he might have also found himself in possession of a fragment of someone else’s free time in the form of an anonymous save file. This might represent minutes, hours, or days of that stranger’s effort, played…