Since I'm kicking off Spoiler Alert! this week with a playthrough of Deja Vu, I wanted to get down a few thoughts about the game itself.
I never actually had a copy of the game when I was growing up, but I did rent it several times over the weekends when I would stay over at a friend's house. We made decent progress through the game, but we never quite got to the end of it. Spoiler alert: Spoiler Alert! will show you that I beat the game in around two hours or so, but that's because I'm still (mostly) familiar with the game now and how its puzzles work. If you're coming in cold and you don't know what to do, the game will probably take a lot longer, and you'll probably see a lot more of the death screens than I show off in the run I did.
But when I was an 11-year-old kid, I loved the game. I loved the descriptions of everything.
I loved losing myself in the adventure. We never finished the game during any of our sleepovers, and we tried everything we could think of to try and continue the game the next weekend. Things like saving the game into Slot 3 instead of Slot 1, but whoever rented it in the interim would invariably either save over our game anyway or somehow manage to wipe all of the saves (or there might have been a dodgy battery in the cartridge, who knows?). We also managed to get the game into an unwinnable state many times, and had to start over, but we'd leave the unwinnable state saved into one of the other slots in hope of confounding whoever would rent it next.
Eventually, though, the summer ended or we got bored, and we never did finish it. I rented it on my own one weekend that fall, and was able to make a lot more progress when I didn't have two other people backseat-detectiving me. I was elated, especially since by the time I finished up the game, it was nearing midnight, and I was pretty tired.
But I didn't want the next person to rent the game to have a free ride to the end of the game! That's almost like cheating! So I decided to break all the rules and do all the things that the warning sticker on the back of the cartridge told me not to do.
I removed the game from the console while the power was on. I pressed the power button on and off a bunch of times rapidly. I removed the game while it was saving (which was hard because it saves just about instantaneously). And... nothing.
Had I thought about it, I probably would have just started a new game in that save slot, but it was getting late and I had kid-with-no-sleep-brain, so I didn't think of that. Plus, that would have been less fun than trying to corrupt the saves on a cartridge that I was about to take back to the rental store.