Back in the days of 8-bit video games, the bane of many a gamer’s existence was a complicated password. While classic games like Mega Man 2 and Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse used a relatively simple graphic-based password system, you had plenty of games that used long strings of text. Metroid and Kid Icarus are perfect examples of this; both had very long passwords that were made up of seemingly random characters (the infamous Justin Bailey code nonwithstanding). Writing those down every time you played could fill a damn book; in fact, that’s exactly what we had to do back then! Separate notebooks were often devoted to each game. What a pain in the ass!

The absolute worst, however, were text string passwords that included non-alphanumeric characters, like the ones used in the Game Boy RPG The Sword of Hope:

What the hell is that? You’d better pray you didn’t fuck up when you copied down those damn things. One mistake, and you were back to square one. This was especially true in RPGs, as you’d likely spent many hours progressing and making your character quite powerful.

Eventually, battery-backed save systems flourished. Passwords became a thing of the past, and all was well with the world. Right?

Wrong.

For those of us that enjoy collecting and playing vintage games, battery save has become the ironic white whale to our Ahab. You see, many of our favorite games came out nearly twenty years ago. The batteries inside have long since crapped out, making saving your game impossible. (They can be replaced, but it takes a lot of work; the batteries are often soldered in there, and you run the risk of destroying your game cart. Not worth it!) In these cases, password-based games have become much more tolerable.

Passwords used to piss me off to no end. Now, they’ve become a saving grace. Who knew?