Creator of Kirby and more recently, director of Kid Icarus: Uprising, Masahiro Sakurai, was victim to something every gamer who invests a lot of time always fears, complete hard-drive failure.
In Sakurai’s position though, he lost more data than the average gamer tends to keep hold of. He told his story this week in the Japanese magazine Famitsu.
 “The hard disk on my PlayStation 3 has completely died,” he said. “It’s a full crash. The end. Goodbye, Planet Earth.”
Sakurai was actually one of the few lucky people to still be holding on to an original 2006 model Playstation 3, which of course featured backwards compatability with both Playstation 1 and Playstation 2. The knock on effect of which was the loss of 18 years worth of game saves dating all the way back to the launch year of the original Playstation.
“Which means,” he wrote, “that all of a sudden, I have lost all of my data for the PS1, PS2 and PS3. I’d like to say ‘All you can do is laugh,’ but I can’t! The first PS came out in the end of 1994, so that means I’ve literally built up 18 years’ worth of save data on the thing. This isn’t just a matter of losing data I spent a few hundred hours on, or losing my character in some MMORPG. This, that, and the other thing; every single bit of it is gone.”
Sakurai said that he also wasn’t expecting the hard-drive to fail anytime soon since he had already replaced it before. He also tried to salvage whatever he could by taking the drive to a data recovery firm, however the drive was so damaged that nothing at all was recoverable.
“I had a lot of save data from games I spent dozens of hours on,” he wrote. “Now I can’t go back to those epic RPGs and take in all the famous scenes where I saved just before. The fighting games where I unlocked all the characters; the experience points I earned for being all those liquid metal slimes… I could take off of work for half a year and still not have enough time to get it all back.”
I’m sure you would all hate to think of what would happen if this happened to your system. After all many of us have invested hundreds of hours into multiple different games of all genres many times in an attempt to collect everything available in a game. Well imagine losing all those files at once. If you don’t want to risk your most precious files then Sakurai has a final message for you all.
“Going through this, I wanted to take this column to nag at all of you a little, If you don’t want to come face-to-face with this depressing turn of events, then it’s best if you back up your game save data as much as you can. Right now! Immediately!”
