One of the most annoying things about those super old school consoles when I was growing up was that you could never save your game, so you literally had to commit to sitting in front of the computer for about eight hours if you wanted any chance of actually completing it. And that was without dying too.
I remember one time I had managed to get further than I had ever got before on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on my NES, but we had to go out somewhere and my mum wouldn’t let me leave it on. I never got that far again.
So I can understand why this one Japanese gamer decided to keep his Super NES – or Super Famico as it’s called over there – plugged in for 20 whole years so he could keep his game saved. You would think that he would have been able to complete the game by then, but I guess he was just so stoked that he had managed to finish it that he wanted to show everyone who ever came over to his house his achievement. And who could blame him?
Featured Image VIA
Image VIA
The game in question was a Japanese only platformer called Umihara Kawase, starring a nineteen year old schoolgirl named Kawase Umihara (pictured above). If this guy thought so highly of the game that he kept his SNES plugged in for 180,000 hours it sounds like Nintendo missed a trick by not releasing it worldwide.
The ‘twist’ in the story comes with the fact that you could actually save games on the SNES – it’s just that the cartridge is dependent on its own battery life, which means that the dude needed to keep it plugged in to make sure it didn’t die. There was one close call in the past twenty years when the guy had to move house and had to unplug it, but fortunately he was able to get the cartridge plugged back in before it died. Phew.
Pretty sure this gamer would also have been interested in buying every SNES game ever when they were all once listed in one eBay ad.