Back in the day, saving your progress in a game wasn’t always as easy as it is now. Some games couldn’t save at all, making use of a password system to resume from a particular point instead. Other games could save, though, using a battery-dependent system that worked reliably, until the battery died.
That’s a big part of the reason why vintage Super Nintendo games don’t work now the way they used to, but Twitter user and super dedicated gamer Wanikun wasn’t going to let that stop him from enjoying his favorite game in perpetuity.
Umihara Kawase came out for the Super Famicom (the Japanese version of the SNES) in December 1994, and was a popular title that unfortunately, as RocketNews24 put it, “featured SRAM (Static RAM) coupled with lithium-ion batteries. As long as your battery stayed charged, the SRAM would hold your save data. Unfortunately, as soon as your battery ran out, your data would disappear as well.”
Wanikun’s battery ran out long ago, and while it’s possible to replace the battery in these types of cartridges, that would mean losing his previous save data. That wasn’t an option, so Wanikun has kept his console turned on for the past 20 years. He estimates that his console has been running for about 180,000 hours, or longer than some of you reading this have been alive.
Well, that’s not entirely true: He turned it off one time in that period because he had to move into a new house. So really, this record (this must be a record, right?) means nothing.
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HT: RocketNews24
Featured image courtesy of @UMIHARAKawase
