For those of us who can remember a time when memory cards weren't a thing, old 16-bit consoles like the Mega-Drive and the Super Nintendo came with built-in memory in the cartridge.

The snag with them was that if you left them out of the cartridge for a certain length of time - a month, if our memory serves - the saved game would be gone when you plugged it back in.

We had a saved game for A Link To The Past that went missing on us when we moved house, hence how we're pretty sure it's a month. One gamer, however, wasn't prepared to let that happen.

A Japanese gamer, who goes by the name Wanikun, left his Super Nintendo plugged in for 20 years. Yes, two zero. Two decades.

The save was on a Japanese-only game called Umihara Kawase, which is some sort of single-player platformer about a girl who gets lost in a world of sea creatures. Japan, everybody.

Anyway, Wanikun managed to keep the game saved for a grand total of 180,000 hours by keeping the SNES plugged in and live for the entire time. He only plugged out the game ONCE when he moved house and had the thing plugged out for no more than a day or two.

We're not sure if he cleared the game or not, but Wanikun has said that the game data would now probably be lost if he plugged out as the memory would have degraded after so many years.

If only we had that level of dedication, we could have kept that save game for A Link To The Past.

 

Via Twitter