It’s the boring Christmas presents you tend to get the most use out of. The chocolates I got several Christmases ago have long since been eaten, the books read and abandoned on the shelf, the games played and deleted to make space. But the socks, the gloves, the scarves? They still keep me warm. That’s why today I want to celebrate the humble memory card, a forgotten MVP from Christmases past.
There isn’t much that puts me in the ‘kids these days’ headspace like video games at Christmas. It’s my own personal Coachella line-up test, seeing how many of the must-have virtual currencies I understand. I know kids still love Christmas, but I just don’t see how getting a card with a string of numbers that translates to Robux is as exciting as a fresh copy of Crash Bandicoot. The magic of gaming is being lost in the monetisation, with a whole generation growing up thinking the live-service hamster wheel is gaming as it should be. Add in the download times and forced internet connectivity, and the gaming Christmas I grew up with doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
Video Games Are An Essential Part Of Christmas Memories
I don’t remember ever getting a memory card for Christmas. I must have – like my Simpsons bobble hat, Newcastle United pencil case, and Minnie the Minx water bottle, it can’t have spawned from nowhere. They were all gifts for Christmas (or possibly a birthday, which for December babies like me, are the same thing) that I opened, smiled at politely, then tossed aside while on the hunt for ‘real’ presents.
And yet, I remember them all the same. I wore that hat, used that pencil case, drank from that water bottle for years. I don’t tie those memories to Christmas, because unlike a box of Sports Mixtures that would be empty by the time I went back to school in January, they outlasted the holiday season. Plenty of Christmas video games lasted longer too, but they are still indelibly tied to that first boot-up on Christmas morning.
I remember squeezing in a few hours of gaming on the living room TV before taking a clunky portable TV, plus the console and all the wires, up to my grandparents’ while sitting in the corner after Christmas dinner. Call of Duty 5: World at War is unshakably a Christmas video game to me because it was played in this exact way, with my virtual innards exploding over the Pacific Front while my family slept through a rerun of The Vicar of Dibley’s Christmas Special. But it’s the memory card that made so many magic Christmas moments happen.
Memory Cards Are Basically Gravy
By the time I was playing World at War in 2008, I had moved onto the exciting world of the built-in hard drive of the Xbox 360. But for many years prior, the memory card played as crucial a role in Christmas Day as the gravy – nobody’s favourite, but everything is ruined if it’s not there.
The first reason for this is obvious – you need to be able to save your games. Even in the ’90s when games were shorter than the bloated open worlds of today, you could rarely beat them in one sitting. And in many games, saving a game was the only way to log your progress. There were no other checkpoints. You went back to the last save, and it wasn’t always convenient.
This is another way the memory card has cemented itself into my Christmas memories without me noticing. In Crash Bandicoot, you could only save after certain levels. Beating one level would all be for nothing if you couldn’t then beat the next three. I remember when we realised this, my mother stayed up into the night playing the game ensuring we reached the next save point so I could play each level through without this crushing weight bearing down upon me.
Digital Has Replaced Physical
This level was The High Road, so my mother was no slouch. Unfortunately, it did not imbue her with a lifelong passion for gaming. To this day, the only video games she could name would be the ones from that very Christmas – Crash, Spryo, Pokemon, and Tomb Raider. But there was always a high level of care in her selections for me. I always got Bonestorm, never Lee Carvalho’s Putting Challenge.
There will have been kids who opened up a PS1 at Christmas then realised they couldn’t actually play it in any material way because Santa forgot to get a memory card. I was never that kid. I don’t think I’d call myself spoiled (consoles always came a year late, and games often bore the tell-tale signs of pre-ownership from hastily peeled off discount stickers and a lack of plastic wrap), but I was never left shorthanded due to technical ignorance.
Memory cards, controllers, spare scart leads, online subscriptions, batteries for handhelds, those weird little plastic jackets with a heavy plastic block at the end for a Wii Remote… these were always on hand. I don’t think I ever had to grimace through actually getting a scart lead wrapped up and placed underneath the tree, but my gratitude for the unsung work a memory card does at Christmas is really a reflection of the gratitude I have that my parents understood gaming paraphernalia, even if they never really ‘got’ gaming itself.
A lot of things will have changed for gamer kids this Christmas. Scart leads are now extinct, memory cards are instead highly expensive USB-C hard drives, and physical games barely exist (and many consoles won’t run those that do). But deep down, things are still the same. You better hope the Santa Claus who arrives at your chimney understands gaming, otherwise you might need to explain why V-Bucks and Robux are completely different things.
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
80/100
- Released
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June 30, 2017
- Developer(s)
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Vicarious Visions