Sony's Free Demo Disc Erased Every Save You Had

In November 2004, Sony mailed a free holiday demo disc to PlayStation Underground subscribers. Play the Viewtiful Joe 2 demo for 20 minutes with a memory card inserted, and your PS2 would tell you the card was unformatted. Years of saves, gone with no warning. It wasn't a virus, it wasn't a bootleg, and the disc never ran a format command. This is the story of a file that was never supposed to leave a Sony development kit, the timer that woke it up, and the one page of your memory card that made the damage permanent. We cover how the PS2's two processors handled saving, why a debug driver treated your memory card like a crash-log device, what the superblock is and why losing it made every save invisible, whether the saves could actually be recovered, Sony's warning emails and rare recall, and why every console since has been designed so this can never happen again. Chapters 0:00 The holiday disc 1:46 What actually happened 2:12 PlayStation Underground and the demo disc era 3:34 The 20-minute timer 3:59 How the PS2 saved your games 5:16 The driver that should never have shipped 6:49 When the timer ran out 7:30 The crash dump 9:08 Why the card looked unformatted 11:09 Were the saves recoverable? 12:26 The forum thread 14:04 Sony's warning 14:45 The recall 15:46 How it passed testing 16:47 Cards out 18:51 Why modern consoles can't do this 20:31 Safer saves, less ownership 21:08 Three assumptions