Video Game Passwords

 By now, most video games are too long to complete in one sitting (unless, of course, you're a speedrunner, but getting to that point requires countless hours of practice and many playthroughs), so it's a given that they need to come with methods of saving your progress. Save features are practically universal, and often, games have an auto-save system. But many older games did not feature such a system, and instead had to find workarounds, such as passwords.

The concept is simple. At certain points(often when you run out of lives), the game would give you a password, ostensibly the proof you had reached this point, which you would then have to write down for later use. By entering the password, you would then be able to get back up to where you left off. It wasn't the most elegant solution, but it served its purpose, ensuring that players who ran out of lives or had to quit could pick up where they left off.

As a bonus, it was possible to hear about certain passwords from a friend or a gaming magazine, and use them to bypass parts of the game you were having trouble on. The password system can also be used to input cheat codes, such as the famous "JUSTIN BAILEY" code in Metroid, which starts Samus near the end of the game, having defeated Kraid and Ridley, fully equipped and as a bonus, in her unarmored sprite.

Of course, this system was not without its downsides. Making a single mistake when writing down a password, which could often be at least 10 or 20 characters long, would render it useless. It's all too easy when some characters look alike, or if your handwriting is not especially illegible. In these cases, part of the problem lies with the user, but other times, the game may share some of the blame, especially if some characters look similar, or there are uppercase and lowercase characters.

Another problem that prevents passwords from being a true substitute for save games is their length.  For example, Aladdin has four slots with a total of six character pictures for the password, making for a total of "only" 1,296 passwords that works well for a platformer in which the password records your progress. However, the original Metroid has the numbers 0-9, the entire alphabet (both capital and lowercase), and question marks and hyphens, so that's 64 characters for 24 slots. It can be tedious to input a lengthy password every time you want to resume your game, even if you're able to get it right. This tends to be true for games with more complicated data, such as Metroid, as mentioned above.

Lastly, the advent of save states in emulators and other consoles, such as the NES and SNES Classic Mini, render passwords entirely obsolete. After all, why enter a password and resume at a specific continue point when you can make or load a save state at any time?

In the end, passwords were rather clunky and impractical as a method for picking up where you left off, but they were necessitated by technology's limitations, and were a good way for developers to work with what they had. The ability to save one's progress, however primitive the method, was necessary for games to become longer and more ambitious, just like how many obsolete bits of technology paved the way for things we use every day.