A fan has stumbled upon a strange feature of the PlayStation: you're actually able to recover games that have been deleted from the memory card.
Exemplified in this video by mega fan John Glasscock, they load the memory card with a number of games into the console. Switching on the PlayStation, the card shows Beyblade: Let It Rip!, Tail Concerto, Spyro 2 Ripto's Rage!, and they delete that last game from the memory card. Now, before this video was published, I bet a fair few of you out there would wince at this action. Regardless of your opinions on Spyro 2 Ripto's Rage!, deleting the data or the game from the card is permanent, and if you accidentally selected the option, that was bye-bye to all of that gruelling progress earned on the game.
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Or... is it? In a revolutionary turn of events, the user presses R1, R2, L1 and L2 all at once on the controller three times. The save file returns in the same place it used to be. No confetti, no fanfare, no red carpet: the game is back like nothing had happened, and as good as new. If your jaw is on the floor after this astonishing act, never fear. Strangely, this feature wasn't mentioned anywhere in the manual for the PlayStation, so no, you've not blocked out an incredibly important bit of text from your memories.
Moreover, this vital restore feature was not brought forward to the PlayStation 2, for reasons that may be lost to the annals of history. Still, this secret knack to getting your games back only goes so far. If the card falls into the sofa and is eaten forever, suffering the same fate as pen lids, two pence pieces and Blu Tack, then you're not collecting orbs and saving Avalar any time soon. Thankfully, accidentally permanently losing a save file is definitely a difficult task with the modern inventions of upgradeable hard drives and cloud storage.
The revelations occurring in the comments of the video are pretty entertaining, though. "Bro no word of a lie one day back then I deleted my Tomb Raider files by accident and from pure panic I think I did exactly this (pressing buttons like a madman in disbelief) and it came back...it happened only that one time and I could never explain how I got back my files...thanks for solving my 20 year wtf puzzle," said Damone "DeeWunn" Walker.
Featured Image Credit: SonyTopics: PlayStation, Retro Gaming