Existential Save Games
In this podcast post, I talk about a singularly odd thing that happened in GTA, which brought into question the very nature of the universe.

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I was just playing GTA: San Andreas a second ago, and I noticed something wholly unseen in the history of man.

First of all, you have to understand something about the way they do savegames. When you step on the little floating floppy disk, the game will do five things: save your game progress (obviously), fully heal you, fully feed you, drop any wanted level you may have gained, and advance the clock by six hours.

In the past, I have always assumed that it worked like this: I walked into my safehouse, got something to eat, had a bit of a lie down to refresh myself, and then came out six hours later. However, I have a spinning savegame icon that's standing in between two pillars in front of a garage, so it's not really a safehouse.

Anyway, I was running out of health, because my wanted level was at about three stars (not impossible to survive, but impossible to ignore). Cops were pouring out of the landscape, shooting off all of my armor, then most of my health. I got to the savegame icon with only one percent health, and a cop pointing his gun in my face. As I was looking down the cobalt blue barrel, the screen flashed to a "Save Game?" prompt.

I said yes, and the game resumed. It was six hours later, I was still standing in the middle of the parking lot, and still looking death in the barrel, when the cop put his gun down and walked away.

It had such an existential feel to it, like the last scene in Time Bandits, where Sean Connery gets back into the firetruck and waves as they drive off.

I figure this is what happened: The cops were pursuing me when I suddenly blipped out of existence. They ran a five-hour exhaustive manhunt, during which I could not be found. One cop stayed in place, swearing to all the others, "I don't care what you say! He freakin' vanished, man!" Then, just as he was giving up hope, I blipped back into existence in front of him. The vision of me, appearing like magic in front of the cop was a highly religious experience, one that made him rethink his whole moral outlook. He put his gun down, swearing never to raise it to another man in anger, and went home to tell his wife that they were going to buy a farm and live off the land.

Of course, it could be one of those normal gameplay invariants, but I like my version better.
- posted by BrandG @ 11:35 PM