Using the File System
In the early days, arcade games would never store the progress of players. Every time you put in a quarter, the game would start from zero, unless there was a system that would let you buy more lives within the same run. But in general, you could not return the day after and start playing where you left off the day before.
Even early console games had limited functionality in terms of saving your progress. Some games would have a code system with which you got a secret code from the moment you had beaten a level. Later, you could use this code to start directly from there. But these games still didn’t really save your progress.
This restriction was partly because storage space, like hard drives or flash memory, was very expensive. Nowadays, almost every computer and console comes standard with a few hundred gigabytes, if not terabytes, of storage. Saving data has become very cheap and easy and players have come to expect that some kind of progress...
