Dancing On Graves Part 1: Passwords

Welcome to an ongoing occasional feature where I talk about stuff in gaming I'm glad is dead and buried. First up: passwords. I hate passwords, I hate everything about them.Now one of the things that makes me hate them so much is that we'd be better off if they never existed. Most annoying features in games were a good idea at the time, and indeed when passwords were introduced it seemed like a good idea. As you may know, the first major games to use passwords (maybe the very first, but the first rule about gaming history is that if you say anything was the very first, you're almost certainly wrong) were Metroid and Kid Icarus.

When those games were released, it seemed like a good concept, the only way to continue console games after turning the system off. The reason I wish password never existed is because ONE YEAR LATER the original Zelda came out and introduced battery backup. That should have cut passwords off permanently, but of course it didn't, they haunted console games until the arrival of memory cards, and even some GameBoy Advance games had the cursed things. Waiting a year to get long console games would have been well worth it to stop the plague of passwords.

The reason I hate passwords should be obvious, the inconvenience of having a pencil and tons of paper, and the possibility of making a mistake when taking down the password. For most games cursed with passwords (the 8 and 16-bit Mega Mans being the main example) I would just complete the game in one sitting, but sometimes developers were cruel enough to make RPGs with passwords. Super Ninja Boy and Mystical Ninja (both SNES games, so there was plenty of time to get used to battery backup) were action-RPGs that used passwords, which essentially made them unplayable. Mystical Ninja had that fixed over 15 years later with a VC port, but I still haven't made any real progress in Super Ninja Boy. There were also games that made you use a password after dying even if you didn't turn the system off, which is just pointless sadism.

So in conclusion: I hate passwords and I'm glad they're dead. Not much more to say, really.