I feel much better that I’m not the only one who has that folder in my archives. I’m not a packrat by nature, however for some weird reason, I feel compelled to keep all my save games for the last thirty years.
I just checked, and my oldest save game is from King’s Quest IV with a modified date of October 19th, 1989. Now I’m curious if that old save still works, so I’m off to GoG and I’m hitting the nostalgia train hard tonight.
When I get a new computer, there will be some stuff on the old one I want to keep, and some stuff I don’t care about. But hard drives grow fast, and it’s all mixed together, and so it’s a lot easier just to copy over everything into a folder called “<old computer’s name> stuff” than it is to sort through and figure out what to save. And of course, somewhere in that folder, there will be another folder called “<older computer’s name> stuff”, and so on back to my first computer.
That they do. After posting in this thread, I’ve been taking a nostalgia trip through my old archives. The oldest file there is a full backup of my very first hard drive as an .arc file. (Anyone else remember .arc files?) It’s about 18 MB in size.
So I checked last night, and amazingly enough, that save file for KQ4 still worked. I played for a couple hours, and I have to say that that game did not age as well as my memories of it did. It was still fun though, so I want to say a quick thank you to Ranchoth for posting this thread and putting this idea in my head.
That’s great that it still worked! I know I have tons of Sierra saves in my PC “attic”. Maybe I will do the same.
That’s cool. Although I’ll confess I’m a smidge disappointed it didn’t turn out as ironically funny as I’d visualized it, like “Yup, the save game worked. Unfortunately, it was from a save point just before I unavoidably died because of something I’d done just before saving.”
There’s something about perpetually memorialized inevitable failure that tickles my insane sense of ironic humor.
I still have a save file for Zelda II, in the old, gold cartridge. Dunno if it still works, as I no longer own the Nintendo system for it.
Oh, yeah, the old Sierra games were great about that (for values of “great” that include maddeningly rage-inducing). In Space Quest, there’s something that might or might not happen about 20% of the way through the game, that looks completely irrelevant at the time… So it happens, you see that it’s no big deal, you continue through the game and eventually overwrite all of your saved game slots, and then you get almost to the end and die horribly.
Ironically enough, the “newest” save game of the dozen or so I had fit that description fairly well. Among other things, I had wasted one of the two arrows for cupid’s bow, so the game was already unwinnable by the time I walked away from it. Luckily the oldest one was only from about ten minutes into the game, so I hadn’t managed to bugger it up quite yet. My first PC game ever was the original King’s Quest from '84, so using multiple save slots had already been beaten into me over the years.
The last time I checked - which was about 8 years ago - I fired up a vintage C64 and discovered that my 5-1/4" floppy disk of Ultima III still had its save file with my mega-powerful party of four last run in, I dunno, 1986?
That was trippy, I couldn’t remember the commands to move around the map and stuff, had to Google it.
I’ve moved houses since then so I’d have to figure out where my C64 got stowed - I never unpacked it - but maybe it’d still work even today.
I almost certainly have all the old save files for Carmen Sandiego and a golf game that were on the original computer I and my parents first had when I was young, a 286. I played the golf game quite a lot on my laptop I got for college, but it eventually went to shit and I couldn’t get it to power on at all, and the golf game only existed on floppies other than on that laptop. Now that there are no floppy drives in computers, I don’t have an easy way of getting access to it. I may have pitched the disks because of that, seeing as I have no clue where they are, but I can’t be sure.
Other than that, probably saves on my Super Nintendo games, particularly FF3 (6) and Secret of Mana (my mother gave away my NES and games when I was in high school, but their batteries are likely dead anyway). I don’t keep all my saves of computer games when changing computers unless I’m actively playing the game; if I decide to come back to it at a future point, I’d prefer to start fresh. The same is true for console games in general, but since I’ve kept all my consoles other than the NES (I don’t have tons of games for them like I did the NES) the saves still presumably exist on the carts if I wanted to use them for some reason.
I have saved games, maybe not so old, but from 15 years ago. Mainly it’s starcraft missions, some replays from the game, etc.
Most likely a Gameboy cartridge, very few allowed saves, though thinking about it, those ones might have included a battery which I would assume is long dead, along with my final fantasy adventures characters 
RIP you 4, you are legends in my heart.
Like Superdude upthread, I also have a Zelda II gold cartridge around here somewhere. I think my brother in law has a NES deck that still occasionally works. I should see if I can find that cartridge. I never did beat that game, I would get to the final castle and get lost every time.