Saved game

A saved game (also sometimes called a game save, savegame, savefile, or simply save) is a piece of digitally stored information about the progress of a player in a video game.

From the earliest games in the 1970s onward, game platform hardware and memory improved, which led to bigger and more complex computer games, which, in turn, tended to take more and more time to play them from start to finish. This naturally led to the need to store in some way the progress, and how to handle the case where the player character died. More modern games with a heavier emphasis on story telling are designed to allow the player many choices that impact the story in a profound way later on, and some game designers do not want to allow more than one save game so that the experience will always be 'fresh'.