Other than batteries dying, how have you lost save files?

[BetaWolf47]

Luckily I've never lost an important save from a vengeful sibling, but I have had other issues.

NBA Hangtime for N64. I beat the entire season and went onto developers' teams. My created character had perfect stats besides height and weight. I'd put months into it. Then, I came home from school one day to find that my dog had used my N64 memory pak as a chew toy. ARGH!

Mega Man Battle Network 3: White for GBA. I've messed up on this twice. Once, I let a friend's sibling borrow my game. I was promised that my save file would be fine, but then I heard that it was unintentionally overwritten.
The 2nd time, I was extremely far, possibly twice as far as I had been before. This was years after I had lost the other save, and was over it. Then, my friend asked to see the game. I started it up and started a new file temporarily. I showed him a few moments of the game, then pressed A+B+START+SELECT to reset the GBA. Warning: soft resetting this game automatically saves it!

I've also lost sheets of paper that had passwords written down on them. That's always annoying.

[raptor94k]

I've probably lost a few save games over the years that I don't really care about anymore. I used to have an N64 memory card that had my Hybrid Heaven, Perfect Dark, etc. saves on it that I no longer have. But, whatever...

However, there are 3 instances of games being saved over that stick out in my mind. All 3 crimes against video gamedom were committed by the same kid and in total this kid has saved over approx. 130 hours of my life.

Final Fantasy IX had just come out and my little neighbor friend (he is a good friend of mine, 4 or 5 years younger than me, and we still keep in touch) wanted to come over and play it. "Just come out" is a slight exaggeration as I had already sunk 54 hours into it and was at the beginning/middle of the 4th disc. Gil, my aptly named neighbor, began playing his file and I asked him to come get me when he wanted to save so he didn't save over my game. He must've misunderstood me because in actuality he just saved over my game...

Since Final Fantasy IX was so new, I was not deterred by this stroke of bad luck and decided to start the game over. I was about 25 hours or so into it again when Gil wanted to come back over and play some more. I said it was okay but this time he better come get me when it was time to save so he didn't save over my game again. Apparently, I didn't make myself very clear...he just saved over my game...again...

Fast forward to Final Fantasy X being out for about 1 and 1/2 years. I borrowed the game from Gil and took it home to play it. After I was about 60-70 hours in, I realized I had missed one of the Al Bhed translation manuals that I couldn't go back and get. Luckily, Gil had it and I happened to have one that he missed. We decided to swap Al Bhed info. After we were done, Gil having deft fingers but deficient memory, thought his memory card was in slot 1. It wasn't...so he saved over my game...

Damn kid.

[Gameguy]

Once I pulled out Donkey Kong Land for Gameboy without turning the system off, my save file was gone. I can't remember any other saves disappearing, that's the only time I can think of.

[Voliko]

This has happened to me around 2 times, Once I pooped in Donkey Kong Country 2 to play after a long deprevation of DKC, I kept my 102% complete file in slot one so when I replayed it I would just use either 2 or 3. I was sitting a bit too far from the TV and I yanked the SNES controller which caused the game to freeze. No big deal, until I turned it on to find all my files missing...

Recently i was playing Chrono Trigger, got to Magus Castle and saved the game right before the battle with him. I then played for 5 hours straight and I noticed that everytime I would save, the stats and time didn't update as the ussually did. I brushed it aside, thinking nothing would happen, and then after 5 hours I died and the file select screen said I was still in Magus Castle....

I do remember recently a friend and I were trying to get all the pokemon in Generation 2. I had to replace the battery in his Gold version, and I just taped it in. We were pretty far, and we planned on battling. We had our teams together and were about to battle via Pokemon Stadium 2 and as he was about to put his game in the transfer pak, it slipped from his grasp tumbling to the ground. His file was erased. Our quest was abondened. That was a terrible day.

All of these instances were mainly stupidity.

I do remember my friend telling me back in the day that he had almost every pokemon in Pokemon: Blue Version and all he needed was the bulbasaur line. His older sister decided to start a new file on day and played for maybe an hour and said she just felt like playing. That must of been heartbreaking...

[Arkhan]

I loaned wizardry on NES to a friend who then called me to ask "how come your level 60 ninja and stuff are missing. is it because i turned the game off while they were in the dungeon?"

idiot.



i had a friend accidentally wipe out my entire PS1 memory card too while using his gameshark to copy a save of mine from my card to his....


and my sister overwrote FF7 with Crash Bandicoot lol

[Zoltor]

The NES(only happens with the model 1 NES) flahing screen of death, and a 3rd party PS1 super memory card decided to delete all my saves(needless to say, I never used that card again, although I still have it).

[PentiumMMX]

I remember accidently wiping my own Misadventures of Tron Bonne file (A file from when I finished the game the first time) when playing through a second time; accidently slipping on a button and overwriting my original save with one still pretty early into the game.

[todesengel]

Only time I ever lost a save file was from using one of those 3rd party memory cards for PSOne. It's one of those cards that has 12 pages that you can flip through, went and changed the page to save a file and it wiped everything on page 1. I had a fully completed Castlevania SOTN file on there and I had just got Parasite Eve and was at the final boss and of course that got wiped as well. I still have the memory card but I never again bothered with the whole page switching thing and just got an official Sony card after that.

[BetaWolf47]

I forgot about this one. Back in 2002, when I was ready to get a 2nd memory card (we were stuck with memory card 59's for quite a while, remember?), I saw a 3rd party one called "Memory Card 16x". Woah, 16x? That'll set my memory needs straight forever!

I bit the bait, and boy was it a mistake. I stupidly moved all of my data over to it, only to have it bite the dust and corrupt two weeks after purchase. I was pissed!

[fahlim003]

I booted up Super Metroid on my Game Doctor SF7. I guess the GDSF7 didn't like my cartridge so it wiped all my saves.

As far as old games go, that's it.

[savageone]

I forgot about this one. Back in 2002, when I was ready to get a 2nd memory card (we were stuck with memory card 59's for quite a while, remember?), I saw a 3rd party one called "Memory Card 16x". Woah, 16x? That'll set my memory needs straight forever!

I bit the bait, and boy was it a mistake. I stupidly moved all of my data over to it, only to have it bite the dust and corrupt two weeks after purchase. I was pissed!

I was trying to think if I'd ever lost any saves due to battery loss or otherwise and I had totally forgotten I had this exact same scenario happen to me back in the Gamecube days. It was probably even the same exact 16x memory card, though I'd say mine made it a month or so.

Fortunately I don't think I lost anything I would have cared about deleting any ways. Having a natural caution with anything 3rd party I used the original tiny Nintendo branded GC memory card for my active games and moved old stuff I'd normally delete to the 16x card.

[BetaWolf47]

Was the Memory Card 16x an Interact brand?

[savageone]

About the most I can remember about it is that it was black and stuck out a bit more than the normal Nintendo cards, I do remember it was wiped clean when I was playing Mega Man Network Transmission though.

[ooXxXoo]

Many moons ago, when KBtoys was going out of business around here (last couple of days there everything 80% off), I bought one of those InterAct N64 GameShark Bytes that have cheat/saves for some games such as Johnny Quest 64 and Mortal Kombat 4...Basically, they are memory cards with a save already in them with inf health, etc...(Mine is for MK4)...One day while playing it, accidentally erased the card, but managed to find the save on-line and got it back with a N64 Dex Drive...

[Az]

Many years ago I acidentally hit my SMS with my foot while getting up off the floor.

The game froze, which was extremely odd to me because at the time I had never seen a console game crash. After I reset the system my Miracle Warriors save files were gone.

[Sonicwolf]

A power outage once caused me to lose a save file on Mario 64.

[ryborg]

2001: Roommate moved out; accidentally ("accidentally"???) took my gray N64 controller instead of his. Mine had a 4x mem card with dozens of save files, his did not. He never returned it and I only saw him once or twice since in passing. Fucker.

[SamuraiSmurfette]

I went to send my Animal Crossing character to another friends' town, but I mixed up the memory cards somehow. I sent my character to a memory card that didn't have a town on it, then it gave me an error, and told me to put my own town back in. I put in the card with the town I was supposed to be going to instead (I think?). When my character returned to her town, everything I had was gone. Even her face :(

[p_b]

A friend of mine had a lot of completed game saves on a memory card. So her brother starts playing one day, and somehow manages to enter the PS2 options. Format memory card: Are you sure? Yes.
Really sure? Yes.
All data will be lost! Yes!

Hey, where's all the date gone?

[Ed Oscuro]

Had my multi-page PS1 memory card die on me. Didn't have anything amazing on it though.

[c0ldb33r]

This wasn't my save file, but when I was young I was playing my cousin's NES and his copy of Legend of Zelda. I had no idea what I was doing and deleted his save file.

I still feel bad about that to this day.

[Flippy8490]

Losing paper with NES passwords on it is the MOST ANNOYING THING EVER.

Worse than dead cart battery! :P

[wingzrow]

You know when they say to hold down the reset button when turning off NES games with saves? They mean it.

Was SO close to beating Zelda 2. I eventually started over and beat it from the beginning but it took forever.

[Drixxel]

A SNES Game Genie destroyed my save games a few times, the most tragic of which was a file near the end of Super Metroid on my first playthrough where I thought it would be fun to screw around with some of the zanier codes. Bloody Game Genie.

By far the most stupid way that I've lost save files, though, was thusly: I was making good progress through Robo-Pit on PSX and while spelunking through the menus one day I noticed something odd, an option to "initialize." Initialize what, I thought? What madness would this activate? Oh, it did something special, it did. Cleared all data from the memory card in slot 1, amongst it some very dearly held saves for the likes of Jet Moto, Castlevania: SOTN, FFVII, King's Field 2, and a number of others. Fuckers, why include that in a game? When would you ever, in game, feel the need or compulsion to empty your memory card? A data manager is one thing, but good god. Man.. did I feel a majestic dolt.

[BetaWolf47]

This wasn't my save file, but when I was young I was playing my cousin's NES and his copy of Legend of Zelda. I had no idea what I was doing and deleted his save file.

I still feel bad about that to this day.

I've done that before too, when my brother and his friend got super far on Super Mario World. Me and the friend's little brother decided to goof around in the game. I don't know if I could even read back then, let alone know what "Clear Data" meant.


Losing paper with NES passwords on it is the MOST ANNOYING THING EVER.

Worse than dead cart battery! :P
It was, back in the day. But now we can look up codes to get to a place where we were approximately.

[Ze_ro]

I have a copy of Pinball Fantasies for Jaguar that is kind of flaky. At one point, it lost all my high scores, and I subsequently set some new ones... then later on, my old scores mysteriously came back. I'm still not sure how that happened.

I've heard from other people that it IS possible to lose NES game saves if you don't hold the reset button while powering off like it says so to do on the back of the cartridge. It's never happened to me however, and I suspect it's only on certain consoles, or only in very specific situations.

--Zero

[BiggerBoo]

Actually, over the past, oh, 2 weeks or so, I've experienced such a devastating sequence of memory losses that I'm not sure I can continue my normal life without venting, or putting an axe through my Super Nintendo. FIRST, my near-100% game in Yoshi's Island freezes one day, then - POOF! - I toggle off/on, and what do I know? The games are GONE. (Granted, this is an easy fix within the cartridge, it's NOT an easy amount of time spent playing to get back!) Then, a couple days later, my StarFox cartridge slips into a coma, and won't be resuscitated until I replace the battery and start anew. What the hell could be next? Well, how about a 16 hour Chrono Trigger game? Okay, well, this is enough to send a man over the edge. I've got to go to something reliable:

My mint Earthbound cartridge. Now, this is a special one, because I don't actually think any memory got wiped - but something strange happened nonetheless! I decided to start a new game, and for the next couple weeks, exhaust myself playing it in my time off - try finding things I've never found before, talking to everyone in every town, the whole bit. And so I get off to a pretty good start, and after going to bed the first night (only in Twoson, but getting that good buzz only Earthbound can give), I wake up (today) with the game on my brain. I go to work, come home and hop on the Wii Fit, drink a beer, then hop on the SNES - my long-awaited return, a kind of therapy I've had scheduled for myself all day.

Well, my main slot, #1 is still intact. But #2? Where...? What the...? WTFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH I KNOW I SAVED IN TWOSON, I KNOW IT I KNOW IT I KNOW IT! I watched it happen, I know I watched Ness's dad say it was ALL RECORDED!

What am I to do? Could there be something wrong with my SNES (it's brand new, damnit)? Or do I just have bum luck? I hope I don't have to keep finding out the hard way.

[M15fit]

The sega saturn and action replay was a constant problem for me. I lost my devil summoner saved game while transferring the save data from console to AR's memory. The 1 save it did keep was corrupt and all of my stats where out of control. This is the one i remember the most as i'm a huge fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series.

[j_factor]

Sonic 3's game save (which doesn't use a battery IIRC) can be flaky. Once it randomly wiped out all my saves (and I had a completed game in every slot :(). But after that, it worked fine.

[RP2A03]

FIRST, my near-100% game in Yoshi's Island freezes one day, then - POOF! - I toggle off/on, and what do I know? The games are GONE. (Granted, this is an easy fix within the cartridge, it's NOT an easy amount of time spent playing to get back!) Then, a couple days later, my StarFox cartridge slips into a coma, and won't be resuscitated until I replace the battery and start anew. What the hell could be next? Well, how about a 16 hour Chrono Trigger game? Okay, well, this is enough to send a man over the edge. I've got to go to something reliable: ...



Before you lose anymore of your sanity you might try cleaning your games and your cartridge slot real good as dirty contacts can cause save file shenanigans. Also Star Fox (I assume you mean the original for the SNES) does not have a battery and even if it did bad batteries generally don't cause a game to freeze or slip into a coma.

[BiggerBoo]

Good point on the Starfox cart, RP2! I gave my SNES a good twice-over cleaning, and have been doing some trial and error with Earthbound...starting new games, getting to the save point, turning it off...so far it's erased 2 slot 2's...hmmm.

[GarrettCRW]

I've heard from other people that it IS possible to lose NES game saves if you don't hold the reset button while powering off like it says so to do on the back of the cartridge. It's never happened to me however, and I suspect it's only on certain consoles, or only in very specific situations.

--Zero

Tecmo Super Bowl gets *extremely* flaky towards the end of the season if you don't hold reset when turning the system off.

[Arkhan]

I loaned my friend wizardry for NES and he wiped out everything. Who knows how, but he did.

[Urzu402]

I lost my Zelda save from NES blinking.
I too have lost a Donkey Kong Land save from ripping out a cart while it was still on hell I even lost my Donkey Kong Land.

[Pantechnicon]

My son was borrowing my Legend of Zelda: LttP cart for the GBA for a sleepover at a friend's house. IIRC, his friend yoinked the cart out of the GBA while it was on and this somehow fried the ability to modify the existing saved games: they could be loaded, but they could neither be deleted nor overwritten.

And then I had a small set of memory cards (PS2, GC, N64) stolen in a burglary a few years back.

[Urzu402]

Oh I also lost my completed OoT save by using a Gameshark to mess around. Forgot about that.

[DevilRy]

My mint Earthbound cartridge. Now, this is a special one, because I don't actually think any memory got wiped - but something strange happened nonetheless! I decided to start a new game, and for the next couple weeks, exhaust myself playing it in my time off - try finding things I've never found before, talking to everyone in every town, the whole bit. And so I get off to a pretty good start, and after going to bed the first night (only in Twoson, but getting that good buzz only Earthbound can give), I wake up (today) with the game on my brain. I go to work, come home and hop on the Wii Fit, drink a beer, then hop on the SNES - my long-awaited return, a kind of therapy I've had scheduled for myself all day.

Well, my main slot, #1 is still intact. But #2? Where...? What the...? WTFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH I KNOW I SAVED IN TWOSON, I KNOW IT I KNOW IT I KNOW IT! I watched it happen, I know I watched Ness's dad say it was ALL RECORDED!

What am I to do? Could there be something wrong with my SNES (it's brand new, damnit)? Or do I just have bum luck? I hope I don't have to keep finding out the hard way.

Did you start the game in slot #2? Cos if I remember correctly EarthBound only lets you record over your old save when you call your dad, not choose which file to save into. :V

[BiggerBoo]

Negatory, DevilRy, there's 3 slots when you start her up, all of which are now quite empty. :(. Something terrible is happening!

[DevilRy]

Well that sucks. Hope you figure it out. In the meantime, there's always emulators if you really need an EarthBound fix. Shit, I hope that never happens to my game though... :yipes: I got the Gutsy Bat.

[Kyle15]

Negatory, DevilRy, there's 3 slots when you start her up, all of which are now quite empty. :(. Something terrible is happening!

I bought a copy back in 2005 and something similar happened. My current playtime was about 3 hours, with two other files from the previous user. Upon starting-up the game again after having it for about two days, all three files were gone. I went straight through after that without ever taking the game out of my system. If anything, I think the battery is loose.

My brother wanted to play something in between both times I booted-up the game, but I removed the cart myself. He didn't erase them and I didn't either. The battery may have jiggled loose just enough to erase all of the saves. Come to think of it, Earthbound may be my only "noisy" cart. Something has shook in there since the day I bought it, but some games just do that . (DS carts come to mind.)

I would have long since replaced the battery, but do not wish to mess-up the label in doing so.

[BiggerBoo]

Word. I did a lot of trial and error last night and today, and seem to have an okay game going, which seems to be saving. It's hard to be mad at a game that can introduce you over and over again to a character like Buzz Buzz though, regardless. :P

[Red Baron]

I've had plenty of lost written-down passwords..

As for actual saves.. I think I lost a Pokemon blue file to my sister saving over it long ago, but I wasn't very far in at all. But then later I managed to destroy a very loaded save file in the same game when experimenting with a gameshark(at least I managed to get a Mew in the end, which was my original goal.)

When I lent my PS2 and memory card to my father, he was playing Draken(sp?): The Elder Gates, which have huge save files.. He needed multiple saves after a while(buggy game), and eventually deleted a lot of stuff on the card to get the needed space.

Also, my sister had my PSX memory card borrowed which had my FF7/Parasite Eve/MGS saves on it.. She lost it with no idea of where it could be. Then years later I was helping clean out her garage and found it in a garbage pile, and full of water and such at that. Well, at least that brought closure to the matter.

Finally, when I was late game in Earthbound(probably my fifth playthrough) a few years back, I managed to crash the game terribly in Magicant(I don't THINK I was using a Game Genie.. I think I may have bumped the console by pulling the controller cord, though.), complete with blackout, then bizarrely crash-sounding noises and music. When I restarted the game, every save file was deleted, but it played and saved normally again after that.

[TheClash603]

Not truly "classic gaming," but this fits with the topic and I love to tell and hate this story.

I had Gran Turismo 3 for PS2 and I played over 150 hours. I had unlocked just about everything, and was mildly obsessed with the game for a while.

My freshman year of college this was, and a friend in the dorm asked to borrow my PS2 for some WWF wrestling game he rented.

When I got my system back the next day there were about 30 created wrestlers on my memory card. In order to fit all of those wrestlers he needed to clear space... BY ERASING MY GRAN TURISMO 3 SAVE!!

I have not touched a game in the series since and am bitter to this day.

[BiggerBoo]

When I got my system back the next day there were about 30 created wrestlers on my memory card. In order to fit all of those wrestlers he needed to clear space... BY ERASING MY GRAN TURISMO 3 SAVE!!


The fact that we get to picture 30-some wrestlers effectively picking up, possibly suplexing, and throwing out your save game makes this the best story
on the thread yet. Lol!

And some other stories have recently come into my memory, regarding little brothers' general disregard for the tragedies of lost save files:

When I was a kid, I played my Pokemon Red/Blue so much that on Red, I had maxed out the clock at 99:99, collected/leveled up all my pokemon to 100 (hello Rare Candy cheat). One day when I was much older, I found that after I'd let my step brother borrow my gameboy games, he'd saved over my Red with a game he got about 00:02 into.... Good ol' ADHD, gotta love it.

AND, I also remember one summer where a friend of mine had been grounded, as he had basically beaten his brother within an inch of his life (I think it might've been a Full Metal Jacket re-enactment, what with the socks and soap) for deleting his FFIX game he'd been basically working on getting 100% all school year - he was almost there, from what I understand, and one day when his brother and him were getting in a fight, his brother had done it right in front of him, out of spite! I'll admit I had to admire the little brother's audacity. :P

[wingzrow]

Zelda 2 on NES. Pressed the power button over and over trying to get it to boot. All the saves killed themselves after that. When they say to hold the reset button when turning off the system they mean it.

[Sothy]

I let a friend play Morrowind on my xbox. Later I turned it on to find my 30+ hrs of gameplay badass replaced with a lvl1 guy in a loin cloth whose only posessions were stolen silverware and a bounty on his head....

[Dr. Dib]

Once when I was younger I owned a N64 3rd party memory card. This memory card had the strange feature of having a button on the back that when pressed erased all the data. My older brother pointed this out to me when we first got it and I always worried that I would hit it.

One day I brought said memory card over to a friend's house to show off my save for some WCW game. After we finished playing it, I put the memory card in my back jeans pocket as we played around the house. When we decided to play it later we noticed how all of my data had been erased. I freaked out about how my brother would react, and he was a bit upset having worked for the things on the memory card. After that I never played the game again, and I also remember I stopped visiting a message board that was about that game.

Another story I have involves Super Smash Bros. My younger brother and i were playing it when he starts going through all the configuration menus to be annoying. He eventually gets to the delete unlocked character data and hits okay. I got pretty angry at him for that, but I was able to get all the characters back with ease.

One final story I have that is much less interesting deals with Animal Crossing Wild World. I had been playing the game on and off for a year, but had gotten a lot of rare and interesting stuff from Nintendo giveaways and people with Action Replay and just finding things. One day I turned it on and I found my town was missing. I stopped playing the game for a few months before picking it back up again later. I then put it down for good and haven't touched it since due to lack of interest.

[Peonpiate]

Final Fantasy 3 I have beaten it around 30 times since Ive owned it [94ish]. Ive lost nearly all of them one way or another over time [not counting overwriting old saves].

The infamous 'oops ive bumped the snes a tad' resulting in garbled screen text and images netted me a few games saves lost.
Power going off by slightly bumping the cord = more lost FF saves.

I also exploited the sketch bug on mostly every game ive done and i lost a save or two from it...But usually that wouldnt kill game saves. The snes getting bumped was almost guaranteed to wipe your data, this is something Ive only had a issue with FF3 but not other games. Using a Game Genie also screwed over FF 3 alot, for me atleast. Saving games where you could play as Leo or Kefca was risky for your data.

[Bugbear]

I guess the most "epic" story I have is when I just got EarthBound and played it for 11 hours straight. One of my ferrets leisurely came along and bumped the cart ever-so-slightly, and it froze, erasing all of the data. Why she went straight over to the SNES, I don't know.
Later I made a new save, and wiggled, tapped, shook, and took the cart out of the SNES without shutting it off, and lo and behold, the five minutes of gameplay was still there.

I've heard that SNES games sometimes have "spasms" in which you turn the game on, and it would appear that all of your games are lost, but when you reset or take it out and but it back in, they're back. It happened with my Super Mario RPG. No avail with Earthbound, though. You could argue that it was hard on the cart with 11 hours straight, which is probably the case, and I will admit my foolery.

[tomaitheous]

On my Super CDROM2 attachment. The tototek card has a problem with it and will corrupt the entire save file block/ram if a rom image on the flashcard tries to access it. :( All my hard work gone down the drain...

[Jorpho]

Once when I was younger I owned a N64 3rd party memory card. This memory card had the strange feature of having a button on the back that when pressed erased all the data. My older brother pointed this out to me when we first got it and I always worried that I would hit it.Might it have been one of those cards that would switch "pages" when you press the button, such that your data would re-appear if you pressed it a certain number of times (to cycle back to the first "page") ?

[garagesaleking!!]

By being anxious, sometimes I will buy a new game and really want to play it, but Ill get my first chance when Im out of town at my sisters house, or at a friends house, and Ill play a good ways into the campaign on someones elses hard drive, and when I return home I have to start from scratch, but thats my fault.

[BiggerBoo]

Okay, I know I'm probably beating a dead horse here, but I seem to be losing save files at an alarming rate, via my SNES. Could there be something wrong with my system I could fix myself with minimal $$$ til payday, other than just plain replacing it? Home remedies? I've cleaned every god forsaken crevice in/around the input slot/dust cover - what else could there be? There's still quite a few games which work perfectly well on my system. :\

[RP2A03]

If your only having trouble with save files and your satisfied that your game contacts and cartridge slot pins are clean then it's most likely the battery. I would replace that first or test it on another console if possible before buying another SNES. If you get a new battery either check the date code or test it with a multimeter to make sure that it hasn't been hanging on the shelf or sitting in a warehouse for ten years.