VIDEO: PS1 secret feature finally found by fans, 25 years later!

Even after twenty-six years the first PlayStation console still brings surprises. It’s been unearthed that deleted saves can be recovered.

Any PlayStation 1 owner has been there; weekends spent trying to complete a game and while re-arranging the blocks on the memory cards, a wrong selection in removing a save.

It’s always been rumoured that there was a way to recover a save, but it was never confirmed.

With that, lets look at the OS itself from the PS1, and how to recover a save.

The PSOS before PS5

Before the days of switching on a console and being greeted by an OS, with notifications and updates for installed games, you would need to have no disk inserted to access the PS1 system.

You would be instead be greeted by a CD Player, or a Memory Card manager. From moving saves between memory cards to playing Tomb Raider music, it was simple but incredibly useful.

If someone had more than three memory cards to better manage the games that would take up more space, or ‘blocks’ as it was known, it wouldn’t be unusual to use the feature to have one memory card as the ‘main’, one as a ‘backup’ and the rest for the rental games.

However, if you wanted to delete a game and chose the wrong one, usually you would be planning a day to gain back the process in the next week.

READ MORE: PS1 to PS5; a design history.

How to Recover Your Saves

But twenty-six years on, there’s a failsafe. On an original PlayStation console, if you delete a save file, press these buttons all together:

R1 + R2 + L1 +L2

Then you will see the save file you deleted, come back in an instant. The source in question is below, where they demonstrate this in action.

After all this time it’s incredible to think that this feature was never discovered. Either from fits of rage or just by mashing some buttons together, it would have saved a lot of upset from kids losing their well-earned saves.

With cloud-saves now a standard, a similar feature would be irrelevant now, but one can’t help wonder what would have happened if this feature lasted up until the PlayStation 3.

READ MORE: PS1 Memory Cards; the highs and lows.