Your blackout/brownout stories?

[Naniyue]

  If you've played video games long enough, you have had, at the very, very least once, a game interrupted or even ruined by a power surge or outage.  I have two particularly interesting ones myself:

  I was playing Neo Nectaris, getting things handed to me the way that game does, when after three long hours of edge of your seat play, the tide had miraculously turned!  BUT, as I was finally close to winning, I had a feeling that the power would go out.  Yup.

  Another time, same place, I was playing the PCE version of Langlisser.  Again, I had the sense something was going to happen.  Yup.  There was a brownout.  The screen dangerously dimmed, but somehow, barely, my DUO retained just enough power to continue the game without losing anything. YES!!!!

What are some of your tales?

[Necromancer]

Interesting topic.  I have no such stories, as power here is fairly reliable; we still have issues occasionally, but I've been lucky not to have anything happen while gaming.

[majors]

I remember renting 1943 for the NES back in '89 from Action Video for a weekend of good ole shmups fun...but hurricane Hugo hit my area Friday night and took out the power for a week. My house was lucky, and no trees hit it, but we did have a big one fall just about 10 feet from my bedroom!

Shitty part was when I returned the game to the rental store (which also didn't have power) when the roads cleared on Monday, they slapped me with a late fee even tho I only had a couple hours that Fri evening before the storm took everything out.

Highlight was 16 year-old-ass learned how to use a chainsaw the following week when we cleared out the back yard of debris I still have all my digits.

[_joshuaTurbo]

Great topic idea, haha. I actually have not had a power outage issue for gaming in ages, but with classic games and the disc drive failing to load, or me bumping a table when a faulty NES or Genesis/MD glitched out while in the middle of a game.... oh man- that's happened too often.

Setting up for game conventions we have tons of problems with consoles and power strips going bad, so it does happen from time to time I guess, lol....

[DarkKobold]

I was really worried this was going to be a thread about drinking way too much and not remembering it.

[majors]

Setting up for game conventions we have tons of problems with consoles and power strips going bad, so it does happen from time to time I guess, lol....

And don't forget about the power setup at venues for cons/events! I always say, "It's not a con if we DON'T blow a breaker". All those CRTs daisy chained over multiple power strips. It's easy to hit 15 or 20 amps real quick.