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Quicksave (according to Wikipedia, and my own experience) is a feature that allows the player to save their game state with a single keystroke, instead of (say) going through a lot of complicated menus. The "FPS" shooter Wolfenstein 3D (1992) had this feature.

I grew up with old 8-bit machines, where you could buy add-on hardware like disk interfaces that might have a special "snapshot button" -- but that doesn't count. It wasn't built into the game, and that matters because add-ons can add anything.

Were there earlier games with a built-in quicksave feature? What was the first game to have this feature?

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  • This isn't really meaningful -- the earliest games to support saving state generally did so using a single button press. Menu-driven saving (and menus in general) came later.
    – Mark
    Commented Apr 8, 2023 at 2:29

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Could it be that Wolfenstein 3D of 1992 was the first?

Before that point, saving might not be "quick", nor would game makers want to take up more space than they needed to, nor would it be a useful feature if any older games were short enough to not need it?

And some game had to do it first, why not that game?

Although, that was almost 20 years after the invention of saving: The Dungeon (1975):

Yes, exiting also saves the character and logs you out of the lesson, but trust me, having to log in again is the least of your worries when trying to win this game.

The last page of this Wizard and the Princess (1983) manual mentions F3 Save and F4 Load where it saves to an external disk with a single button press. Does that count?

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  • I think all them "rogue-like" games had quick-saving with a single key combo.
    – Amarth
    Commented Aug 13 at 19:40
  • @Amarth - Like: britzl.github.io/roguearchive/files/misc/EpyxRogueDOSManual/… "If you wish to save a game and continue playing it later, type an S." ... Whether such a thing counts, would only be answerable by the OP, who hasn't been around for a month... ... It's not quite as frictionless as the single-button quicksaves of Wolfenstein and recent Elder Scrolls' games.
    – Malady
    Commented Aug 13 at 20:40

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