Games that have long play times, like the Zelda series for Game Boy, Super Metroid for SNES and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 for Sega Genesis, require some way for players to save their progress. Many systems did not have any nonvolatile storage built in. Therefore, some cartridges include a little bit of RAM that the game could write save data to. Since RAM will also lose it's memory when it loses power, the cartridge also has a small battery to keep the RAM powered at all times. The disadvantage of this scheme is that the battery will eventually run out, and the game can no longer be saved.

Battery Backed RAM is part of the Miscellaneous Attributes category.