An example of a game system includes a plurality of game apparatuses, and a matching server decides game apparatuses as players (A, B), and game apparatuses as game masters (C-E) in response to a request from the game apparatus. During the game play, operation data in response to an operation input to each of the game apparatuses (A, B) is transmitted to the game apparatuses (C-E), and in the game apparatuses (C-E), game processing is executed. Result data of the game processing is transmitted to the game apparatuses (A, B). When the data is saved, the encoded game data is transmitted from each of the game apparatuses (C-E) to the game apparatuses (A, B), and saved there.