Am I Weird for Missing Loading Screens? – Extra Punctuation

This probably sounds like when old people talk about preferring to listen to vinyl even though the sound is objectively lower quality because the hiss and scratching gives them a sense of nostalgic comfort. And that’s strictly a them thing, they associate that low quality audio with the happier times of their youth. And I suppose that’s where I’m coming from here with loading times, because when I was a kid I did a lot of gaming on a tape deck Commodore 64. The sensation of pressing down on play, the sound of the humming and computerised grinding as the data loaded, the festive coloured lines wiggling about on the screen while you sit for twenty minutes reading a book, all of that is burned permanently into my memory. I remember staring at the coloured lines waiting for the green and brown one to come up, which I had named Mint Chocolate.

These days I mainly game on a top of the range gaming PC I somehow convinced the company to pay for, occasionally switching to the PS5 for the inevitable stubborn exclusive, so I’m very much in the land of the solid state hard drive right now and loading times are less and less a fixture of my life. And there’s no ceremony to a game that can just dump you straight into play. You don’t appreciate it as much. It’s like going to the cinema, they don’t start blaring the opening titles while you’re still finding your seat, they give you time to get settled and build anticipation before they slowly bring the lights down. I suppose there’s still installation times, but those don’t count. You can do other things while you’re waiting for stuff to install. It’s like saying the drive to the cinema counts as part of the buildup.

Ah, you see what’s happening, don’t you. Already I’ve fallen for the nostalgia-blinded old bastard trap of trying to come up with reasons for why the old way is somehow objectively better than all these new fangled toys the kids like, and therefore all progress should be halted, taxes should be lower and universal healthcare is communism. Obviously having no loading time is objectively better because it means you can have more time to game before you’re needed in the operating room to perform a lifesaving heart transplant.

And loading isn’t even an old times versus new times thing. Historically, it’s gone up and down depending on the hardware. If you had a cartridge console as a kid you’re probably more nostalgic for a complete absence of load times whatsoever. We’re sitting pretty with our solid state hard drives now but all it’ll take is another technological advance that the software developers can’t quite catch up with and it’s back to keeping a book by your gaming couch. Come to think of it, making us wait while the game precaches the shaders seems to be something the newest games have been doing a lot lately.

But anyway. The reason I was thinking about loading times is because, not for the first time, I was thinking about loading screen minigames. As in, a system wherein during the loading screen the game puts up a little zero-stakes challenge or fidget toy for the player to occupy themselves with while they wait. Which is an idea so obvious and brilliant one feels sorry for every other idea in the world for having to share space with its radiance. And it’s not my idea. There were a couple of games I had on my old tape deck C64 that had something called “Invade-a-load.” Halfway through the loading sequence a Space Invaders clone with very distinctive chiptune music would start up until it abruptly stopped and kicked you out when the rest of the game was ready for you. I also very clearly recall that the PC version of Broken Sword let you play a Breakout clone while you were waiting for it to install from the CD.

And that was about it for classic examples that I came across, and that struck me as odd for such an obvious winning idea. I mean, having the player just sit there to watch a bar filling up for ten seconds risks killing the pace every single time, giving us literally anything to do with our hands at that point would keep us somewhat mentally alert and not daydreaming about pies.

The situation was made clearer several years ago when I bemoaned this in mixed company and was informed that there was actually a straightforward explanation for loading screen minigames not really being a thing: Namco had a patent on it to stop anyone else using the idea. Which explains why Namco put out all those great games in the early 2000s that richly explored the concept of loading screen minigames to the utmost. No, I don’t remember any of them, either. Feels like Namco were uselessly patent squatting the idea owing to some combination of obliviousness and lack of shame.

But this is old news, because I was bemoaning this subject again on stream fairly recently and was informed by someone in the ever quick-witted chat that Namco’s patent actually expired in 2015. And with that I remembered that Splatoon 1 on the Wii U had had a little Doodle Jump-esque minigame you were invited to play while the game looked for a free server, one of the few actually good uses of that bloody Wii U screen controller, and I didn’t seem to recall Namco suing Nintendo’s bollocks off.

So, hooray. Loading screen minigames are back on the table, just in time for loading to not be that much of a presence anymore now that disc-based media has basically stopped being a thing. But as I say, technology may yet bring it back. In fact, one could argue that the painfully common practice in modern video games of covering up loading times with squeezing through narrow passages or very very slowly opening doors are modern examples of loading screen minigames, not that pushing forward on the analog stick counts for much as a gameplay mechanic.
The problem with these, besides the fact that I will put a 12-gauge to my head if I’m obliged to play many more games with the fucking things, is that they turn a loading screen, which can appear for variable lengths of time depending on how much needs to be loaded and what level of hardware we’re running on, into an incredibly boring transition sequence of fixed length. So if in the future it’s played on a more advanced machine that need significantly less loading time, it’s still going to be full of these tedious flow-breaking spelunking exercises, except now for absolutely no cocking reason.

Do let me know in the comments if you know of any other examples of loading screen gameplay beyond the ones cited, because this is a microfacet of our beloved medium I find weirdly interesting. I think Okami on the PS2 had a sort of easter egg where you could press buttons in time with the loading screen animation, and that was during Namco’s patent so Clover Studios were dicing with danger on that one.

It wasn’t much of a minigame but then it doesn’t need to be to hold interest for such a short amount of time. Even something as simple as an onscreen counter showing how many buttons you’ve pressed during the loading sequence, with your personal best displayed alongside it, would be something. Still better than nothing. And you just know some nutter online would be maintaining a leaderboard.