Loading Screens as Lost Design Space

Namco held a patent on playing a game while a game loaded. US Patent 5,718,632, filed in the mid-1990s, covered the minigame-during-loading trick that Ridge Racer used in 1993 — Galaxian running on the load, and if you cleared it before the track finished streaming, you unlocked cars. The patent expired in November 2015 and the games press wrote it up as a liberation. Almost nothing happened. By 2015 the industry had spent fifteen years working to abolish the loading screen, and handing it a gift was like unlocking a door in a building nobody worked in any more.

The loading screen is the only genuinely dead design space in games, and it was killed by an unambiguous improvement. It is still worth an autopsy, because it was doing four jobs and the industry has since had to re-manufacture all four at considerable expense.

The captive frame

Consider what a Commodore 64 tape load actually was, from a designer’s point of view. Five to fifteen minutes in which the player is sitting in front of the machine, cannot leave, cannot play anything else, has no phone, and has literally nothing to look at except your screen. That is the highest-attention, lowest-competition frame in the history of the medium. No modern game has ever had one.

British publishers understood immediately, and treated it as a stage. Bob Wakelin’s airbrush art went up as a loading picture, then the game. Martin Galway wrote the Ocean Loader themes — a numbered sequence of tunes that eventually ran to six versions, each with its own following — and Jonathan Dunn took over the job later. These were overtures. You put a tape in, a picture appeared, and music you had heard a hundred times told you what kind of evening this was going to be. The SID chip’s whole cultural position rests partly on this: an enormous fraction of the C64’s canonical music was written for the eight minutes when the game itself was not running.

Some loaders went further. Invade-a-Load, a C64 tape loader written by Richard Aplin, put a playable Space Invaders clone on the screen while the rest of the game streamed in behind it — the Namco patent’s idea, done a decade earlier on a machine with 64K, by a British coder, for free. Thalamus put a scroller and a Rob Hubbard tune on the front of Sanxion and produced a loading screen with a longer cultural life than its game, which is a genuinely absurd sentence and a completely accurate one.

The picture that drew itself

The Spectrum’s loading screen deserves its own paragraph, because it is the one case where the loading was the art.

A ZX Spectrum screen is 6,912 bytes, and the standard ROM loader delivered them at about 1,500 baud, so a loading picture assembled itself over roughly forty seconds — and thanks to the Spectrum’s peculiar interleaved display memory, it did not assemble top to bottom. It came in in thirds, in bands, the image resolving in three interleaved passes with the colour attributes slapping on at the end in one go. A generation watched a dragon materialise in stripes and then flush into colour, and the reveal was hypnotic in a way that a finished JPEG is not, because you watched it being made.

Nobody designed that. It fell out of a memory layout chosen by Richard Altwasser and Steve Vickers for reasons of hardware economy in 1982. It is the single best argument in this whole essay: the medium’s most memorable reveal animation was a side effect of a display-address scheme, discovered by users, and it lasted precisely as long as the constraint that produced it.

The commercial artists then designed for it. A loader picture that read well in bands, that had its punchline in the middle third, that survived the attribute clash of eight-by-eight colour cells — that was a real craft skill with a real brief, practised by people like Bob Wakelin at Ocean, and it went extinct in about 1993 with no successor discipline and no retrospective.

Four jobs

It set the tone. Anticipation is a designed feeling and it is expensive to produce deliberately. The tape load produced it for free: eight minutes of music and a painting, and by the time the game started you were leaning forward. Horror understands this better than any other genre — the whole architecture of dread is delay — and the loading screen was delay you did not have to justify.

It named the author. The scroller was a byline. The coder’s name went past at the bottom of the screen, in a scrolling sine wave, with greetings to his mates, because the demoscene had made that a norm and the loader was where scene habits leaked into commercial product. A generation of British and Scandinavian kids knew what a programmer was, by name, because the loading screen told them. Credits at the end of a modern game are read by nobody.

It taught. The tip screen — a rotating hint about a mechanic — is the last surviving remnant of the loading screen and the only one anyone still writes. It works, too, because teaching a player something at the moment they cannot act on it turns out to be a decent way to plant an idea.

It made a threshold. This is the one nobody costed and the one that mattered.

The threshold problem

A game you can enter in two-tenths of a second is a game you never arrive at.

The tape load was a door. You committed, you waited, you crossed, and the crossing marked the world off from the room you were sitting in. Rituals do that job in every other medium — the lights going down, the needle on the record, the first page. Games had one by accident, and then spent twenty years removing it because the accident was also a fifteen-minute tax on a Tuesday evening.

The removal was correct. I want to be plain about that, because there is a genre of retro writing that mistakes a broken tape transport for a spiritual practice, and I have more than enough azimuth-screwdriver memories to know better. Fast loading is one of the few unambiguous wins in the medium’s history. The 1541 disk drive was slow enough to be a joke and the Epyx Fast Load cartridge sold in quantity in 1984 for exactly that reason; the PlayStation 5’s SSD is the same victory finished.

What is interesting is what happened next. Having abolished the threshold, designers immediately began building it back by hand, at enormous cost, because games without one felt wrong.

The transition period is the funny bit. The 2000s hid loads inside fiction: the elevator in Mass Effect, the vent crawl, the door two characters pull open together in Gears of War, the gap you squeeze through sideways in God of War (2018) to keep the one-shot camera unbroken. Every one of those is a loading screen wearing a costume, and players learned to read them as loading screens within about a week. Mass Effect’s elevators got mocked relentlessly and the mockery was unfair — they were doing the loading screen’s tone job and its threshold job, and doing them while lying about it, which is the only part that annoyed anyone.

Then the SSD arrived and made the hiding unnecessary. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021) turned instant streaming into a mechanic — portals you jump through mid-fight into another world — which is Insomniac spending the entire hardware budget on proving the threshold is gone.

And the moment it was gone, the best designers started charging for it again. The bonfire and the fog gate in a FromSoftware game are thresholds with no technical function whatsoever: a deliberate pause, a deliberate crossing, a deliberate lock behind you. Hades makes Zagreus walk to the door every single run, on hardware that could drop him into the next room instantly, because Supergiant know that a run needs a beginning and a beginning needs a walk. The tape load did that for free, badly, for ten years.

What is actually recoverable

Nobody should bring back the wait. The recoverable thing is the recognition that entering a world is an event, and that events want ceremony.

The medium currently has no equivalent of the lights going down. It has a launcher, an update, three logos you cannot skip and a menu. That is a queue rather than an overture. The loading screen was a bad piece of engineering that accidentally performed a real dramaturgical function, and the engineering got fixed while the function got dropped on the floor.

Somewhere in the archive there is an eight-minute Ocean tune written for a wait that no longer exists, and it is better than most of what modern games play over their main menus. That should embarrass someone.