how one company gave you 20 years of boredom
So, you just bought that game you’ve been waiting for years to be released. You take the CD from the packaging and put it in your console. That music starts playing, and you can’t wait to enter that world. Finally, the long-awaited moment arrives, and then you see it. A loading screen. In Portuguese: tela de carregamento, in Spanish: pantalla de carga, in Latin… I don’t know. They didn’t have loading screens back then.
Loading screens are, at the same time, something common in all games and the worst part of them. Now, wait a minute, am I really going to write a ten-minute article about loading screens and still expect you to stay here reading it? Well, yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, and I know you won’t leave because otherwise, I’ll come after you, I’ll find you, and I’ll kill you… unless you’re bigger than me.
Our story begins a long time ago when humanity started using agriculture when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. When the first PlayStation was released, it was a time when the console industry was beginning to transition to 3D graphics, with two major players leading the race: the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. One of the big differences between these two consoles was their media format. While the Nintendo console still used classic cartridges to store its games, Sony decided to enter the market with a new crazy technology called CD-ROM, which were basically like cartridges, but if your mom had rolled over them.
Each technology has advantages and disadvantages, but the most important are storage capacity and reading speed. CDs could store much more information, which made room for bigger and more complex games, but on the other hand, they loaded all this information much more slowly than cartridges. And that’s when loading screens started to become a problem, with some PS1 games taking up to… and this is true until 2017 to load. In an attempt to minimize all the agony these screens caused, Namco decided to insert a port of the arcade game Galaxian during the loading screens of its new game, the grand and wonderful Ridge Racer (never heard of it).
The idea was genius: distract players with a simple minigame that could be loaded almost instantly while the main dish was slowly prepared behind the curtains. It was so brilliant, in fact, that Namco did the only thing a company would know to do in this situation: they patented the idea.
Patent 5718632 had its share of problems. The first one was that it was a patent because the purpose of patents is to encourage innovation and progress. Still, in this case, it served as precisely the opposite, ensuring that so-called auxiliary games, i.e., minigames during the loading screen that did not represent the core gameplay or used different code from the main game, were for Namco’s exclusive use, preventing any other company from experimenting with the idea and consequently hindering innovation and progress.
But to be fair, as annoying as the patent may have been, since this mechanic was Namco’s invention, they had every right to act like the chubby owner of the basketball. If I wanted to, that’s what I would say if this were their invention because it turns out that there already was a very similar tool called Invade-a-Load for Commodore 64 games. The difference was that while Namco had put a Space Invaders clone during its loading screens, Invade-a-Load put a Space Invaders clone during its loading screens ten years earlier.
The point is, this patent should never have existed, and it may have been largely responsible for all these years with the same screens full of bars, logos, lazy story summaries, and clichéd tips — screens without a hint of creativity, innovation, or progress.
While this became the rule, it doesn’t mean some exceptions don’t exist. No article about loading screens would be complete without giving due recognition to these cases. Older Dragon Ball games are good examples of this, giving you various distractions while the game loads, where you have to tap buttons for Saibamen to emerge from the ground, for Gohan to pull out swords, or for Goku to eat faster.
Or games like FIFA and Bayonetta that let you practice your moves before the main action. Games that let you walk around, like Assassin’s Creed and Rayman Origins, give you a moment to appreciate the beauty of their art or the beauty of nothingness. Games that follow the philosophy that anything is better than nothing, like Crash Tag Team Racing, where you could burp and fart.
Crash Tag Team Racing — Loading Screen — All Farts/Burps (youtube.com)
Screens played an essential role in the game’s atmosphere, like the classic doors of Resident Evil, which built up tension with the mystery of “what could be behind this door? We’ll definitely find out… in five minutes.”
On the other hand, some developers found ways to hide this loading, the most obvious being the hated elevators that hide the fact that the game is loading something, as well as I can hide an elephant in my pocket. So yes, despite the metaphorical leash around the industry’s neck, some developers still managed to find a way to experiment with such an essential part of video games instead of simply ignoring it.
But how could things have been without Namco’s infamous patent? Well, maybe nothing would have changed. Maybe there would be no more wars and hunger in the world. We can’t know for sure, but as some of you may know, the patent expired back in 2015, nine years ago.
So, how have things been since then? Well, the day the patent expired was like an international event. All the specialized media sites reported the news, people took to the streets to celebrate, North Korea made peace with the world. But that wasn’t all. Even a game jam was created in celebration, challenging participants to develop those “minigames” that had been forbidden for so long. While most of them were just distractions, good distractions, but just that. There was one minigame, though, that caught me by surprise.
Cat on the Roof didn’t do anything exceptional. Still, maybe the mix of its music with its visuals and the idea of a cat spending its days doing nothing special on a roof while the main story unfolded around it without it noticing brought me some different feelings and made me think.
It’s hard to know what we might have missed out on when we never had it to begin with, but this little glimpse of what could have been made me imagine the possibilities of keeping the player immersed in that world, expanding a narrative, finding new ways to tell a story, or simply experimenting with new ideas that would never get off the ground otherwise. Maybe the simple change between a continuous experience and one that constantly breaks your rhythm could be enough to completely transform the impression at least certain games leave on us.
And then I played an absurdly annoying minigame. I said, “Enough.” I may be getting carried away a bit here because the truth is that nothing changed since 2015. And to be honest, things probably wouldn’t have been much different without Namco’s patent. In the end, there’s no way to know. But if there’s any moral I want you to take away from this text, it’s nothing. And that’s OK, because does that mean you wasted ten minutes of your life here? Yes, but at least you’re already used to it.
