For twenty years the loading screen minigame belonged to somebody else

The first Ridge Racer arrived on PlayStation at the end of 1994 and ran into the physics of its medium. A track had to be lifted whole from the compact disc into memory, and the first PlayStation's drive read on the order of three hundred kilobytes a second. Loading took tens of seconds and nothing could be done about it.

Namco did something nobody else did: instead of a progress bar the player was handed Galaxian, the 1979 game, fully playable. Better, it was rewarded — clear the aliens before the load finishes and you unlock extra cars. Empty time was converted into content.

And then it was closed off

In 1995 Namco filed a patent application, and in 1998 received United States patent 5,718,632 — recording medium, method of loading games program code means, and games machine. The wording described the general idea: while the main program is being read from the medium, the machine runs an auxiliary game so the player's time is not wasted.

The patent ran twenty years from filing and expired on 27 November 2015.

The obvious solution to the platform's most visible problem was legally closed for two console generations.

A catalogue of workarounds

The most interesting part is what the industry put into loading instead. The resulting list reads as a catalogue of techniques produced by patent law rather than by design.

Lore text and tips, from Skyrim to the Souls games. A rotating three-dimensional model you can spin with the stick: formally not a game, which is precisely why it is permissible. Video of the coming scene played over the load. And the main device, disguising the load as a level: a corridor, a lift, a narrow gap the character squeezes through, a long ladder. The doors in Metroid Prime and the lifts in Mass Effect exist for this reason.

An honest caveat belongs here. The patent was not a courtroom weapon: Namco barely litigated it, and individual games with playable interludes during loading did ship. Its force lay elsewhere, in legal caution. A large publisher will not invest in a mechanic about which a lawyer has said a suit is possible, even when the probability is small. The patent worked as deterrence rather than as a weapon, which makes it a fine example of law shaping design without once appearing in court.

What happened after 2015

Less than expected. When the patent lapsed, the trade press expected the technique to return, but by then the reason for it was disappearing on its own. Solid state drives and streaming cut waits to seconds, and building a second playable game inside the loader costs real money and requires somebody to test and maintain it.

The patent outlived the problem it was obtained to solve. By the time the idea was released to everyone, almost nobody needed it.

From which follows a habit worth keeping when discussing any convention. Part of what looks like settled craft is legal residue. A whole generation of players learned that a loading screen is where you read lore, as though that had been an artistic choice.