A load time coming
Dear Darran,
In these times of instant gaming, one thing we tend to forget is how we once were made to wait for our games, literally. I remember my trusty Commodore 64, and watching the tape counter crawl forever upwards, often for several minutes, before a game loaded and could be played.
Perhaps there is something amiss nowadays with new technology when everything is so fast. During the 8-bit days maybe we appreciated our games more due to the simple fact that we were made to wait for them to load before we could play?
Yet even this could be fun in its own way! Most had nice loading screens and music to match, others even allowed us to play while we idled away the time before the main event.
Compilations, for instance, were also fun. With several games per side on a tape, I first loaded each one in order and wrote their start counter times on a piece of paper which I kept with the compilation so I knew, when I wished to play a particular game later, how far to fast forward the tape in order to load it.
No doubt this will seem monotonous to the younger generation, but for those of us who lived through it, it was just a sign of the times. If anything, the 8-bit games taught us the art of patience! Yours sincerely,
Stuart Hardy Darran always used to make a sandwich and a cup of tea while he waited for a game to load on his Amstrad, so it’s something we remember too. Having said that, Nick had to wait 30 minutes for our Xbox to update, and patches and installs can take an age to upload nowadays. The more things change the more they stay the same.