History Main / LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading

* The original Platform/{{Xbox}} set out to avoid this by allowing games "cache space" on the internal HDD - data could be copied there for fast access during gameplay. But games which actually ''used'' this feature took forever to initially fire up (eg ''VideoGame/{{Fable|I}}, VideoGame/NinjaGaiden''), as it basically amounted to copying a few hundred megabytes in one massive loading spree (it still generally did a better job than the [=PS2=], due to a superior DVD drive - the Xbox knocks about a minute off ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas San Andreas']]'' start time, for example). Both systems could be modified to run entire games off a HDD, obliterating load times and removing the need to get up and swap discs.
* The Platform/PlayStation3 inherited this feature, with some games requiring an install time of 20 minutes or more the first time you play them. In this case, it's because the Blu-Ray discs are very data heavy (more specifically, the [=PS3=]'s Blu-ray Disc drive operates at approximately 9 MB/s, while the Xbox 360's DVD drive reaches 15.85 MB/s, seriously compromising performance of multiplatform titles on the former, and furthermore, game developers have declared that the 360 drive's data transfer speed is already low for their needs...), and therefore take longer to access. In an effort to prevent long loading sections, the games are installed to the hard drive, or pre-loaded. Then games like Uncharted 2 come along and just blow that out of the water (it doesn't install at all, and has no loading time after you start playing).
* The Platform/Xbox360 officially integrated this feature in a firmware update -- though it requires that the disc for the game you wish to play be in the DVD drive to function [[DigitalPiracyIsEvil to prevent the rampant piracy]] that often resulted with modded [[Platform/PlayStation2 PS2]] and Platform/{{Xbox}} consoles. This can still be quite handy should the DVD drive start to fail as it requires much less work from it. However, some games actually ''slow down'' when played off the hard drive. ''VideoGame/Halo3'', in particular, outright calls people that install the game to their hard drives idiots. This is because the 360, like the original Xbox before it, has dedicated "cache space" on the hard drive. If a game gets a full install, then it may still try to use that cache space - but instead of copying from the disc drive to the HDD (in which case the two drives can operate simultaneously), it's copying from the HDD to the same HDD (and the read/write operations can't happen at the same time). Programmers could, in theory, tweak their games to disable caching for full installs (in which case there'd be a hands-down performance improvement), but the ''Halo 3'' coders did their work before such installs were possible (and have no apparent interest in releasing a patch).
* As noted above, many of the original [=PlayStation=] games suffered from this, as it was one of the first CD-based consoles. [[http://kotaku.com/hey-sony-please-add-a-fast-forward-button-to-ps1-class-472989362 Even the PSN re-releases are guilty.]]
* Platform/PlayStationPortable games in general tend to suffer long load times due to the slow speed of the UMD drive, which is all the more silly considering it is a ''handheld''. If you want to play during a 30-minute train ride, you want to start as fast as possible and not waste half of that time just to load the game.
** People often install custom firmware on their [=PSPs=], rip their games from the UMD in .iso format, put them on relatively expensive high-capacity and speed Memory Sticks, and run games off of them just to alleviate the load times. Although it is fun to watch ''VideoGame/CrisisCore'' load faster than the load screen can be displayed. Ripped games can in .iso format or .cso format- .cso files are much smaller, helpful for those with smaller memory sticks, but take significantly longer to load than .iso's. Sony seems to have done this as well -- the PSP Go does not have a UMD drive. Instead, all games are loaded off of memory sticks. But your old UMD library? Worthless. You had to buy the games again. Digital copies were retroactively made an option for disc-based [=PSPs=] too. Unfortunately, it also meant that you need to invest in a few extra large memory sticks. And yes, you needed to buy the games again even if you already own them on UMD; Sony's not giving you an option to trade in your physical UMD for downloadable content.
** PSP load times seemed to be getting better over the years. As an example, ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTactics: [[UpdatedRerelease War of the Lions]]'' loads faster than the original PSX release.
** On a loading related note, installing data to the memory stick helps improve load times for bigger games, if given the option (and you have enough memory). Such titles include ''VideoGame/DissidiaFinalFantasy'', ''Gundam vs Gundam NEXT Plus'', and ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsBirthBySleep''.
** Accessing [[Website/TVTropes This Very Wiki]] with your PSP will take long to load sometimes.
** The Vita actually ''lowers'' the loading times for some PSP games. As for the Vita games themselves...they seem to have gotten ''longer''.
* This is one of the reasons James "WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd" Rolfe slams the Platform/SegaCD in his review of it.
** This specifically resulted from the Sega CD using a ''single''-speed CD-ROM drive, as this was before CD-ROM technology was affordable or advanced. The Neo Geo CD also used one, and is similarly notorious for atrocious loading times that get worse the newer and bigger the game is. Good luck trying to play ''The Last Blade'' on it.
** Platform/NeoGeo CD. For games where it only had to load each level, like ''VideoGame/AeroFighters 3'' or ''VideoGame/MetalSlug'', it was okay. For fighting games, it'd take about half a minute for each fight. For ''Franchise/TheKingOfFighters'' games, it took the same time for each ''round''.
** Single speed on the Sega CD was better than the double speed on the Saturn and [=PlayStation=]. Both 32-bit consoles had a mean average of 4MB of RAM and could load about 300KB per second, meaning it takes about 13 seconds to fill RAM. The Sega CD had 896KB (Base Genesis (128KB) + Sega CD Main RAM (768KB)) and could load about 150KB per second, meaning it takes about 6 seconds to fill RAM.
* The Platform/{{Wii}} has this. Not a specific game on the Wii, the programs on the Wii itself. There's fairly ridiculous load times just to browse the shop channel, along with some of the other online functions, such as videos on the Nintendo Channel (why does it only buffer when you reach the point that the video has loaded up to so far, and then stop after a few seconds?).\\\
Explainable in some of the cases, like the shop channel, which is really just a glorified website (which, due to the fact that you could connect to it from a PC before Nintendo started requiring authentication, means it's not stored locally, and websites do take time to transfer and load). It wouldn't be surprising if some of the other channels are the same way, and given the Wii's software layout, is likely the better choice over having it take up precious space in the 512MB NAND flash memory that also stores channels, saves, and the various [=OSes=]?\\\
Just getting to the control panel used to be pretty slow back at launch. It seems to have gotten a little faster through firmware updates. The Wii also has a relatively puny amount of RAM (a measly 88MB), about as much memory as you'd find in a late-1990s PC. This maximized the need to swap data in and out of RAM a lot.

* Nintendo went out of their way to avert this, particularly notably with the Platform/Nintendo64, which continued to use cartridges long after the others began using [=CD=]s, simply because the load times were significantly less (and they were much harder to pirate). The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the Platform/NintendoGameCube and the Platform/{{Wii}} as Nintendo employed constant angular velocity (CAV) as opposed to the constant linear velocity (CLV) used elsewhere. CAV has the advantage of having higher data rates toward the center of the disk, rather than a constant data rate from CLV.

Unlike C64 and Atari examples, however, there were only about ten games released on a cartridge for Spectrum (and even those required a rather rare and expensive Interface 2 extension), so most fans had to bear with tapes or invest into a floppy drive, which were (except for those in late Amstrad models), while generally much better that C64 one, even more expensive, and could cost more then a Speccy itself.
* Creator/{{Konami}} is notorious for insanely long boot times in their ''VideoGame/DanceDanceRevolution'' arcade games. System 573-based games usually take 10+ minutes to boot up. When they switched ''DDR'' to Platform/PlayStation2-based hardware, it only got worse - ''Supernova'' can take up to half an hour. By comparison, ''VideoGame/PumpItUp Exceed 1'' takes...about 15 seconds. Konami's M2 arcade games suffer from slow CD loading, which is probably one reason why the console version of the M2 became {{Vaporware}}.
* Creator/{{Capcom}}'s CP System III[[note]]home to ''VideoGame/RedEarth'', ''VideoGame/JoJosBizarreAdventureHeritageForTheFuture'', and ''VideoGame/StreetFighterIII''[[/note]] arcade board used CD-[=ROMs=] for its games. While this came with the advantage of larger games -- size constraints plagued the CP System II in its later years -- it also meant potential load times which wouldn't be good for UsefulNotes/{{arcade game}}s. Capcom tried to get around this by making games install themselves into the board's memory, thus avoiding in-game load times entirely, but this resulted in '''''25- to 45-minute''''' install times[[note]]though the install screens [[BlatantLies claim]] to take only 15-20 minutes which is still long[[/note]]! Worse yet, if you wanted to play a different game (a heavily advertised feature of the CPS-3 was the ability to switch games as long as you had the right amount of memory chips), you needed to go through the whole process '''again'''. This, combined with its [[DigitalPiracyIsEvil infamous suicide battery cart]] that would go off at the slightest provocation contributed to the board's commercial failure.
* The Platform/Atari8BitComputers, especially in Poland, where they remained alive the longest. Ask anyone in that country who was an Atari gamer in the early nineties, and nine times out of ten you'll hear stories of an entire family gathered around the Atari for a half-hour, being careful not to make any loud noises or sudden movements, and praying that this time the game will load without errors. Much like the C64, though, the loading problem with Atari computers could be circumvented by only using cartridge-based software.
* The 3DS has rather long loading times, due to its low amount of RAM (128MB), and expanded feature set compared to, say, its predecessor, the DS. The Web Browser, particularly, is nearly unusable with modern websites that expect a modern PC on the other end, and it doesn't even try to load mobile sites. The New 3DS includes a faster processor and double the RAM, making things much better.
* The Platform/WiiU has comparatively long loading times in between screens, and navigating the menu. This has gotten enough complaints that Nintendo promised to fix it in a future patch. The worst offender is accessing the [=vWii=] compatibility mode- it takes up to 30 seconds of blackness before the Wii menu appears. Nintendo recognizes this, and has added certain features to lessen the pain. For example, the Quick Start menu shows you any new [=SpotPass=] software downloaded while you were away, or lets you boot directly to a game, while the Wii U's operating system loads in the background. The eShop, while far faster than the Wii's Shop Channel ever was, has a little matching game to help you pass the time. You might even find yourself wanting the loading screen back.
* Extremely common in {{Mobile Phone Game}}s. Though it can be circumvented by, of course, larger RAM and processor or simply allocating at least 4 GB in Bluestacks (Android emulator).
* The Platform/NintendoDS managed to avoid long loading times for the most part, with the glaring exception of DS Download Play. This feature allowed for wireless multiplayer with only one player needing to own a copy of the game. Since large amounts of game data had to be sent from Player 1's game card to everyone else's DS systems, long and frequent load times were usually required. Even the best games suffered from load times upwards of a minute long for things that would load instantly in single player or multi-card play.

* ''VideoGame/BlazBlue'':

** Blazblue: EXTEND for the Vita isn't much better, requiring more than twice as long as the console versions before every fight.

* ''VideoGame/EternalChampions: Challenge from the Dark Side'' suffered from the Sega CD's single-speed CD-ROM drive, taking a lengthy amount of time to load between matches, and then further seconds (which halted the action and sound dead in their tracks) if a finishing move was triggered.

* The Platform/NeoGeo CD ports of ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters'' games, which have loading times so frequent and so ridiculously long (20 to 30 seconds, due to the [=CD=]s slow single speed drive) that it slows the pacing of all the games to a crawl. The website "The Video Game Critic" even gave the ports very low ratings for this alone, as opposed to the solid reviews given to the cartridge versions, because the loads are just that detrimental to the experience.

** ''VideoGame/MortalKombatTrilogy'' on the [=PS1=], dear lord. The game had to load on ''[[PunctuatedForEmphasis EVERY. SINGLE. SCREEN.]]'' Have you picked your fighter yet? ''Loading Versus Screen'', have you entered your codes on the versus screen? ''Loading Stage Backgrounds'', have you defeated your enemy already? ''Loading '''next enemy screen''''', have you seen who's your next enemy yet? ''Loading Stage B''- ''FUCK THIS!'' And if you think that's bad, then let me tell you the game even had to load when Shang Tsung transformed into another character. To combat this, you had the option of limiting yourself to the characters you wanted to morph into, which could allow the game to just preload the data for those characters.
** The Sega CD port of the first ''Mortal Kombat'' is guilty of having excess loading, too. This most commonly happens whenever one of the fighters performs a FinishingMove, but the game will also load a new set of sprites when Shang Tsung transforms.
** The Switch version of ''VideoGame/MortalKombat1'' can get to more than ''30 seconds'' of loading -- longer than, for example, ''The King of Fighters '98 on the Neo Geo CD''. [[https://youtu.be/EKxTiDORG64 See for yourself.]]

* ''[[VideoGame/SoulSeries Soulcalibur: Lost Swords]]'' has loading times that reach just over a minute in length. Putting into consideration that it doesn't look much better than ''Soulcalibur V'', we're left to assume that either the game's trying to connect to it's servers and having a problem doing so.

** The Saturn version of ''SFA 2'' also has plenty of loading screens. It does have an option to cut out most of the bits between battles to cut the loading to a minimum though.
** Endless loading screens were also a common complaint with the [=PlayStation=] version of the first ''VideoGame/StreetFighterAlpha''.
** ''VideoGame/StreetFighterIV'' (at least the [=PS3=] version) doesn't have ''that'' long loading times, but in the arcade mode, you're required to re-select a character each time you lose and select "continue". Over time (and especially against [[SNKBoss Seth]]), those 25 seconds of loading for a new match will start to feel like forever. [[{{Aesop}} Moral of the story]]: Allow players to select "continue with the same character" to avoid reloading.
* ''VideoGame/StreetFighterII'' for the Platform/{{Amiga}} came on four floppy disks and made players engage in plenty of disk-swapping action between fights. The ports of ''Super Street Fighter II'' and ''Turbo'' upped the number of disks to seven and eleven, though these at least allowed HD installation.
* The otherwise superb ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosBrawl'' suffers from this.
** Transforming characters also take longer to load than they did in ''Melee''. If multiple characters transform at once, the loading time will even increase for all involved. Additionally, scrolling through the various alternate colours for your character will add on to the loading time for the match for some reason. One reason there are no more transforming characters in the 3DS/[=WiiU=] version is to cut down on otherwise unpredictable load times.
** The game's creator apparently acknowledged that little point on the development blog, mentioning that the loading process begins as soon as characters are selected in an attempt to cut down on the time spent on the loading screen and that changing settings caused the "masking" of the loading time to not work as well. This is because ''Brawl'' was the first dual-layer disc the Platform/{{Wii}} had. The Wii's disc reading laser has to focus between one layer and the other to load data on different layers, adding considerably to the loading time.
** It takes Super Smash Bros. 3DS exactly ''thirty seconds'' just to load the title screen. That's because the game is so huge it turns off the 3DS's background OS and boots into a minimal version of the OS just to guarantee it has enough RAM to load the game. As a result of this minimal mode, it takes 5-10 seconds to return to the 3DS home menu (because it has to start the home menu!) The New 3DS, with 2x the RAM of the original, thankfully cuts loading times by at least half all across the game (14 seconds to load to title as opposed to 30), and no longer needs to reboot the system into a minimal mode, making the experience much smoother.
* The [=PlayStation=] ports of ''VideoGame/XMenVsStreetFighter'', ''VideoGame/MarvelSuperHeroesVsStreetFighter'' and ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom'' also saw gratuitous loading, enough so that the gameplay suffered horribly. Such gameplay sacrifices include only 2 unique characters for 2P VS (one unique with the other two used by your opponent), long load times in between matches, and near-dead stops during the fights, especially for very graphic-intensive [[LimitBreak super combos]]. The Platform/SegaSaturn versions of the first two games avoided such issues only by making the 4 MB RAM cartridge a requirement. Luckily, the Dreamcast came out just in time for Capcom to develop an arcade-perfect version of ''Marvel vs. Capcom'' (although they still released a load-happy PSX version alongside it), and its sequel was developed on a Dreamcast-only arcade board, rendering these issues obsolete.

* The Platform/Commodore64 was the king of this trope. Long load times were actually ''inherent'' to the design - the floppy drive went from having four data lines in the original design to ''one'' by the time of release, ''quadrupling'' the load times already inflicted by the floppy format. Tapes were even worse. If you plan on playing any C64 games, do it in an emulator with turbo mode or have a fast loader cartridge handy for those who insist on using original hardware.
** The original [=IEE488=] interface used on the Commodore [=PET=] was expensive to implement, and required equally expensive and clunky cables that were only available from a few sources, so they tried to design a simpler, lower-cost serial interface for the [=VIC-20=]. Unfortunately, they discovered at the last minute that there was a flaw in one of the serial-bus chips they'd used, and the only way to ship on schedule was to intentionally slow down the data rate far enough that the flaw wouldn't occur. Once that was done, [[StatusQuoIsGod backwards compatibility]] dictated that even after they fixed the flaw in the chips, every computer and disk drive made after that ''still'' had to run at the same glacial speeds so the drives would still be compatible with the million-plus [=VIC-20s=] already sold and shipped, and so that [=VIC-20=] users could upgrade to the [=C64=] without having to replace their $400+ disk drives too.

* The Platform/Xbox360 officially integrated this feature in a firmware update - though it requires that the disc for the game you wish to play be in the DVD drive to function [[DigitalPiracyIsEvil to prevent the rampant piracy]] that often resulted with modded [[Platform/PlayStation2 PS2]] and Platform/{{Xbox}} consoles. This can still be quite handy should the DVD drive start to fail as it requires much less work from it. However, some games actually ''slow down'' when played off the hard drive. ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'', in particular, outright calls people that install the game to their hard drives idiots. This is because the 360, like the original Xbox before it, has dedicated "cache space" on the hard drive. If a game gets a full install, then it may still try to use that cache space - but instead of copying from the disc drive to the HDD (in which case the two drives can operate simultaneously), it's copying from the HDD to the same HDD (and the read/write operations can't happen at the same time). Programmers could, in theory, tweak their games to disable caching for full installs (in which case there'd be a hands-down performance improvement), but the ''Halo 3'' coders did their work before such installs were possible (and have no apparent interest in releasing a patch).

* Platform/PlayStationPortable games in general tend to suffer long load times due to the slow speed of the UMD drive, which is all the more silly considering it is a ''handheld''. If you want to play during a 30 minute train ride, you want to start as fast as possible and not waste half of that time just to load the game.
** People often install custom firmware on their [=PSPs=], rip their games from the UMD in .iso format, put them on relatively expensive high-capacity and speed Memory Sticks, and run games off of them just to alleviate the load times. Although it is fun to watch ''VideoGame/CrisisCore'' load faster than the load screen can be displayed. Ripped games can in .iso format or .cso format- .cso files are much smaller, helpful for those with smaller memory sticks, but take significantly longer to load than .iso's. Sony seems to have done this as well - the PSP Go does not have a UMD drive. Instead, all games are loaded off of memory sticks. But your old UMD library? Worthless. You had to buy the games again. Digital copies were retroactively made an option for disc-based [=PSPs=] too. Unfortunately, it also meant that you need to invest in a few extra large memory sticks. And yes, you needed to buy the games again even if you already own them on UMD; Sony's not giving you an option to trade in your physical UMD for downloadable content.

** Accessing Website/ThisVeryWiki with your PSP will take long to load sometimes.

** Platform/NeoGeo CD. For games where it only had to load each level, like ''VideoGame/AeroFighters 3'' or ''VideoGame/MetalSlug'', it was okay. For fighting games, it'd take about half a minute for each fight. For ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters'' games, it took the same time for each ''round''.

* An obscure ostensibly-7th-generation console system from Creator/{{Mattel}}, the Platform/HyperScan, attempted to [[JustForFun/XMeetsY join]] CollectibleCardGame [[JustForFun/XMeetsY and]] [[VideogameSystems console]] into one. It had specifications in the ballpark of the sixth generation of console systems while trying to compete against the seventh, but loading times were unbearable even for the standard of the previous generation - [[WebVideo/{{Rerez}} Rerez]] tested one and found it took two minutes of loading ''to display the intro logos'', with more loading screens peppered throughout the games. It flopped miserably: the games were not fun to play, the card system was awkward and the absurd loading times certainly didn't help.
* Nintendo went out of their way to avert this, particularly notably with the Platform/{{Nintendo 64}}, which continued to use cartridges long after the others began using [=CD=]s, simply because the load times were significantly less (and they were much harder to pirate). The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the Platform/NintendoGameCube and the Platform/{{Wii}} as Nintendo employed constant angular velocity (CAV) as opposed to the constant linear velocity (CLV) used elsewhere. CAV has the advantage of having higher data rates toward the center of the disk, rather than a constant data rate from CLV.

* Creator/{{Capcom}}'s CP System III[[note]]home to ''VideoGame/{{Red Earth}}'', ''VideoGame/{{Jojos Bizarre Adventure Heritage For The Future}}'' and ''VideoGame/{{Street Fighter III}}''[[/note]] arcade board used Cd-[=ROMs=] for its games. While this came with the advantage of larger games--size constraints plagued the CP System II in its later years--It also meant potential load times which wouldn't be good for {{UsefulNotes/Arcade Game}}s. Capcom tried to get around this by making games install themselves into the board's memory, thus avoiding in-game load times entirely, but this resulted in '''''25 to 45 minute''''' install times[[note]]though the install screens [[BlatantLies claim]] to take only 15-20 minutes which is still long[[/note]]! Worse yet, if you wanted to play a different game (a heavily advertised feature of the CPS-3 was the ability to switch games as long as you had the right amount of memory chips), you needed to go through the whole process '''again'''. This, combined with its [[DigitalPiracyIsEvil infamous suicide battery cart]] that would go off at the slightest provocation contributed to the board's commercial failure.

* The load times of ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossingNewHorizons'' at the title screen have progressively gotten longer and longer as it recieved more and more free content updates. Similar to the Ubisoft example above, this is because the game is checking all of the installed updates: the original load time was something like 10 seconds, but as of mid-2020 it can take over a minute and a half to get to the Isabelle check-in.

** The ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' games do this for travel between areas, but now individual rooms also have to be loaded. The games hide this well by loading the next room as you approach a door, and refusing to open it until the room is ready. This usually just takes a second, so it's not too annoying, but now and then a door will take forever to open, and leave you a sitting duck in the meantime. Also, the loading system was buggy in [[VideoGame/MetroidPrime the original American release of the first game]], liable to crash it if overtaxed. Some of the room loads in ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption'' can leave you standing around for several seconds waiting for the door. This is almost always due to loading a scripted event, so you can usually tell when something's going down just by how long it takes the door to open. The load times greatly improve on the digital version of the ''Metroid Prime Trilogy'' compilation, making most doors open instantly after shooting them and load times via elevators take about 5 to 7 seconds at most. This is mostly due to the games being directly on the hard drive (Platform/WiiU) instead of having to load from a PlatformNintendoGameCube or Platform/{{Wii}} disc.

''"Whensoever games are loaded off disk, whether that be a floppy, a hard drive, or some kind of Platform/BluRay thing, there will be games that take longer to load than to play."''

* Expect to see the animated flower doodle screen most of the time when you play the ''Innersar University'' game, which is exclusive for those who bought a [[Toys/AmericanGirlsCollection My American Girl]] doll. Paying a hundred bucks for you to enter the community is one thing. Being subjected to loading screens every so often, however, is something only a Buddhist monk would be able to tolerate, especially on a slower connection.

* An obscure ostensibly-7th-generation console system from Creator/{{Mattel}}, the UsefulNotes/HyperScan, attempted to [[JustForFun/XMeetsY join]] CollectibleCardGame [[JustForFun/XMeetsY and]] [[VideogameSystems console]] into one. It had specifications in the ballpark of the sixth generation of console systems while trying to compete against the seventh, but loading times were unbearable even for the standard of the previous generation - [[WebVideo/{{Rerez}} Rerez]] tested one and found it took two minutes of loading ''to display the intro logos'', with more loading screens peppered throughout the games. It flopped miserably: the games were not fun to play, the card system was awkward and the absurd loading times certainly didn't help.

* The UsefulNotes/Atari8BitComputers, especially in Poland, where they remained alive the longest. Ask anyone in that country who was an Atari gamer in the early nineties, and nine times out of ten you'll hear stories of an entire family gathered around the Atari for a half-hour, being careful not to make any loud noises or sudden movements, and praying that this time the game will load without errors. Much like the C64, though, the loading problem with Atari computers could be circumvented by only using cartridge-based software.

->''"If cartridges were still popular, this game would have finished loading by now."''[[note]]Ironically, this game was later ported to the cartridge-based UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, but only digitally aside from a small print from Limited Run Games. The message was removed in that version.[[/note]]

''"Whensoever games are loaded off disk, whether that be a floppy, a hard drive, or some kind of UsefulNotes/BluRay thing, there will be games that take longer to load than to play."''

Load times for cartridge-programmed games are an ''extremely'' complicated issue. Cartridges work, in theory, by allowing the system to access data near-instantly (as fast as electricity can travel through the solid-state ROM chips used to store the game data). Though some consoles like the N64 used slow rom which means that the CPU didn't have access to the ROM directly: It can only stream items that don't require fast memory, like sound or animation and load everything else in RAM. The problem is that solid-state memory is not nearly as fast as dynamic RAM (except for the NES, SNES, UsefulNotes/TurboGrafx16, and GBA), so most of the time, the CPU can't work with it - it has to run off of program code stored in RAM. Moving data from solid-state to RAM takes time, and while it's not nearly as bad as long disc-based load times, it can add up... especially on the GBA, which has cartridges storing up to 32 megabytes (''VideoGame/Mother3''), for a system that only has 256 ''kilo''bytes of RAM. Decompression times can also bottle neck graphics

This was ''less'' of a problem on UsefulNotes/Xbox360 and UsefulNotes/PlayStation3 onwards, as they work by installing from the disc to the hard drive-- once that's done, the disc is only used for checking that you own the game. For about a decade that was the only advancement... then the UsefulNotes/PlayStation5 and the UsefulNotes/XboxSeriesXAndS arrived, which both utilize Solid State Drives to their fullest potential for lightning-fast load times: certain games can have practically instant loads of levels that would previously take 30 seconds or more. Time will tell how much this will proliferate to other platforms like PC and handhelds, but for now the 9th Generation consoles are reaping the benefits (and making the games that don't take advantage stand out even more).

* The UsefulNotes/PlayStation version of ''VideoGame/BloodOmenLegacyOfKain'' suffers heavily from this. Other games in the series range from short to barely existent loading times. ''Soul Reaver'' in particular only has one loading screen, when you first load the save, after which all new environments are streamed as you come to them, with nary a hiccup. The problem does persist even while playing the one bought off of PSN. Strangely enough, it seems playing it on the PSP cuts loading time in half. The PC version (released a year later) had almost zero loading times.

** ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaIISimonsQuest'': The Japanese version, which was released for the [[UsefulNotes/NintendoEntertainmentSystem Famicom Disk System]], had players [[https://legendsoflocalization.com/avgn/castlevania-ii/#what-a-horrible-night-to-have-a-disk sit through a simple, static loading screen]] whenever they entered a new area. This could quickly add up if, say, an enemy knocked Simon off-screen with a projectile, which could sometimes happen mere seconds after loading finished. On top of this, loading some areas also required you to switch which side of the disk was in. If you were knocked off-screen after that, you'd have to switch disk sides ''twice'' to get back: once to load the previous area, and again to load the one you were in. Soon, the load times became notorious among Japanese players, even to this day. The North American and European/Australian versions for the cartridge-based UsefulNotes/{{N|intendoEntertainmentSystem}}ES eliminated loading altogether, but were instead infamous for a BlindIdiotTranslation that sometimes made it harder to complete the game.

%% * ''Superman: Man of Steel'' for the ''UsefulNotes/Commodore64''.
* The video game adaptation of ''WesternAnimation/FindingNemo'' on the UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube took a stupidly long time to load levels. Perhaps the game's usage of recorded audio as opposed to MIDI music that contributes to the load times.

** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'' has some pretty lengthy load times when loading into the overworld since it's basically loading the entire massive map. On the UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch version, loading into the overworld from the main menu can take roughly 30 seconds and it's a few seconds quicker if one loads into the overworld from a shrine or other enclosed location. However, playing the downloaded version of the game loads everything a few seconds quicker than it does on the cartridge version due to the console having immediate access to the data whereas the data on the cartridge version needs to be pulled from it.

* The UsefulNotes/PlayStation3 and UsefulNotes/Xbox360 versions of ''VideoGame/MiddleEarthShadowOfMordor'', due to being ran on less powerful hardware, have ''insanely'' long load times ranging from 10 to 15 seconds every time the player exits the pause menu, transitions missions, dies, reloads a save slot, and even ''between cutscenes''.

* ''VideoGame/TheAdventuresOfWillyBeamish'' for the UsefulNotes/SegaCD had such gratuitous load times that the game, itself, came with a sort of distracting screen saver, referred to as "Laser Balls," which could be called up at any time with a press of the Start button.

* ''VideoGame/StarWarsEpisodeIRacer'' for the UsefulNotes/SegaDreamcast hit what must be some sort of zenith, with loading screens constantly interrupting the '''ending credits'''.

* The UsefulNotes/NeoGeo CD ports of ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters'' games, which have loading times so frequent and so ridiculously long (20 to 30 seconds, due to the [=CD=]s slow single speed drive) that it slows the pacing of all the games to a crawl. The website "The Video Game Critic" even gave the ports very low ratings for this alone, as opposed to the solid reviews given to the cartridge versions, because the loads are just that detrimental to the experience.

* ''VideoGame/StreetFighterII'' for the UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} came on four floppy disks and made players engage in plenty of disk-swapping action between fights. The ports of ''Super Street Fighter II'' and ''Turbo'' upped the number of disks to seven and eleven, though these at least allowed HD installation.

** The game's creator apparently acknowledged that little point on the development blog, mentioning that the loading process begins as soon as characters are selected in an attempt to cut down on the time spent on the loading screen and that changing settings caused the "masking" of the loading time to not work as well. This is because ''Brawl'' was the first dual-layer disc the UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} had. The Wii's disc reading laser has to focus between one layer and the other to load data on different layers, adding considerably to the loading time.

* The [=PlayStation=] ports of ''VideoGame/XMenVsStreetFighter'', ''VideoGame/MarvelSuperHeroesVsStreetFighter'' and ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom'' also saw gratuitous loading, enough so that the gameplay suffered horribly. Such gameplay sacrifices include only 2 unique characters for 2P VS (one unique with the other two used by your opponent), long load times in between matches, and near-dead stops during the fights, especially for very graphic-intensive [[LimitBreak super combos]]. The UsefulNotes/SegaSaturn versions of the first two games avoided such issues only by making the 4 MB RAM cartridge a requirement. Luckily, the Dreamcast came out just in time for Capcom to develop an arcade-perfect version of ''Marvel vs. Capcom'' (although they still released a load-happy PSX version alongside it), and its sequel was developed on a Dreamcast-only arcade board, rendering these issues obsolete.

* Another example of a cartridge game requiring loading: ''VideoGame/AlienVsPredator'' for the UsefulNotes/AtariJaguar. When you first selected a campaign, it needed to load up the "simulation," and any time you rode an elevator or entered/exited an air duct, be prepared for the action to freeze for several seconds while the new area is loaded.

* ''VideoGame/DeusExInvisibleWar'' doesn't as much load a new level as restart the game with the correct level loaded. Additionally, even over half a decade after it's release, it still takes quite a bit of time to load a new level on a modern, high-end computer, and the levels in the game small because it was made for the [=64mb=] of RAM the UsefulNotes/{{Xbox}} had, so you'll have to load a lot, especially compared to ''VideoGame/DeusEx'', which had large, open levels and loaded quickly. Plus, there's about a 1 in 20 chance that the game will simply not start up again once it's done loading, deleting the last autosave but not making a new one.

* In the UsefulNotes/Xbox360 port of ''VideoGame/QuakeIV'', the lengthy intro cutscene is unskippable, among others, plus the countless loading screens between chapters.

* ''Videogame/CrashBandicootTheWrathOfCortex'': Many of the levels can be completed faster than their load times. [=PlayStation=] magazines used it as the yardstick for bad loading times for years afterward. Apparently the reason for this was because the developers had initially implemented a minigame within the loading screen (where you could control Crash falling and collecting incoming wumpa fruit), however [[ScrewedByTheLawyers an alleged patent by Namco to utilise playable loading screens forced them to take it out last minute]] with not enough time to refine the coding to run quicker. It certainly didn't help that the game was released on a CD, when most [=PS2=] games were already then being released on [=DVDs=]. The loading times were improved for the Greatest Hits re-release of the game, as well as the UsefulNotes/{{Xbox}} and [[UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube GameCube]] versions.

** The ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' games do this for travel between areas, but now individual rooms also have to be loaded. The games hide this well by loading the next room as you approach a door, and refusing to open it until the room is ready. This usually just takes a second, so it's not too annoying, but now and then a door will take forever to open, and leave you a sitting duck in the meantime. Also, the loading system was buggy in [[VideoGame/MetroidPrime the original American release of the first game]], liable to crash it if overtaxed. Some of the room loads in ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption'' can leave you standing around for several seconds waiting for the door. This is almost always due to loading a scripted event, so you can usually tell when something's going down just by how long it takes the door to open. The load times greatly improve on the digital version of the ''Metroid Prime Trilogy'' compilation, making most doors open instantly after shooting them and load times via elevators take about 5 to 7 seconds at most. This is mostly due to the games being directly on the hard drive (UsefulNotes/WiiU) instead of having to load from a UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube or UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} disc.
** ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeHunters'' tries to use small empty hallways between rooms to disguise the loading. It does not work, as you can often spend as much as 10 seconds standing at the door waiting for the damn thing to open, particularly if one of the other Hunters or Guardians are in the next room. Keep in mind this is on a ''UsefulNotes/NintendoDS cart''.

* ''VideoGame/MickeyMania'' features loading screens where Mickey stares at his watch for a few seconds or reads the script before the start of each level in every version of the game except for the UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis version. While the UsefulNotes/SegaCD and UsefulNotes/PlayStation versions of the game at least have the excuse of being early CD-based games, this feature is most infamous in the [[UsefulNotes/SuperNintendoEntertainmentSystem SNES]] version, which uses a cartridge similar to the Genesis version.

** The loading screens for the UsefulNotes/SegaSaturn version of ''[[VideoGame/Sonic3DFlickiesIsland Sonic 3D Blast]]'' can run for as long as 30 seconds. The [[UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis Genesis]] version of the game has no loading screens due to being on a cartridge, the Japanese release of the Saturn version slightly shortened the loading times, and the PC version significantly shortened them.

* ''Beat City'' for the UsefulNotes/NintendoDS has this problem which is somewhat odd for a cartridge based handheld game, and especially one that's clearly inspired by ''VideoGame/RhythmHeaven'', a game with next to no loading times on the same system.

* ''VideoGame/InTheGroove'' had this problem in its UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 port - mainly because it has an elaborate 3D menu system for song selection. In addition, when compared to ''VideoGame/DanceDanceRevolution'' which masked its short loading times with AnnouncerChatter, audience cheering, and animations, ''VideoGame/InTheGroove'' has a "Loading..." screen and a plain black screen which goes on for several seconds, which can easily be mistaken for hardware failure. They're also optimized for going forward, so backtracking, especially from the mod menu back to the song select menu, are the slowest load times.

* ''VideoGame/DragonQuestVIII'' had some of the worst loading times of any UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 RPG. The world map is incredibly large and detailed, but loading times are the tradeoff. What's more, there are actually ''three'' world maps -- one on foot, one on boat and one from the air. If you got off your boat at the wrong place by accident, it could take you over 30 seconds to get back on and start sailing again. And there's no loading animation; the screen is just plain black. Counting the time with any animation onscreen that you have to wait for, it seems to take an average of 15 seconds to load your saved game, 10 seconds to enter or leave a town, 3-10 seconds to enter a building (depending on its size), 7-10 seconds to reload a town after exiting a building, and at least 15 seconds to teleport anywhere with Zoom or a Chimera Wing. Additionally, during battles there may be a pause between actions that can last as long as 4 seconds, during which nothing but the camera will be moving. This also happens when you use the orb to fly over the world map. You can actually hear half of the world map's BGM before it finally finishes loading the screen.

** ''VideoGame/PokemonStadium 2'' had a feature to play the Pokémon UsefulNotes/GameBoy games on your TV. It let the player choose between loading just a little bit before starting and interrupting the game by loading stuff, or loading a lot before starting, thus allowing the game to be interrupted less frequently. ''Pokémon Stadium'' also had this feature, but only with the option to load everything at once. Although, loading times were noticeably shorter in this game.

* ''VideoGame/{{Summoner}}'' for the UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 fell into this. Imagine a MMORPG, but it's single player. The world was huge and immersive and genuinely fun to explore at times, but the loading, the Loads And Loads Of Loading horrible, horrible loading...

* The UsefulNotes/PlayStation port of the arcade game ''Viewpoint'' is notorious for excessive loading. Each time you die, you're going to be greeted with a loading screen.

* ''Hot Shots Golf 5'' on the UsefulNotes/PlayStation3. The loading times aren't bad, but they're not great. So why is it worth a mention? Because of the ~15 minute mandatory initial install. It has about the same graphics as ''Mario Golf'' on the [=GameCube=], on a ''way'' more powerful system, with 5GB of information loaded on the system's hard drive (thus theoretically averting the main disadvantage of the system: slow disc read times), and it still has slower load times overall. So the otherwise bearable spoonfuls and spoonfuls of loading wouldn't normally feel so bad, they're disheartening after loads and loads of install.

* The PC version of ''VideoGame/SplinterCellDoubleAgent'' had loading times for different sections in the menu. That's right: going from, say, "sound options" to "keyboard options", then "load game"? That's 3 loading animations. The UsefulNotes/WiiU version of ''Blacklist'' had loading times ranging from 40 seconds to A FULL MINUTE.

* ''[[VisualNovel/CorpseParty Corpse Party: Blood Drive]]'', despite being a cartridge-based UsefulNotes/PlaystationVita game, has a "NOW LOADING" screen for every possible screen transition: Including opening the main menu and navigating to/from each sub-menu.

* ''Film/MenInBlackII: Alien Escape'' for the UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 had load time comparable to the Commodore 64. It takes 10 seconds to load the briefing of a mission and then [[https://youtu.be/gLaR5CMkU-0?t=311 30 more]] to finally load the level.

* ''Video Chess'', a first-party title for the UsefulNotes/Atari2600, has some of the longest load times ever recorded for any video game under certain conditions -- those being, if you're playing on a real Atari system and the game difficulty is turned to the highest setting, owing to the primitive power of the system coupled with the age-forgotten complexity of just how demanding a chess algorithm can ''be'' -- being clocked in at [[ExaggeratedTrope ten hours]] for moves that the CPU has particular trouble thinking around. Making the wait more painful, the game doesn't have the memory to both display the board and think at the same time, so it has a loading animation [[SensoryAbuse turning the entire screen into a flashing solid color]].

* One of the main issues of ''Series/{{Tweenies}}: Game Time'' for the [[UsefulNotes/PlayStation PS1]] is the sheer abundance of loading screens, including one that appears before the screen asking the player if they want to play the same mini-game again. One of the game's glitches [[GameBreakingBug causes the game to be stuck on the loading screen forever]], [[HaveYouTriedRebooting requiring the player to reset the game to get out of it]].

* The UsefulNotes/Commodore64 was the king of this trope. Long load times were actually ''inherent'' to the design - the floppy drive went from having four data lines in the original design to ''one'' by the time of release, ''quadrupling'' the load times already inflicted by the floppy format. Tapes were even worse. If you plan on playing any C64 games, do it in an emulator with turbo mode or have a fast loader cartridge handy for those who insist on using original hardware.

* The original UsefulNotes/{{Xbox}} set out to avoid this by allowing games "cache space" on the internal HDD - data could be copied there for fast access during gameplay. But games which actually ''used'' this feature took forever to initially fire up (eg ''VideoGame/{{Fable|I}}, VideoGame/NinjaGaiden''), as it basically amounted to copying a few hundred megabytes in one massive loading spree (it still generally did a better job than the [=PS2=], due to a superior DVD drive - the Xbox knocks about a minute off ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas San Andreas']]'' start time, for example). Both systems could be modified to run entire games off a HDD, obliterating load times and removing the need to get up and swap discs.
* The UsefulNotes/PlayStation3 inherited this feature, with some games requiring an install time of 20 minutes or more the first time you play them. In this case, it's because the Blu-Ray discs are very data heavy (more specifically, the [=PS3=]'s Blu-ray Disc drive operates at approximately 9 MB/s, while the Xbox 360's DVD drive reaches 15.85 MB/s, seriously compromising performance of multiplatform titles on the former, and furthermore, game developers have declared that the 360 drive's data transfer speed is already low for their needs...), and therefore take longer to access. In an effort to prevent long loading sections, the games are installed to the hard drive, or pre-loaded. Then games like Uncharted 2 come along and just blow that out of the water (it doesn't install at all, and has no loading time after you start playing).
* The UsefulNotes/Xbox360 officially integrated this feature in a firmware update - though it requires that the disc for the game you wish to play be in the DVD drive to function [[DigitalPiracyIsEvil to prevent the rampant piracy]] that often resulted with modded [[UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 PS2]] and UsefulNotes/{{Xbox}} consoles. This can still be quite handy should the DVD drive start to fail as it requires much less work from it. However, some games actually ''slow down'' when played off the hard drive. ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'', in particular, outright calls people that install the game to their hard drives idiots. This is because the 360, like the original Xbox before it, has dedicated "cache space" on the hard drive. If a game gets a full install, then it may still try to use that cache space - but instead of copying from the disc drive to the HDD (in which case the two drives can operate simultaneously), it's copying from the HDD to the same HDD (and the read/write operations can't happen at the same time). Programmers could, in theory, tweak their games to disable caching for full installs (in which case there'd be a hands-down performance improvement), but the ''Halo 3'' coders did their work before such installs were possible (and have no apparent interest in releasing a patch).

* UsefulNotes/PlayStationPortable games in general tend to suffer long load times due to the slow speed of the UMD drive, which is all the more silly considering it is a ''handheld''. If you want to play during a 30 minute train ride, you want to start as fast as possible and not waste half of that time just to load the game.

* This is one of the reasons James "WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd" Rolfe slams the UsefulNotes/SegaCD in his review of it.

** UsefulNotes/NeoGeo CD. For games where it only had to load each level, like ''VideoGame/AeroFighters 3'' or ''VideoGame/MetalSlug'', it was okay. For fighting games, it'd take about half a minute for each fight. For ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters'' games, it took the same time for each ''round''.

* The UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} has this. Not a specific game on the Wii, the programs on the Wii itself. There's fairly ridiculous load times just to browse the shop channel, along with some of the other online functions, such as videos on the Nintendo Channel (why does it only buffer when you reach the point that the video has loaded up to so far, and then stop after a few seconds?).\\\

* Nintendo went out of their way to avert this, particularly notably with the UsefulNotes/{{Nintendo 64}}, which continued to use cartridges long after the others began using [=CD=]s, simply because the load times were significantly less (and they were much harder to pirate). The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube and the UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} as Nintendo employed constant angular velocity (CAV) as opposed to the constant linear velocity (CLV) used elsewhere. CAV has the advantage of having higher data rates toward the center of the disk, rather than a constant data rate from CLV.
* UsefulNotes/ZXSpectrum games were loaded from tapes, so you had to go through about half an hour of odd colour patterns and noise until you got to the game proper. And then there were these odd cases where you had to run both sides of the tape, or stop at specific points and continue running them later after some level... Kids today complain about a few seconds, what do they know...
** UsefulNotes/AmstradCPC games were also usually sold on tapes. Frequently, about a quarter of the loading time would consist of '''loading the loading screen'''. And if you were lucky, the end result wouldn't be "R Tape loading error, 0:1" ("Read Error a[or b]" on the Amstrad).

* Creator/{{Konami}} is notorious for insanely long boot times in their ''VideoGame/DanceDanceRevolution'' arcade games. System 573-based games usually take 10+ minutes to boot up. When they switched ''DDR'' to UsefulNotes/PlayStation2-based hardware, it only got worse - ''Supernova'' can take up to half an hour. By comparison, ''VideoGame/PumpItUp Exceed 1'' takes...about 15 seconds. Konami's M2 arcade games suffer from slow CD loading, which is probably one reason why the console version of the M2 became {{Vaporware}}.

* The UsefulNotes/WiiU has comparatively long loading times in between screens, and navigating the menu. This has gotten enough complaints that Nintendo promised to fix it in a future patch. The worst offender is accessing the [=vWii=] compatibility mode- it takes up to 30 seconds of blackness before the Wii menu appears. Nintendo recognizes this, and has added certain features to lessen the pain. For example, the Quick Start menu shows you any new [=SpotPass=] software downloaded while you were away, or lets you boot directly to a game, while the Wii U's operating system loads in the background. The eShop, while far faster than the Wii's Shop Channel ever was, has a little matching game to help you pass the time. You might even find yourself wanting the loading screen back.

* The UsefulNotes/NintendoDS managed to avoid long loading times for the most part, with the glaring exception of DS Download Play. This feature allowed for wireless multiplayer with only one player needing to own a copy of the game. Since large amounts of game data had to be sent from Player 1's game card to everyone else's DS systems, long and frequent load times were usually required. Even the best games suffered from load times upwards of a minute long for things that would load instantly in single player or multi-card play.

* ''Video Chess'', a first-party title for the UsefulNotes/Atari2600, has some of the longest load times ever recorded for any video game under certain conditions -- those being, if you're playing on a real Atari system and the game difficulty is turned to the highest setting, owing to the primitive power of the system coupled with the [[SeinfeldIsUnfunny age-forgotten]] complexity of just how demanding a chess algorithm can ''be'' -- being clocked in at [[ExaggeratedTrope ten hours]] for moves that the CPU has particular trouble thinking around. Making the wait more painful, the game doesn't have the memory to both display the board and think at the same time, so it has a loading animation [[SensoryAbuse turning the entire screen into a flashing solid color]].

** ''VideoGame/MortalKombatTrilogy Mortal Kombat: Trilogy'' on the [=PS1=], dear lord. The game had to load on ''[[PunctuatedForEmphasis EVERY. SINGLE. SCREEN.]]'' Have you picked your fighter yet? ''Loading Versus Screen'', have you entered your codes on the versus screen? ''Loading Stage Backgrounds'', have you defeated your enemy already? ''Loading '''next enemy screen''''', have you seen who's your next enemy yet? ''Loading Stage B''- ''FUCK THIS!'' And if you think that's bad, then let me tell you the game even had to load when Shang Tsung transformed into another character. To combat this, you had the option of limiting yourself to the characters you wanted to morph into, which could allow the game to just preload the data for those characters.

* ''[[VideoGame/MortalKombatTrilogy Mortal Kombat: Trilogy]]'' on [=PS1=], dear lord. The game had to load on ''[[PunctuatedForEmphasis EVERY. SINGLE. SCREEN.]]'' Have you picked your fighter yet? ''Loading Versus Screen'', have you entered your codes on the versus screen? ''Loading Stage Backgrounds'', have you defeated your enemy already? ''Loading '''next enemy screen''''', have you seen who's your next enemy yet? ''Loading Stage B''- ''FUCK THIS!'' And if you think that's bad, then let me tell you the game even had to load when Shang Tsung transformed into another character. To combat this, you had the option of limiting yourself to the characters you wanted to morph into, which could allow the game to just preload the data for those characters.

* When ''VideoGame/WingCommander III'' was released in 1994, a cutting edge PC could take 10 minutes to load each mission. It became common practice to defrag the hard disk between every mission to improve the load times! Going from 8MB of RAM to 16MB dramatically improved the load times, but 16MB was an expensive luxury when this game came out.

* The UsefulNotes/NeoGeo CD ports of ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters'' games, which have loading times so frequent and so ridiculously long (20 to 30 seconds, due to the [=CD=]s slow single speed drive) that it slows the pacing of all the games to a crawl. The VideoGameCritic even gave the ports very low ratings for this alone, as opposed to the solid reviews given to the cartridge versions, because the loads are just that detrimental to the experience.

** The mod for both 1942 and 2 ''VideoGame/ForgottenHope'' pushed this to ridiculous levels. FH1 had loading times that on computers that could load vanilla in a matter of seconds that could easily reach 5 minutes, and god help you with FH2 on setting the cache. Admittedly, both are mods that push their game engines to their absolute limits.

* Creator/{{Konami}} is notorious for insanely long boot times in their ''VideoGame/DanceDanceRevolution'' arcade games. System573-based games usually take 10+ minutes to boot up. When they switched ''DDR'' to UsefulNotes/PlayStation2-based hardware, it only got worse - ''Supernova'' can take up to half an hour. By comparison, ''VideoGame/PumpItUp Exceed 1'' takes...about 15 seconds. Konami's M2 arcade games suffer from slow CD loading, which is probably one reason why the console version of the M2 became {{Vaporware}}.

* Flash cartoons/games in general almost always have "preloaders" that halt the play of the file until it has been fully downloaded. Preloaders that start the video before the loading is done based on the estimated connection speed, similar to the buffering that [[InternetVideo video player panes]] do, are theoretically possible but very rarely used. Some may have mini-animations or small games that take less time to load, and can amuse people in the meantime: the {{Animutation}} ''Suzukisan'' has a short animated loop when it's around 25% loaded, and some the first two WebAnimation/HomestarRunner Halloween toons have really simple games you can play while waiting.

* [[CompilationRerelease Final Fantasy Anthology]] had this problem. Level grinding in it, and particularly hunting Rages on the Veldt in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'', becomes downright impossible unless you have loads of free time and/or patience. both of the games on that set (''Final Fantasy V'' and ''Final Fantasy VI'') took 2-3 seconds to switch from the game, to battle or the main menu, and back again, which was annoying most of the time and in certain areas where you have to open the menu repeatedly, maddening. Especially during {{Timed Mission}}s (such as the Karnak escape in Final Fantasy V or the escape from the FloatingContinent in ''Final Fantasy VI''), where the timer kept going during the loading times. This was because the [=PlayStation=] had only 2MB of RAM and the ROMs were larger.

* Creator/{{Capcom}}'s CP System III[[note]]home to ''VideoGame/{{Red Earth}}'', ''VideoGame/{{Jojos Bizarre Adventure Heritage For The Future}}'' and ''VideoGame/{{Street Fighter III}}''[[/note]] arcade board used Cd-Roms for its games. While this came with the advantage of larger games--size constraints plagued the CP System II in its later years--It also meant potential load times which wouldn't be good for {{UsefulNotes/Arcade Game}}s. Capcom tried to get around this by making games install themselves into the board's memory, thus avoiding in-game load times entirely, but this resulted in '''''25 to 45 minute''''' install times[[note]]though the install screens [[BlatantLies claim]] to take only 15-20 minutes which is still long[[/note]]! Worse yet, if you wanted to play a different game (a heavily advertised feature of the CPS-3 was the ability to switch games as long as you had the right amount of memory chips), you needed to go through the whole process '''again'''. This, combined with its [[DigitalPiracyIsEvil infamous suicide battery cart]] that would go off at the slightest provocation contributed to the board's commercial failure.

''[[ShaggyDogStory ...LOAD]] [[GameBreakingBug ERROR!]] [[HaveYouTriedRebooting PLEASE RESTART...]]''

This is something of a {{cyclic trope}} because of technology changes. Computer gamers of the 1980s learned to loathe the slow-as-molasses tape and floppy disk drives of the era, and cheered when they were replaced by the much faster hard disks. But it didn't take too long for games to take advantage of increasing disk size and grow so big that they took as long to load from the hard disk as their ancestors did from floppies. Solid-state cartridges from the old days had fast random access times that some cases matched or exceeded RAM, leading to near-instantaneous load times, but because solid-state memory costs a lot more than optical disc-based data storage even today, most game cartridges tend to be fairly limited in data capacity (if you thought $60 for a 32-gigabyte UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch game was greedy, wait until you see [[CrackIsCheaper the cost of a 1-terabyte microSD card]][[note]]as of the end of 2020, those can go for upwards of ''$250'' per unit, sometimes even more[[/note]]). Thus, it becomes tempting to compress data for modern cartridge games to make them fit in the limited space, and since most game consoles have equally limited RAM (since that also requires pricy solid-state technology), it can take a long time to uncompress that data. So it goes...

* The original ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'' has a particularly egregious example occurring when the player opens the door to the Butcher's room. This was presumably because the game had to access his infamous utterance [[CatchPhrase "Ahh, fresh meat!"]] on the CD.

** ''VideoGame/PokemonBlackAndWhite'' brings us the Pokémon Global Link/DreamWorld website functionality. It tends to be absolutely ''brutal'' to load even on fast Internet connections. The frequency with which loading is necessary - virtually every screen change, and even twice in some parts of loading the Dream World - is something of a disappointment.
** The original DS and the DS Lite have a top speed of about 12 [=KBytes=] per second, regardless of how much faster the host connection is, so linking one's copy of ''Pokémon Black'' or ''White'' to the Dream World takes a very long time.

* ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsII'' and ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsBirthBySleep'' Final Mix in the 2.5 bundle get hit by this HARD. Using a Summon/D-Link/Drive form can take a very long time to load.
** While Summons and D-Links pause everything else until finished, Drives on the other hand has the standard "knock enemies into the air" effect like in the [=PS2=] versions, but the transformation takes such a long time to load that the slowmotion disappears, and everything starts moving normal again while Sora is still doing his invulnability flex for another 5-10 seconds. Pausing right after transforming fixes the problem but you just replace one type of waiting with another. The 1.5+2.5 version on the [=PS4=] removes this problem completely however.
** And the reaction command "Reversal" somehow became a victim of this too. During 2 certain bosses (Twilight Thorn and Final Xemnas) the bosses shoot some thorn-like attack towards you which you can use "Reversal" to dodge. But sometimes the reaction command takes too long to load. This makes playing a level 1 run on the [=PS3=] way harder as the start of Final Xemnas you are forced into using "Reversal" or the limit with Riku to not instantly die. Once again, the [=PS4=] version fixed the problem.

** This is what makes [[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaCDiGames Zelda's Adventure]] very infamous. Entire seconds are spent loading by going from screen to screen.

* The UsefulNotes/PlayStation version of ''VideoGame/BloodOmenLegacyOfKain'' sufferz heavily from this. Other games in the series range from short to barely existent loading times. ''Soul Reaver'' in particular only has one loading screen, when you first load the save, after which all new environments are streamed as you come to them, with nary a hiccup. The problem does persist even while playing the one bought off of PSN. Strangely enough, it seems playing it on the PSP cuts loading time in half. The PC version (released a year later) had almost zero loading times.

* Flash cartoons/games in general almost always have "preloaders" that halt the play of the file until it has been fully downloaded. Preloaders that start the video before the loading is done based on the estimated connection speed, similar to the buffering that [[InternetVideo video player panes]] do, are theoretically possible but very rarely used. Some may have mini-animations or small games that take less time to load, and can amuse people in the meantime: the WebAnimation/{{Animutation}} ''Suzukisan'' has a short animated loop when it's around 25% loaded, and some the first two WebAnimation/HomestarRunner Halloween toons have really simple games you can play while waiting.

* ''NBA 2K20'' as the longest loading screens of all time beating all of Sonic '06's loading screens with a whopping amount of '''12 hours'''. This believes people that the game is broken.

* ''Superman: Man of Steel'' for the ''UsefulNotes/Commodore64'', something WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd got annoyed at when he reviewed the game for a few levels. Not to be confused with ''[[VideoGame/Superman64 Superman]]'' for the ''UsefulNotes/Nintendo64'', which was bad for other reasons.
* The video game adaptation of ''WesternAnimation/FindingNemo'' on the UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube took a stupidly long time to load levels. Perhaps the game's usage of recorded audio as opposed to MIDI music that contributes to the load times. Music/TommyTallarico and Victor Lucas called this a serious flaw and cracked ToiletHumour jokes at the loading screen picture of Nemo when they reviewed the game.

* ''VideoGame/BrokenSword 3'' had load times of a few minutes every time you entered a new area. As one [[Website/GameFAQs forum user]] put it "[it is]...the incredible loading simulator, starring George Stobbart."

* An obscure ostensibly-7th-generation console system called the Creator/{{Mattel}} [=HyperScan=] attempted to [[JustForFun/XMeetsY join]] CollectibleCardGame [[JustForFun/XMeetsY and]] [[VideogameSystems console]] into one. It had specifications in the ballpark of the sixth generation of console systems while trying to compete against the seventh, but loading times were unbearable even for the standard of the previous generation - [[WebVideo/{{Rerez}} Rerez]] tested one and found it took two minutes of loading ''to display the intro logos'', with more loading screens peppered throughout the games. It flopped miserably: the games were not fun to play, the card system was awkward and the absurd loading times certainly didn't help.