That’s because those old cartridges that you’d slap into the NES were essentially the great-great-great-grandpappies of modern SSDs, the drives you’ll find in a PS5 or Xbox Series X now. In fact, you may be surprised to find that a lot of older games have instant load times, a detail we all have passed over during playthroughs of Super Mario 3. In the original Mega Man titles, load screens were instant – a quick fade to black when entering a level, and then those iconic slides to the next room. But as we move into the next generation of consoles with the PS5 and Xbox Series X (which will likely be the current generation by the time this article is published), which have targeted loading screens with deadly precision using high-speed Solid State Drives (or SSDs), it’s a good time to look back on the good things that came out of loading screens, and what games will lose as they shrink their loading times from minutes to seconds. But they also serve practical purposes – clever developers have constantly found ways to fill these small breaks in content with even more content.

These short breaks between games are at the root of so many emotions that players feel in-game, or at least that’s how they’ve affected me. Loading screens are a staple of gaming they’ve been around since its beginning and have changed incredibly over time.

Time on loading screen skyrim