Alright, Bro! The other night I fired up my original PlayStation — the grey box, the one with the parallel port on the back that nobody ever used, the one that makes that satisfying click when the lid closes. I was in the mood for some Metal Gear Solid. Not the remake. Not the remaster. The 1998 original with the jagged polygons and character models that look like origami folded by someone who had only heard faces described to them secondhand.
And then it happened. The loading screen. Not a quick one — a proper, old-school, “go make a sandwich” loading screen. The PlayStation logo appeared. The black screen sat there. The disc drive made that rhythmic whirr-click-whirr-click sound that is burned into the neural pathways of anyone who grew up with physical media. And I realised something: I missed this. Not ironically. Genuinely. I missed the waiting.
In 2026, everything is instant. I tap a game on my Switch 2 and I am in before my thumb leaves the screen. My retro emulation handheld — loaded with everything from Game Boy Advance to PS2 — boots ROMs faster than the original hardware ever could. Spotify does not buffer. Netflix pre-loads the next episode while you are still watching the current one. We have built a world where waiting is treated as a bug, a failure of optimisation, a problem to be engineered out of existence. And we succeeded. The loading screen is dead. But here is the thing nobody talks about: the loading screen was never just a technical limitation. It was a ritual.
The ritual of the wait
The loading screen was the transition between worlds. Those 30 seconds you spent watching a progress bar inch across the screen — that was not wasted time. That was anticipation. Your brain was shifting gears. You were leaving the real world, with its emails and Teams notifications and the reminder that your road tax expires next month, and entering a world where you were Solid Snake, crawling through a ventilation shaft on Shadow Moses Island, wondering why every guard sounded exactly the same.
Contrast this with my Game Boy Advance — the purple one. My actual handheld. The one that lived in my pocket through countless bus rides and lunch breaks. The GBA had no loading screens. Zero. You flipped the switch and Pokémon was already there, mid-battle, frozen exactly where you left it. That instant-on magic was its own kind of ritual. Not the ritual of waiting, but the ritual of continuity. No interruption. The world carried on. And both rituals — the wait and the instant — served the same purpose: they pulled you deeper into the game. Different paths. Same destination.
Handheld gaming has always had a spot in my heart for exactly this reason. From the Game Boy Color to the Game Boy Advance, from the original Switch to the Switch 2 sitting on my desk right now — the portable consoles understood something that the big living room boxes did not. They understood that gaming is not always about the big cinematic moment. Sometimes it is about the 15 minutes you have between meetings, or the bus ride home, or lying in bed at midnight when you should be sleeping. The loading screen on a handheld was never a problem because you were already there. The game was already running. The world was already loaded. You were just stepping back in.
What instant gratification stole
There is a concept in game design called “juiciness” — the little feedback moments that make an interaction feel satisfying. The thunk of a menu selection. The sparkle when you collect a coin. The loading screen, in its golden age, had its own kind of juiciness. The Resident Evil door animation — that slow, creaking door that took 8 seconds and was secretly hiding an entire level loading behind it. The spinning PlayStation logo that you swore spun faster when the game was almost ready. The loading screen tips so absurdly obvious — “Press X to jump” — that they wrapped around to being profound. These were not bugs. They were breathing room.
And breathing room is the first thing eliminated when you optimise everything down to zero latency. You get from A to B faster. You also arrive at B without having processed A. The journey collapses. Only the destination remains. And the destination, without the journey, is just a checkpoint. A thing you did. Not a thing you experienced.
My retro emulation handheld is a perfect example of this tension. I can load any game from any console in seconds. I can fast-forward through cutscenes. I can save anywhere, anytime — no more waiting for a save point. It is efficient. It is convenient. And sometimes, it feels like cheating. Not because it makes the game easier, but because it removes the weight. The commitment. When you know you can save anywhere, you are less present. When you know you can rewind, you take fewer risks. The loading screen was never about loading. It was about arriving. And arriving takes time. Or at least, it should.
The comeback nobody asked for
Here is my prediction: the loading screen will make a comeback. Not because technology will regress. Because someone — probably an indie developer who grew up with a Game Boy Advance in their pocket and a PS1 under their TV, someone who remembers the whirr-click of a disc drive working hard — will intentionally add a loading screen to their game. Not as a limitation. As a feature. A moment of forced pause. A breath between worlds. A tip so obvious it becomes a philosophy: “Press Start to begin. Or do not. The game will wait. It has been waiting since 1998. It can wait a little longer.”
And people will love it. Because in a world where everything is instant, a deliberate pause feels like rebellion. The old consoles knew this. The Game Boy Advance knew it too, in its own way — sometimes the best loading screen is no loading screen at all, just a screen that is always ready for you to come back. Two approaches. Same wisdom. The space between worlds matters. Good games know this. Great games build it in. XAXAXA!