Loading screen
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A loading screen is a picture shown by a computer program, often a video game, while the program is loading or initializing. Loading screens that disguise the length of time that a program takes to load were common when computer games were loaded from audio tape, a process which could take anywhere up to 20 minutes. Nowadays, most games are loaded from optical disc which is very fast, but games still include loading screens to disguise the amount of time taken to initialize the game in RAM.
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[edit] Loading screen variations
The loading screen does not need to be a static picture. Some loading screens display a progress bar or similar indicator to show how much data has actually loaded.
The game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas shows a slideshow of hand-drawn gangster images to disguise its very lengthy initialization period (over 2 minutes).
[edit] Minigames
Some games have even included minigames in their loading screen, notably Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64.
Namco used to include variations of their old arcade games (e.g. Galaxian, Rally-X) as loading screens when first booting up many of their early PlayStation releases. Even to this day, their PlayStation 2 games, like Tekken 5, still use the games to keep people busy while the game initially boots up.
The game Air Combat also has a loading game - the mini-game can be accessed using a cheat code.
