During the early eighties on my first computer the ZX Spectrum games were, to begin with, not on CD, DVD, Hard disk or Rom Cartridge, they were loaded into the computer from audio cassette tapes.
Even though the games were as little as 8 kilobytes in size they still took an awful long time to load into the computer. Four or five minutes doesn't sound like a long time but it is when you are just sat there staring at the screen hoping the 'loading error' message doesn't pop up and also hoping you won't be driven insane by the flashing 'loading... please wait' message that adorned many early games.
To relieve the boredom programmers would record loading screen data at the start of the cassette which would display a pretty picture on your TV screen whilst you waited for the actual game to download. Nice....., until you realised this data in itself also took minutes to load into the computer in effect extending the waiting time even further, Yawn!!
But anyway, considering the limited capabilities of the Spectrum they still managed to create some unforgettable images that burned themselves into the memory as you were staring at them for so long every time you wanted to play a particular game.
So now for the geeky fun memory test part of this post. Below are twenty six cropped images from various loading screens. Some contain little clues as to their identity. See how many you can recognise and put your answers in the comments. If you can guess all twenty six then you are a truly awesome speecy loading screen quiz nerd. I'll give the answers in the next post a week or two from now. Good luck.
