Consider the humble video game cartridge. It’s a small, durable plastic box that imparts the most immediate, user-friendly software experience ever created. Just plug it in, and you’re playing a game in seconds.
If you’ve ever used one, you have two men to thank: Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel, who invented the game cartridge 40 years ago while working at an obscure company and rebounding from a business failure. Once the pair’s programmable system had been streamlined and turned into a commercial product – the Channel F console – by a team at pioneering electronics company Fairchild, it changed the fundamental business model of home video games forever. By injecting flexibility into a new technology, it paved the way for massive industry growth and the birth of a new creative medium.
Ah, gaming with effectively no loading times. Those were the days.
No loading times?
Most cartridge systems required ~10 seconds between inserting a module and the game actually starting and being ready for use. That’s longer that any loads I am seeing on my ps4.
Considering the insane complexity increase, what we have today is pretty darn impressive.
Edited 2015-01-25 21:01 UTC
I’m confused. I’m pretty sure you make sure the system is OFF before you load the module, if by “load the module” you mean inserting the cartridge, and once you flip the power switch it loads right up. Okay, there were often a few purposely non-skippable boot screens showing the developer’s and/or publisher’s logo(s) and maybe a few other splash screens, but everything felt pretty much instantaneous… and it was. And it was great. I also miss those days, when we didn’t have to wait for a damn optical disc to spin up, seek and read. Back when the original PlayStation was taking ages to load a game, the N64 was already playing, running loops around it. The PS2 was slow as hell too, and I don’t recall the original Xbox being much faster (but the GameCube’s loading speed was quite impressive).
We must be living in different decades. I haven’t using a disc in years. Just download and play, dude.
We’re talking about cartridges here. They haven’t been used much since the 80s. In the meantime, before the advent of the SSD, we suffered under spinning media.
They were used during most of the 90s as well.
Sega Genesis (also had CD option)
Super Nintendo
N64
Atari Jaguar (it also had CD)
TG16 (well these were cards)
The 3DS and PS Vita are really the only consoles that still use some sort of cartridge packaging for their titles.
I love the idea of owning the physical media. Toward the end of a console lifecycle, games are removed from market places, even if you have purchased them. If you have a hard drive failure, or a new console (and you don’t have a backup), you might not be able to download that game again. I know it’s far-fetched, but it’s a reality.
Those were almost always a placeholder/`loading screen` while stuff was being decompressed in the background (code, maps, graphics, music). I’ve having a hard time remembering any cartridges that just immediately came on the moment you flipped the power switch.
I guess you never used a 2600 or NES?
Those had neither the power nor the memory to decompress code/data. That was more the 16-bit era. Good example was the Sonic series. That’s got nearly all data compressed (in two different formats, depending on how fast the decompression was vs how much time was available to decompress in). They used screens to cover up as much of the decompression as possible. Many SNES games were that way as well.
16-bit games were bigger, but they weren’t willing to pay for bigger roms, so compression was common, which led to loading screens on carts. Ironic, that they then complained of loading screens on CD games, claiming roms were instantaneous when they mostly weren’t by that time.
I remember playing Mortal Kombat on the PS1/Saturn and if you’re playing as Shang Tsung and switched to another character, you’d have to wait a beat every time you switched characters, so the system could load them into memory. Every time you moved to the next fight, ‘Loading …’ I also remember the fatality demonstrations taking forever, because it had to load each one. This kind of thing wasn’t an issue on cartridges.
On the other hand, I think modern consoles have gotten much better in this regard, mainly by having you install a portion of the games to the hard drive. But that’s still better than waiting an hour and a half for a level to load up
Still, if you compare the loading time of, lets say Donkey Kong Country on the SNES, and Assassin’s Creed on the PS3, it is a real shame that games became so full of loading times. Or even worse, take Megaman 9 that clones a NES game but adds loadings
But yeah, there is no way cartridges would store so much data like a DVD/bluday and still be affordable, so you have to pay a price; also you have to decide between a big loading in intro or loading times during stages as only a few games implement continuous loading.
Also, not only the change between cartridges to laser or magnetic disks have a play here, older games were written in assembly, thus making it smaller because space was a luxury and had to put all your data in the format the hardware could read. Nowadays you mostly use a high-level language like C++ with lots of libraries to play sounds or import textures in a format that is easier for the developer, not the console to read.
F-Zero X on the N64 had basically no loading time that I can remember, and most games that did decompress things did it in a far less obvious way than stopping all sound and graphics activity for a couple of seconds to spin up and read the disc. In fact, the only N64 game I can think of that actually stopped to load/decompress data is Wipeout 64, and that was a port of Wipeout 2097 from the PS1/PC – an impressive game to fit into a cartridge with soundtrack and all!
I think some people are forgetting the time it takes to turn on a modern console. Even if you have the game stored internally and it’s quick to load, powering up the console itself, loading the OS and so on takes quite a while, where there was basically no OS loading involved whatsoever. Flick the switch and you’ve already got the game’s splash screen. Fine if you leave your machine on all day, but lots of people still power things down when they’re not used…
And, it’s not like these “instant loading” modern console (or PC for that matter) games don’t have the same splash screens. They still have screens showing company logos, copyright information and so on, most of the time not skippable either.
Perhaps I’m showing my age, but most game cartridges (and BASIC, of course) for my old Atari 800 were up and running between my closing the cartridge door and picking up the joystick. The hiss of the engines and warning klaxon of Star Raiders still knots my stomach.
And I distinctly remember BASIC blowing a quick raspberry at me through the TV via the POKEY chip during the second or so it took to initialize.
Yes, but I don’t think that’s what Thom is talking about in regards to load times. It’s a mistake I see people make all the time, mistaking boot times for load times. Yes, they took a few seconds to boot. Once booted though, everything worked instantaneously during gameplay. Contrast this to the PSX and original Xbox, where you would often have a massive pause in gameplay between scenes or selections while the system loaded. Yes you could mod the Xbox and stick a hard drive or even an ssd in it, load your games onto that and cut load time down to nearly nothing, but it didn’t come that way from the factory.
This reminds me of the fixation on PC boot times these days when suspend would be better used instead. Boot times are not important. It is the load and wait times after the initial boot which are far more annoying and which the cartridges did not suffer from.
xbox came with hdd as standard
Sure it was. The system was also loading data from a 1.3GB disc, VS a 4.7GB disc.
So? Less surface area = less seeking. Smaller physical disc probably means higher RPMs as well. The GameCube was my favorite system of its generation. I dreaded having to deal with the extra-long load times when playing games on the PS2 and original Xbox. But that was just a nice extra, the real point is that the GameCube had far more games I was interested in than its competitors.
Really, a user named UltraZelda64 liked the Nintendo console of that generation better?
… Don’t get me wrong. I love my Gamecube. Resident Evil Remake, RE0, Eternal Darkness (see a trend?) are awesome titles. My only complaints about the Gamecube is the reputation it garnered as a ‘toy’, and that the mainstream model couldn’t play video DVDs out of the box. I never really played much of the original Xbox, but the PS2’s loading times never really bothered me. I guess I was too busy kicking ass in Final Fantasy 10 to care. 
Thanks for linking such an interesting and informative article. Good to see the internet used for something besides illegal downloads, facebook spam, and porn.
I don’t have a Channel F, never even heard of it, but several of my systems are dependent on inserted cartridges for software: a couple of Atari sets, TI99/4a, and who could forget the Mattel Aquarius.
All you young whippersnappers with your gaming consoles and fast-loading cartridges. Back in my day we had to load the game off freakin’ tape. 5 minutes of the computer making strange noises and afterwards you hoped the thing passed the checksum, or you’d have to redo it all over again. Save slots? What are those? After completing a level you got an access code which you had to write down, pen & paper.
Anyway, I’m not actually that old
and I enjoy the progress of technology as much as the next guy. Would I have preferred photorealistic graphics with a few minutes of load time in the 80s? You bet!
So you’ve loaded Bruce Lee for c64 from cassette I take it. Pop it in, come back an hour and a half later, wait for it to finish loading, pray it runs and you don’t have to start over. Good times…
Ha, I remember Temple of Apshai. My old memory say that the guy who played it at the computer store needed to load 4 tapes in the C64 before the game would start.