10 Loading Screens So Good You Forgot You Were Waiting To Play
2. Invade-A-Load (1987)
Going all the way back to the commercial hit that was the Commodore 64, players found entertainment in their loading screens in a clever and fun way. Instead of seeing a spinning icon or an animated hourglass, which was common at the time, players were treated to a game of Space Invaders!
Technically, Invade-a-Load wasn't a game in and of itself -- well, it was, but it only functioned as a game within a game. The game was loaded onto the system so that players could play a clone of Space Invaders while they waited for their actual game to load, which could take some time on the Commodore 64.
The game was much smaller than the others you could load onto the system, so it popped up in less than a minute. Some games could take as long as five to ten minutes to load, so it was a great alternative to sitting around waiting.
The loader was mostly found in the United Kingdom, and it appeared on gamed loaded onto Compact Cassette. By the time it was infiltrating games in the UK, the media being used in the United States and other markets had primarily been switched to floppy disks, which made Invade-A-Load less common outside the United Kingdom.