'We were thinking ‘Somehow we've got to make this waiting time more enjoyable,'' he said. In a 2012 NowGamer interview, Ridge Racer team member Yozo Sakagami recalls that the company decided to include a minigame of arcade classic Galaxian. When Namco developed arcade racing game Ridge Racer for the PlayStation system back in 1994, the company became frustrated by the long load times on the new CD-ROM technology. Patent 5,718,632, was filed in 1995 and is thus set to expire in 2015.'

'Namco holds a dubious patent on 'auxiliary games' that play while the main game loads,' writes Hoppe. Over on Gamasutra, video game legal specialist David Hoppe tells an interesting story about how Namco nabbed a patent on loading screen minigames 20 years ago, a patent that is due to expire later this year. But I hadn't realized, until today, that a single game company owns the patent on one neat idea, which is the inclusion of a loading screen minigame that is not especially relevant to the main game at hand. Loading screens, after all, do not take long these days. I hadn't really given the whole issue much thought. Others, like the FIFA series, offer up practice sessions on key skills. They show in-world artifacts or offer up gameplay tips or clue the player into minor aspects of lore and narrative. Many games seek to keep your attention on the game. What do you do during loading screen-time? Gaze at the screen in a stupefied torpor? Check your other screens in the vain hope of finding something of interest for a few seconds? Make a cup of tea?

Galaxian arcade games