Longest Load Time

[DracoSuave]

pff, you think you know slow! you haven't seen slow until you run a c64

36 minutes for boulder dash to load from cassette tape.

bam!

Oh yeah! Pop in Sid Meiers Pirates in the deck, load'*',8,1 and run. Go off to make a hot chocolate and maybe a sandwich and you should be golden by the time you get back.....

pssst... that's the load-from-disc command. The one for cassettes is load'*',1,1.

Tho, and this must be noted... the c64 disk drive was NOTORIOUSLY slow and noisy. For some games cassette was honestly faster.

For some reason I miss poke54638,0 to make my screen black.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

pff, you think you know slow! you haven't seen slow until you run a c64

36 minutes for boulder dash to load from cassette tape.

bam!

Yup, that sounds about right.

For me it's Operation Wolf for my ZX Spectrum - 30 mins. I used to come home from school, set it off and then go downstairs for my dinner. If I ate at a leisurely pace, and washed up afterwards, it was occasionally loaded when I got back up to my room.

Spoiler: 30 minutes to load this...

Ah, tape loaders. Technology at the cutting edge. At the time, anyway.

 

[Sectan]

I used to have to take 20 minute breaks at my friends house when he'd load a new zone in World of Warcraft. My longest load time is about 5 or 10 minutes and the prize goes to any of Valve's source games (except L4D. That seems to work out real nice.) *RETRIEVING SERVER INFO...* Skreeeeee! LOAD ALREADY!

 

[BringBackBuck]

pff, you think you know slow! you haven't seen slow until you run a c64

36 minutes for boulder dash to load from cassette tape.

bam!

Oh yeah! Pop in Sid Meiers Pirates in the deck, load'*',8,1 and run. Go off to make a hot chocolate and maybe a sandwich and you should be golden by the time you get back.....

I used to go round to my friend's house who owned a C64 (they were cutting edge at the time). Actually, I think he was only my friend because he had the only gaming machine on our street. I guess 11 year old me was a bit shallow when it came to choosing friends.
Anyhoo, we would load Double Dragon into the cassette tape drive and push play. We would walk to the corner store to by a couple of 50c mixtures worth of lollies (enough for an afternoon's gaming), come back and kick arse with some sweet flying kicks, roundhouses and whatnot for about 10 minutes. Level 1 finished we would flip the cassette tape over and go outside and play for 20-30 minutes before it was ready to go for level 2.

Good times.

 

[The Wykydtron]

My laptop took about 3 hours to download and install vanilla WOW, to be fair i'm suprised it even worked on my laptop

^never gives his laptop any credit ever

Hopefully KOTOR runs ok on it when it comes out...

As for actual ingame loading times, my brain is programmed to not remember how long stuff takes to load. So yeah, Skyrim maybe? When it goes into it's "i'm gonna die behind the loading screen" shenanigans

 

[Snotnarok]

I know cassette tape based games took forever, however at least that's 1 load vs what Sonic 2006 put me through, I think it took a solid 60 seconds to load a 14 second clip of a ship flying by then it'd load again for another 60 to show a full cutscene then ANOTHER 60 for you to go to the hub world, then ANOTHER 60 to get into a level.

Glad I'm done with that game, Generations raaaaaaaaawks.

 

[DannyJBeckett]

Can't say I've ever had anything near the times some people have had, but my worst two were Crash Bandicoot: the Wrath of Cortex, and Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly (yeah, I actually played that game).

 

[Brinnmilo]

Oh lord, Empire Total War on my old laptop. I read Crime and Punishment in 4 days thanks to those loading screens.

 

[80Maxwell08]

I would say Kingdom Under Fire The Crusaders on the Xbox. That took like 3 minutes to load each time at the start. Don't know why I never really minded.

 

[teqrevisited]

Dawn of War: Soulstorm has awful loading times on both the campaign meta-map and the larger campaign maps and skirmish maps. Sometimes the loading bar even goes backwards. I could go downstairs, get a cuppa, come back and it would still be loading. That isn't mentioning the excuses for air units, numerous bugs and poor texture quality for the SoB & DE in comparison to the existing races.

Iron Lore dissolved as a studio (4 days before release if the interweb is to be believed) so there is some justice after all.

 

[xdiesp]

Quickloading in Shogo took me 1 minute.

 

[Zenkem]

Movie Monster on Commodore 64. While C64 games had long load times, that game had the monsters on one side of a casette and cities on the other, meaning that after choosing your monster and city you had to load through BOTH sides of a casette! To add insult to injury, the game itself lasted less than ten minutes, and had to be loaded all again after dying once.

And it was a bad game too.

 

[aztjazcab]

I waited in front of the screen for a solid 30 mins until I found out that The Binding of Isaac had frozen. In my defence I was really drunk.

 

[Scarim Coral]

When I first install Guild Wars Faction, it took about 1 or 2 hours to load the first area (I was in Uni during this time which they had 1 Mbps so that explain why it took ages).
Also when they give a free acess to Eye of the North for the weekend I was in my parent house with 56k. That again took several hours to bloody load to the first area!

 

[Akyho]

Elder Scrolls Morrowind for the Xbox. Basicly you know going in and out doors in Oblivion and Skyrim can take a little time and be aslightly annoying. Morrowind was exactly that but it wasnt uncommon to have to wait 5 minutes to go through a door and know you forgot somthing and have to do it again twice back in and then back out.

Sometimes the game would take 20mins to load. Othertimes you would wait 30mins...and relise it is not loading and you lost save data.

Horrible. and yet i still played 100hrs of it not including load times.

 

[willsham45]

lego land2 i think it was not sure how long those times were but I managed to get though the short game and watch one of the star war movies though the loading screens

 

[Ubermetalhed]

Duke Nukem's wasn't great. Driver 3 was slow aswell and was even more brutal as you were restarting the levels all the time.

Not quite loading screens though but slow to getting to anything worthwhile was Valkyria Chronicles. The fact you had to go to the menu each time to select a 2 minute bad anime scene which you had to watch was infuriating. There would be at least 3 or 4 to get through before you hit a battle.

Also if you're going for Big Boss rank on MGS4 quiting to menu and loading the game again because you did something wrong (which happens all the time) is hellish.