It looks like loading screens are now a thing of the past. A 20-year-old patent owned by the former video game developer and publisher Namco (now known as Bandai Namco Entertainment) that allows users to play minigames during load time has expired, leaving the idea up for grabs and allowing companies to let users play supplementery games while they wait for their main game to load.

As EuroGamer.net points out, EA has been doing a version of this for awhile for its FIFA video game series, but the company has avoided legal backlash on a technicality: Namco's patent, which was filed on Nov. 27, 1995, specifically identifies games that are auxiliary (i.e., accessory, sure, but unrelated to the main game), whereas the minigames that appear in the FIFA franchise are in direct relation to the main game at hand. 

In celebration of this, gamers have taken to the Internet with the intent of "defiling the patent that held back game design for so many years," holding a Loading Screen Jam in which budding gamer-developers can submit "interactive loading screens (or anything that infringes on the abstract)" they have designed themselves, with "games/interactive material based on infringing the now-defunct patent in any way possible[.]"

So far, there is no word from a publisher or developer on an intent to take advantage of the expiration of Namco's patent.

Via: EuroGamer.net