> Huh? Just about everything that didn't come on a cartridge took forever to load, especially on a C64.
Taking a long time to load doesn't mean having a minutes long "Loading ... Please Wait" screen.
Civilization needed a lot of time, on a contemporary computer, to create the map. While doing so, it plays a slideshow with captions:
In the beginning,
the Earth was without form,
and void.
But the Sun shone upon the sleeping Earth
and deep inside the brittle crust
massive forces waited to be unleashed.
This goes on for quite a while, accompanied by appropriately epic music.
How do I even know that this is actually a loading screen? Simple - the animation is not skippable on a low-powered computer. You can try, but the actual skip will only occur later, when the computer is ready for it. On a Windows-95-era computer, you can skip the whole thing; the game will be ready before the slideshow starts.
But just because the game required a loading screen didn't mean the designers thought it would make any sense to punish the player by making them spend minutes staring at a message saying "I bet you feel pretty stupid for buying this game now, huh?". The Civ I intro is famous and well loved. You can watch a youtube video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtK388b9drE . You can read the entire text on TvTropes, where a fan has posted it as a memorable quote: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/Civilization . It is the first thing listed on that page.