The other day I learned that Bandai Namco had the patent for showing a minigame while presenting a loading screen for the main game. I find it mind blowing tha

The other day I learned that Bandai Namco had the patent for showing a minigame while presenting a loading screen for the main game. I find it mind blowing that the mere idea of adding a small silly tetris or some other easy way to distract during a long load screen, was patented, and a company could get into trouble if they had the same idea for their game and didn't check if it's something in the category of "no-do". That patent was active until 2015, when it finally expired. What an absurd reason, on the grand scheme of things, for not being able to have minigames at all in any other game before that year. (not that afterwards we got a lot of that anyways, but that's beside the point) Now extrapolate that to a myriad of cool ideas that cannot be used, essentially, because an stupid system that says so.