Faster game consoles and speedier storage devices have meant that the interminable time we had to wait between levels of a videogame or after an untimely falling-off-a-platform death have all but vanished. Sure, some games still have long load times: massively multiplayer games with enormous levels and, say, every game Valve makes. But these days, especially in the console world, a long load time is usually the sign of bad programming or a crap game. (In the case of the first version of the Sony PSP, it was evidence of a bad piece of hardware.)

Progress marches on, but some masochistic part of us misses the frustrated, silent rage we felt we were subject to some unfair death in a game, then had to wait an eternity to respawn and try again. Sometimes, in this gaming purgatory, we paused to reflect on the fragility of digital life. Sometimes we made shopping lists in our heads. We’re not saying we’d ever wish for long load times to ever come into vogue again, but back in our day, fake death had real consequences, man!