Progress bars often come with text that tells you what it’s doing. In recent years, it seems that a lot of them stopped actually telling you what they’re doing and instead give you a silly unrelated message (e.g. Panoramax would give me things like “Calculating Cornish sunshine”, “Measuring the high tides”, “Brewing tea”, etc). Where/how did this trend start?
Edit: Thanks for all the responses! It looks like this is much older than I originally thought. I played SimCity 2000 as a kid, but at that age, “reticulating splines” just sounded like normal computer jargon to me.
SimCity 2000 (and many Maxis spinoffs) show the phrase “Reticulating splines” on the loading screen, which was probably not the first funny loading message, but the first one I think of. https://unsung.aresluna.org/some-rather-obscure-and-complex-mathematical-process/
Reticulating splines is always my go to, as I think everyone else here has mentioned! 🤣
Sim City is the first I can remember
Earliest I can recall is Sim City 2000, but spoofing overly-serious progress bar info probably didn’t start there…
“Reticulating splines” lives rent free in my head every time a loading animation plays.
Those splines aren’t going to reticulate themselves.
Winamp beat that I think.
For reasons unclear to me, SimCity “2000” came out in 1993, vs 1997 for WinAmp.
It’s because 2000 was this not-so-distant but super exciting future for us pre-2000 people. Things just had “2000” on their names to make it sound futuristic.
Weird, I could have sworn winamp was like 91ish because I remember talking about mitnick. Turns out mitnick was 95 and I’m just old and losing chronological grasp.
I first noticed the trend in video games. Perhaps that would explain the irreverent nature of the messages.
That being said, most progress bars are just theater. If you want to have a good laugh, do a phone number search and hit one of the thousands of gateway pages for paid lookup companies. They will literally sit you through 10-15 fake progress bars before dropping you to a payment page.
I agree with others that SimCity 2000 was one of the earliest, if not first. So many things now just have a spinner to pretend things are happening without any sort of calculation or commitment.
Not sure where it started, but the earliest that comes to mind for me is “Reticulating Splines” from Sim City 2000.
World of Goo, released in 2008, had a series of goofy progress messages like that. I don’t know if it was the first, but it was the first one that I noticed.
*goo-fy reference?
You’re going to make a lot of us feel old saying that lol. That’s a pretty “modern” game in comparison to the ones who started it.
I doubt that I’m going to make you feel old, I started gaming in about 1980. I’m just saying that was the first time I saw those kind of phrases.
