The Muppets (and by extension, Sesame Street) have appeared in dozens of games over the years, going as far back as the beginnings of gaming itself with some early entries on PC and the Atari 2600. Unfortunately, not many — erm, any? — have ever been highly regarded outside of maybe my childhood nostalgia for the Atari Kid’s Controller. Nevertheless, my love of the Muppets has always had me hopeful that their next video game outing would be the one that really took off.
Now, I still haven’t spent enough time with Muppet RaceMania — the kart racer from 2000 that feels more like a nod to Diddy Kong Racing than Mario Kart — to really weigh in and say if it’s my favorite of the lot. But I can definitively tell you in one way that it rivals practically every other video game ever made: its number of memory card-based loading screens.
I don’t know if it’s because they expected you to be going into this menu a lot as you unlocked things and needed to save, or if someone at Traveller’s Tales just loved sticking memory cards into Muppets skits. But I love it. And I love that MemCard.art might be the one site on the internet to ever stop and appreciate not one, not two, not even five, but eight unique loading screen images specifically used for the Memory Card menu. So let’s appreciate them all now in their purest form; I cleaned them up to remove the text and button prompts that are on top of them in-game:
In the end I find it a bit ironic that they spent so much time on these loading screens only to have the memory card icon itself just be a static image of Kermit. Not animated, not changing depending on the slot you save in or the character you’ve used the most… just Kermit. I mean, Kermit is more than enough and he is the frontmanfrog for the Muppets after all, but I’m surprised they didn’t do a little more with the icon itself.
