POV: It’s the mid-90s.
Compact discs are hotter than ever.
There are lasers involved, it’s all very cool.
Multimedia is the trendy tech buzzword of the day.
There are buttons on screen, so many buttons.
Every button makes a sound.
Most buttons are animated.
Every button leads to a whole other screen of buttons.
Techno music is almost certainly playing over the whole experience.
In that era graphic designers teetered on the cutting edge of the multimedia trend but on PlayStation there was only so much memory to spare and all of those kewl sounds, animations, and transitions took their toll. What we wound up with in some of the more ambitious (or maybe under-optimized) games were actual loading screens just to move from one menu to the next. And if not a separate loading screen, then at least several seconds of waiting. Need to change that sound effects slider? Please wait for up to three seconds. Done? Hurry up and wait.
Click Play below and see a couple of extremely painful examples in action.
This wasn’t so bad in most games where simpler menus were snappy, but sports titles in particular seemed to really get bogged down. With huge rosters of players to load and multiple gameplay modes that had totally different menus — from Season, to Tournament, to Franchise sim modes — they were especially prone to a slow and confusing experience. It was easy to find yourself three screens deep in a Season menu and have to press Back, Back, Back, waiting with each press, just to reach the Options screen or to save your progress.
To contend with these slow transitions between numerous screens some studios like Gremlin Interactive pioneered what I have dubbed the Double Menu. It’s the concept of an extra pop-up menu that is either stacked off to the side of the screen or hidden until you press a certain button — usually it’s Circle. Some games called it the Navigation Menu, some the Quick Menu, and others the Side Menu. Whatever name you like, I think it’s easiest to picture with some visual examples.
Neat, right? Not only did it give you quicker access to the most frequent functions, it also gave designers more places to add cryptic and stylish icons. Ok, so it was still kind of confusing visually but by ditching the fullscreen transitions for simpler flyout boxes they did feel snappier. The trend was most prevalent between 1998 and 2000 and saw mainly Gremlin Interactive and Electronic Arts leaning on the Double Menu across 20 or more soccer, basketball, and football titles.
But like an evolutionary dead end, the Double Menu began dying out in 2000 and all but vanished by 2002. What happened? Ahem, it’s called the PlayStation 2. With more power, memory, and dazzling effects Sony’s next console shot out of the gates and by 2001 it was already moving more than double the numbers of the original PlayStation.
Publishers were quick to shift to the new console, leaving mostly budget titles, licensed tie-ins, and sports games to fill out the dwindling PS1 roster through 2004. I’ll never be technically minded enough to confirm it, but I also suspect that there were new streaming or buffering techniques developed around 1999 (or even earlier) that made menus snappier without a lot of extra work. Oh, and Gremlin Interactive was acquired by Infogrames in 1999 so that stopped them from iterating on the Double Menu.
Electronic Arts retained the Double Menu in a few more of their franchise entries with FIFA 2001 on PlayStation and even PlayStation 2 sporting the sub-row of icons. But after NBA Live 2003 (released in 2002) they also gave up on the multi-layered menus and moved the series exclusively to PlayStation 2.
And that sums up the short-lived era of the Double Menu: a user interface innovation that lightened the lag for the titles that needed it the most before more powerful hardware rendered it unnecessary.Â
A Couple of Notes
If you were wondering about EA’s massive Madden franchise, they flirted with a Double Menu in 2000 but switched to a stark white menu system in 2001 that was copied every year through Madden NFL 2005. It’s really quite striking, and a little disappointing, to see the same menu year after year with only new player names and a new EA Trax playlist added.
Finally, if anyone wants to pick up where I left off, here’s the slate of games where I spotted a Double Menu:
- Actua Soccer 2 (1997, Gremlin)
- NBA Live 98 (1997, Electronic Arts)
- Actua Soccer 3 (1998, Gremlin)
- Fox Sports Soccer 99 (1998, Gremlin)
- Fox Sports Golf 99 (1998, Gremlin)
- NBA Live 99 (1998, Electronic Arts)
- FIFA 99 (1998, Electronic Arts)
- FIFA 2000 (1999, Electronic Arts)
- NBA Live 2000 (1999, Electronic Arts)
- Actua Ice Hockey (1999, Gremlin)
- MLB 2001 (2000, 989 Sports)
- NBA Live 2001 (2000, Electronic Arts)
- FIFA 2001 (2000, Electronic Arts)
- FIFA 2002 (2001, Electronic Arts)
- David Beckham Soccer (2001, Rage)
- NBA Live 2003 (2002, Electronic Arts)
