One reason no ones does this is that a game company (3D0?) got a patent in the last 90s on playing a game (I know their game was PSX) while waiting through a loading screen. It was broadly-written enough that they forced a Linux distro (Red Hat?) to remove a game (tetris?) that you could play while waiting on your initial system install. Sorry I can't recall proper particulars or dig up links, anybody remember more precisely?

I remember some Commodore 64 games that let you play Space Invaders while the game was loading off tape: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=126...

When I was a kid, I saw a disk copy program on Apple II's at camp that let you play pong while copying disks. (So the counselors wouldn't know you were pirating games.)

"Imagine a progress bar that involved Dogbert using a mallet to pound the Pointy-Haired Boss into the ground" - I'm sorry Scott, but this just smacks too much of the hugely-reviled clippy. Treating your users like idiots might amuse a few, but will completely alienate the rest. Those of us with an IQ greater than a handful of salt might take the time (while the regular progress bar is creeping up) to do something else, more productive. Like read HN :)

The old Defender game would be perfect for playing inside of a horizontal progress bar. Instead of having a radar display, you could just have the whole planet inside the progress bar, just like you have Defender in the favicon of this website.

http://www.p01.org/releases/DHTML_contests/files/DEFENDER_of...

First post, broken patents again. What about a little program that immediately connected you to a chat session with other people who were waiting for load bars.

"...And Jimmy, that's the story of how your mom and I first met."