Some people don’t believe me when I tell them that splash screens were
originally created because programs started taking too long to load, so something was
needed to keep the user occupied and prevent them from trying to use
the program too soon. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what I heard and
experienced myself. When applications I was working on got too bulky
to load in a jiffy, we’d add the splash. Some of the more amusing
bugs I’ve fixed had to do with splash screens interfering with the
loading of the program, either through display quirks or window handles
not going away. And many Windows programs had a “no splash”
command flag (e.g. runme -ns) so that you could load up without them.
There’s also the “how to freak out your product manager when you’re
very close to shipping” practical joke: replace your app’s splash screen
with something unexpected — perhaps a wanted poster with their photo.