Is that some form of "intelligence test" that game developers employ to check if the player is able and willing to follow basic commands, or is it a plot of the educational system to entice people to learn to read so they can play their games?

Seriously, why are games going through the usual intros, then some introductory movie to arrive at a screen that says "Press any key" (or "press SPACE"), only to get you to the main menu? Is that some sort of console thing and there's some reason behind that which PC gamers just cannot comprehend? On the same line, are all games that don't have manual saves, or worse still, no saves at all, ports from consoles to PCs, and consoles still are so severely lacking that they need to resort to such things? I expected these "save point" things to gradually vanish from consoles due to them getting harddrives and cloud storage, but it seems to be getting worse even? Retro flash?

***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

I suppose it's a commonplace trope, outside of what dnovraD mentioned.

As I recall, games in the 8bit home console era would loop a skippable introduction sequence which returned to the main menu.

I would argue its counter intuitive to see a game go from cut-scene to a menu screen without a pause.
Maybe you think otherwise, but it doesn't sound as immersive as an opening shot of the title with the words "press any key to continue"

There is a choice. You may press any key. Or, you may, at your own discretion, press an other key.

Sorry, I thought about the marine in StarCraft: Brood War saying, "What the hell is the any key?" when asked to press any key.

but what if my kb doesn't have the "Any" key?

Yeah it's a console thing, mostly to do with detecting controllers. Console ports certainly made that a lot worse, eg, they ran out of room for dedicated F5/F9 quick save / load buttons on controllers. It didn't take long though for them to figure out that if you make a game with Quicksaves and can reload mere seconds after a mistake, then 20hrs gameplay actually has to have roughly 20hrs of content. On the other hand if you make a game like Ubisoft's Watchdogs where checkpoints placed 20 mins apart often saving immediately before lengthy unskippable cutscenes, then you can pass off only 15hrs of content as 20hr "gameplay" (or 20hr content as 25-30hr "gameplay") through excessively forced replays. Checkpoints (and Level codes like Lemmings) used to be a technical limitation when platforms had no local saves, but "cheap padding" / HowLongToBeat inflation time is far more the reason they do it on PC today.

I think this dates back to the arcade days, where instead of "Press Any Key" (or "Press StarT"), the message was "Insert Coin". Hence, you had to perform a different action, one that costs real money, as well as look away from the screen, in order to get the main menu to appear. Throwing the player right into the game as soon as the coin is inserted would be rather disconcerting.

One thing I found disconcerting is when I first played Sonic the Hedgehog (on the PS2 Sega Genesis Collection). There's a title screen, with no "Press Start" message, and as soon as you press the button, you're thrown into the game. Don't forget other accessibility settings, like not being able to turn on subtitles or disable rumble before starting the game for the first time.

Every once in a while, I encounter a game that, when there's no save file detected, will just jump straight into the game, skipping even the title screen. (SaGa Frontier 2 does this; on first startup, you're thrown straight into the Gustave Born event.)

In any case, I consider it an accessibility issue if the game's settings menu isn't accessible before starting the game for the first time. Arcade games would loop a demonstration, sometimes with audio disabled, until the player inserts a coin. There's other reasons for games to not allow saving just anywhere at anytime.
* Save points serve as a way for developers to set a pace for the game, putting the point whenever the player could use a bit of a rest.
* Limiting where a player can save means that less information needs to be stored in the save file. (For instance, the game can avoid saving the state of every single active enemy.)
* With less information stored in the save file, it provides a way out of many buggy situations. If a boss fails to spawn due to a bug, the player might be able to recover by saving and then reloading.
* Some games are so short that implementing a save feature isn't worth the effort. Game jam games are a common example of this.
* (There are some games that have a level select or warp zones instead of saves.)

I pressed the Windows key. The start menu booted me out of full screen mode and returned me to the desktop.

Perhaps I should have pressed the copilot key instead.

If I had a copilot key that is. I guess I'll just have to miss out on that game after all.

It's a leftover from the past that's kept in because... why not.

Back in the day the only thing that separated you between booting up your console or arcade machine or whatever and actually playing the game is the press start screen, there were no "main menus", no menus to load saves because you had to play the whole thing in one sitting, no options because screw you if you think the SFX is too obnoxious, etc. Obviously you didn't want the game to throw you into Level 1 way before you got your hands on the controller.

I guess nowadays it's used mainly to show you a presentable title screen before shrinking the logo or transitioning to another screen more suitable for a main menu. In the end, it's one thing you just get used to and unlike... everything else in the games industry, it's a first world problem than anything.

@Mortius1: did the game advance to the main menu in the background? ;)
I pressed "Power", but instead of getting into the game, the system shut down. So much for "any" key. ;) Though I must admit, the key challenge usually does not specify which result the keypress will have.

Admittedly, I've never been into arcades, and also have only played on other peoples consoles because I always appreciated the PC as "universal machine". Of course, with sufficient determination a console can also be coaxed into doing just about everything else, but that's usually a ton of effort for a sub-par result due to lack of drivers and other limitations on non-upgradable hardware that doesn't even offer binary compatibility from one generation to the next.

Anyway, the PC games I was brought up with all booted straight into the main menu, which then contained the usual selection, including settings for audio and LAN / Null modem / serial) New game, etc., all in one central, easily accessible place. I think they did, anyway, because otherwise I'd view the key challenge as normal, I suppose?
But Titles like Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen, Close to the Sun titles from very different genres are having the "Press any key" syndrome, and they're all comparatively recent. DD:DA even tops things off by having a nested main menu, which you need to enter from the "not main menu?" you're put in after successfully completing the key challenge. Though that specific game does have a nice animation playing in the key challenge, I still argue that this could've just as well be playing behind the main menu. Some games even demand that you press "space" and insist on only taking that key.
I see the reasoning about the input method (controller selection) on consoles, and also that it's bad to just boot up straight into the game.
Generally, only half the games do the startup "right" (in terms of what I think would be best, anyway: have skippable logos and intro, no key challenge, boot into a meaningful main menu that is in the center of the screen (in case the resolution doesn't match) and let you set a toggle whether or not you want the intro and logos in the future. At least they should start loading while waiting for the key challenge.

Not all games had saves (did DOOM have in-level saves? I think Half-Life did? Could you save mid-mission in C&C? I honestly don't remember). I see why limited save options do have their uses, and maybe (part of) the reason why savegames tend to be rather large in open world games like NWN or Witcher. So thanks for broadening my horizon. :)

dtgreene brought up Sonic, let's use it as a fun example, the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Genesis. The game boots up, plays the SEGA medley, says "SONIC TEAM PRESENTS" and then you're at the title screen. It didn't say press start, but if you did, you're immediately put in Green Hill Zone Act 1. No options, no saves. The only menu the game has is accessible by a secret code and lets you select a level.

Okay let's jump the series to 3D with Sonic Adventure. There's a title screen that's epic looking in either the original Dreamcast or the ported-all-over DX versions, and after you press start you select a save file and get put in the main menu. It makes sense because everything in the main menu is tied to your save file. Come to think about it, this setup makes sense for a technical reason: when you press Start you tell, or rather, confirm to the game to actually go ahead and read your memory card/storage for the save files because you are definitely ready to play. No point reading your save files if you vanish for whatever reason at the title screen.

Doom has in-level saves and quick-saves. I think HL does but I'm not going to install steam to confirm it in-game.

It's mostly seen on games from the 2010's period onwards, eg, Bioshock Infiniite (2012) has it, but Bioshock 1-2 (2007/2010) don't. Prey (2017) has it but Prey (2006) doesn't. We've had consolized PC games since the early 2000's but "Press Any Key to see the main menu" is definitely a thing that's more prevalent over the past 15 years than the 90's / 2000's.

Doom, Quake, Half Life, Thief, System Shock, etc, and most old school games all did. The flip-side to wanting limited checkpoint only saves for 'simplicity' is that multiple / manual saves are good insurance vs save-game corruption / game-breaking bugs in buggy games (needed more now than ever given the appalling buggy state many games are rushed to market in) where you can "roll back" to an earlier save without having to start the game from scratch vs a single-slot, checkpoint-only system that overwrites everything each time and gives you a "choice of 1 load".

Other advantages of a manual save system include walkthrough creation assistance, freedom of branching (sometimes it's fun to do something completely out of character in an RPG without messing up your main game), a "bookmark" to save a particularly funny / cool scene you want to show someone else later on, hardware benchmarking (because "official" pre-scripted benchmarks are rarely done at the most demanding part of a game (eg, you might want to test the CPU by saving near a huge crowd of people in a city or test draw distance impact on GPU by saving on top of a hill overlooking various landmarks), more incentive to explore in difficult games (sparse checkpoints in hard games can simply discourage exploration) and last but not least, games that would otherwise place checkpoints up to 20 mins apart can actually be playable by busy people who may only be able to snatch short 10-15 min game sessions at a time and want to pick up where they left of.