Sometimes in the spring an update reduced the startup time to about 1.5 minutes, which is much better, but still quite slow compared to wine.
Hello @mtmkls, are you still experiencing this issue on an up to date system?
With Mesa 17.2 the startup speed is adequate. Closing the issue.
Nothing extracted yet.
The native client needs about 5 minutes to start, with wine it's about 20 seconds. Other Orange Box games don't have this problem.