Thank god for the interwebs! Without them, so many wonderful, delightful, mysterious things would be lost forever...or we'd just never know that they ever existed in the first place. For example, back in 1982, a guy named Daniel took a tape recorder into video game arcades up and down the east coast, recording without ceremony what it sounded like if you stood three feet away from some of the most popular games of the day for a few hours. Whether he knew it or not, he was engaging in an journalism in its purest form—completely un-distilled, unbiased observation. Even more remarkable is that after a few years of doing this, he simply abandoned the project without taking any further action, leaving the tapes in storage until 1997, when he accidentally discovered them while cleaning.

Realizing that he had a perfectly preserved time capsule of a culture and an era that by then had already begun to vanish, Daniel recently digitized the tapes and created an easily-scannable library of the recordings for posterity (albeit a very narrow, nerdy posterity). You can listen to the recordings here:

Coin-Op Video Games

These are absolutely fascinating to me. For the most part, collections of historical audio recordings typically cover serious, academic subjects like the Great Depression or modern poetry, and serve as cherished primary sources for scholarly research.
Such recordings are created, collected and curated by hallowed, authoritative institutions like the Library of Congress or the
Smithsonian Folkways organization, and for the most part, access to a complete catalogue requires a student ID or a trip to a library or museum. These are all stereotypical examples of how cultural records—specifically audio records—have almost all been created and managed through a top-down system. Academic authorities decide what’s important and how access shall be granted.

But Daniel’s recordings defy that rule, and came to the public sphere through a kind of bottom-up curation, enabled by the nearly nonexistent costs of web site hosting and the great democratizer of information that we call the search engine. The sheer existence of a comprehensive audio snapshot of a cultural era that has little academic significance is pretty amazing,
regardless of what the tapes yield in terms of useful information.

But the result is perfect--you don't even need video. It's rare to hear so many classic machines going and making sounds all at once these days, but this archive perfectly preserves the excitement and sensory overload of being in a huge arcade when nothing is more important than somehow finding more quarters.