arcades, digital archives, and nostalgia 2K30

Today I ran into Classic Arcade Sounds over on coinopvideogames.com. Apparently one day back in 1982 a couple of guys got the simple idea, "Hey. Let's carry around a cassette recorder every time we go to the arcade, and just record the sounds onto a series of tapes as we're playing.  We'll do it over an 8 year period. Future generations will thank us."

27 years later it's a hit with me and countless others.

I've been doing a lot of thinking on nostalgia lately because it's such a fascinating and incredibly pervasive thing. Stronger and more pervasive than we realize, I'm thinking. I've been diving around doing some analysis that'll certainly share soon.

But on the tapes, what caught my attention is this:

Is there a 2K9 equivalent? Things like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and the rest of the cloud have certainly changed the nature of how we collect and save things.

But nostalgia's been around forever and likely isn't going away anytime soon.

What could any of us be archiving now that others will be truly nostalgic for? We're quite proud of our "store anything, anywhere, forever" mentality in this digital world. But as our methods for archiving things change, we're sure to leave behind other intangible things that we'll no doubt be longing for.

What does nostalgia mean to you?

(by the way I've been collecting this and a lot of other stellar things here at yesthisisawesome.com; check it out.)