Click, whir, ping: the lost sounds of loading video games

From the Apple II to the ZX Spectrum, the aural experience of loading a game from a cassette, disc or cartridge was all part of the fun

The first time I ever put a "51/4-inch disk into an Apple II drive to play Lode Runner, I was hooked. It seemed wildly futuristic - this was in the early 1980s - but there was also something pleasingly analogue about the process. You had to slide the disc from its sleeve like a vinyl record, then gently feed it into the mouth of the drive, before closing the little plastic door behind it with a satisfying click.

The loading noise was a stuttering series of electronic snare drum taps, accompanied by the baseline hum of the computer itself. There was something almost organic about it, like a CT scan or ultrasound. To me it seemed incredible that typing something on a screen could cause the disk to start loading, as though I was talking to the computer, and the clicking noise only accentuated this feeling of communication. In these early days of video game playing, the actual game was only part of the experience - the allure began with the novelty of the loading process. The retrofuturistic noise of a disk drive still makes me wistful whenever I hear it on old movies and TV shows, or highly specialist YouTube videos such as this one: