Gameology pointed me to Rosemarie Fiore’s long exposure shots of old arcade games.
By strange coincidence, I have been working on something similar lately. (For the sake of truth, not beauty.) Here are two time lapses from the beginning and the end of a level of Asteroids:
Here is the same for Defender:
The aim here was to illustrate how the spatial layout of each game changes during a level – this is part of a piece for the Space Time Play anthology.
Asteroids goes from few large rocks > many small rocks. The Defender images are not quire as revealing, but the radar shows how aliens are initially distributed throughout the world, but hone in on the player at the end of a level.