Hear Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ Performed by a Dot Matrix Printer

Arguably the band's biggest hit in a career with no shortage of them, Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger' is a song every classic rock fan knows pretty much by heart. Still, we feel pretty confident saying you've never heard it like this.

Vimeo user MIDIDesaster rigged up an old dot matrix printer to crank out the track, and with some painstaking file editing, ended up with a highly unorthodox -- yet just about note-perfect -- rendition of the song that hogged the top of the charts during the summer of 1982. Spun off from the 'Rocky III' soundtrack, it went down as the second-biggest single of the year, behind only Olivia Newton-John's 'Physical.'

The video, which was posted a year ago but is just now making the viral rounds, describes the MIDI file used for the performance as coming from an "unknown creator," but it still took a fair bit of finessing to get the dot-matrixed song in the shape you hear in the above video. "The MIDI files have to be edited a bit to be played on the printer: some channels need to be disabled (percussion stuff), some are transposed to avoid exceeding the frequency limit," explained MIDIDesaster. "Also the volume of the individual instruments never fits when the original settings are used."

'Eye of the Tiger' took over the top of the rock charts from .38 Special's 'Caught Up in You' -- a double triumph for Survivor co-founder Jim Peterik, who had a hand in writing both songs. Reached for comment by Ultimate Classic Rock, Peterik was suitably impressed, responding to the video by saying, "This is an amazing piece of work. Seriously! This dude even got the off beat at the intro. He's got to be a musician cause it's dead nuts on the money. Very impressed. Who is this guy? Ha!"