Release year
A clip plays. Slide the marker along the timeline: within five years you level up, otherwise you lose a life.
Five games drawn at random, one try each →Five games drawn at random.
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How to guess the release year of a song
Dating a track by ear has nothing to do with music theory. Every era has its own way of recording, and that is what you hear first. Drums pushed forward, wide reverb and a snare that cracks almost always land you in the eighties. A saturated guitar and a voice buried in the mix suggest the early nineties. A clean, compressed production with the vocal glued to your ear belongs to the twenty-tens.
Instruments give you the second clue. Strings and brass played by real musicians dominate up to the seventies. The analogue synthesiser takes over in the eighties, the digital drum machine in the nineties, and auto-tune becomes audible from the late two thousands. Hearing one of those sounds already fences off a decade.
The last reflex is the most useful: do not look for the year, look for the decade, then narrow down. The mini-game rewards proximity, not accuracy. An answer within five years is enough to level up. Being three years off costs nothing, being an era off costs a life. So aim at the middle of the decade you hear rather than betting on a precise year.
Do you need to know the song to answer?
No, but it helps. Without recognising it, you date the production: the drum sound, the reverb, the instruments used. With it, you go straight to the year. The early levels only draw on tracks everyone has heard a thousand times.
Which year counts as the right answer?
The first public release of the track: the single where there was one, the album otherwise. That is the year people have in mind, not the date of the remaster or of the compilation it sits on today.
How does survival mode work?
Three lives. An answer within five years or less moves you up a level, beyond that it costs a life. The threshold never changes. What gets harder as you climb is the repertoire, which goes from universal hits to tracks you have to have gone looking for.
Five games drawn at random, one try each →Five games drawn at random.