About WTV
WTV is a free daily music video guessing game. It is made by one person, it has no accounts, no sign-ups and no paywall, and it exists mostly because the idea would not leave me alone.
Where the idea came from
Anyone who was near a television in the 1980s will recognise the specific texture of analogue static. It was what you got between channels, what you got when the aerial slipped, and what you got at the end of the night when broadcasting stopped. It was noise, but it was noise with a particular character, and it is strange how strongly it still reads as a picture of a specific decade.
The thought was simple: what if the static was not hiding a dead channel but a music video, and clearing it was the reward for knowing your stuff? The audio gives you a fair chance from the first second. The picture makes you earn it.
WTV grew out of an earlier and much rougher prototype called Pixle, which used a pixelation effect rather than static. The pixelation worked, technically, but it never felt like anything. Static feels like something. It has a period and a mood attached to it, and since the videos are almost all from a single decade anyway, the two things reinforce each other.
Why it started with the 1980s
The catalogue is not restricted to the 80s by any rule. It began there deliberately, and it is expanding outwards from there as the game grows.
The 80s was the obvious place to start because the music video as a serious form really belongs to that decade. MTV launched in August 1981, and within about three years the video had gone from a cheap promotional item, usually a band miming in a warehouse, to something with a director, a budget, a concept and occasionally a plot. Record labels worked out that a video could break a record on its own. Directors who would later make feature films were cutting their teeth on four-minute pop promos. The results were frequently ridiculous and occasionally brilliant, and either way they are extremely recognisable.
That recognisability is what makes the game work. An 80s video usually has one striking visual idea in it, and once you have seen it you do not forget it. That is exactly the sort of memory the static is testing.
The same is true of plenty of videos from other decades, which is why the game is not staying put. The 70s, the 90s and the 2000s all produced videos that are unmistakable from a fragment, and they will find their way in.
Who makes it
WTV is made by Martin, working as Morning Sun Games. I am an independent developer and this is not my day job funded by anybody. If you have played Heardle Decades, Coverd, Bee Sharp or Cryptune, those are mine too. There is a pattern, and the pattern is music.
Building things like this alone means the whole thing is one person's decisions: which videos go in, how hard round one should be, what the static sounds like. It also means when something is broken it is broken because I broke it, and telling me is genuinely useful rather than an annoyance.
How the videos are chosen
Every video in the catalogue is picked by hand. There is no algorithm scraping a chart and no automated import. That is slower, but it means each one has been checked to be a real music video rather than a lyric video or a live recording, to be available to embed in most countries, and to be identifiable in a way that makes for a fair puzzle.
The catalogue currently holds 301 videos from 188 artists, and it grows steadily, both by filling out the years already covered and by reaching into new ones. If a video you expect to be there is not, it is either because I have not got to it yet or because it is not embeddable, which happens more often than you would think.
Videos are played from YouTube
WTV does not host any video. Every clip plays through YouTube's own embedded player, which means the artists, labels and rights holders keep whatever arrangement they have with YouTube exactly as it stands. When you finish a round, the link takes you to watch the full thing on YouTube properly, which is where it should be watched.
What it costs
Nothing. The game is free, it always will be, and there is no premium tier holding anything back.
Running it is not free, though. There are hosting costs and there is a great deal of time. The site carries some advertising to cover that, and there is a Ko-fi page for anyone who would like to help more directly. Neither is compulsory and the game does not nag you about either.
Getting in touch
If you have found a bug, want to suggest a video, or just want to argue about whether a particular clip was too hard, the contact page has the details. Video suggestions are genuinely welcome and a decent number of the entries in the catalogue came from players.