The Videos
WTV draws on 301 music videos by 188 artists, and the catalogue grows all the time.
The game started with the 1980s, and that is still where most of it lives. There was a reason for that. The 80s is the decade when the music video stopped being a cheap promotional item and became a form in its own right. At the start of it a video was usually a band miming in a room, shot in an afternoon because the record company needed something to send to a television show. By the end of it, videos had directors with reputations, budgets that ran into millions, and premieres that were events in themselves.
You can watch that happen year by year. Below is every year the game currently has a page for, with what was going on in each, and the videos from that year that appear in the puzzle.
Browse by year
What comes next
The 1980s is where the game began, not where it ends. The catalogue is expanding into other decades, and as videos from a new year build up, that year gets a page here alongside the rest.
A handful of videos already sit outside the 80s at either end. "Video Killed The Radio Star" is there because it is the obvious starting pistol, and a few early 90s entries are there because the artists and the visual language still clearly belong to the decade before. Those years do not have their own pages yet, simply because there are not enough of them to write about properly. That will change.
What makes a video work in this game
Whatever the decade, the static reveal works best when a video has one strong visual idea in it, something you recognise the instant enough of the picture comes through. The 80s happens to be full of those, because it is a decade of videos that committed to an idea completely, whether the idea was good or not. But it has no monopoly on the trait, which is the whole reason for going further afield.