GuruHits
GuruHits was an online music quiz: hear a five-second clip, name the song or the artist. It launched on 20 September 2001, built by a single developer on a now-vanished stack — Apple HyperCard, NetCloak, and WebSTAR — and licensed for short song clips by SABAM after nearly four years of negotiation.
A quarter-century later the HyperCard stack, the song database, the high-score tables, the audio clips, the screenshots, and the original licensing correspondence were all recovered. This site documents that story, shows the real code, and lets you play a faithful reconstruction.
A few milestones along the way:
What you'll find here
- The Story — why five seconds, the CD collection, the years of licensing.
- Technology — HyperCard as a web app server, NetCloak, WebSTAR, four audio formats before HTML5.
- The SABAM Files — the correspondence that licensed online music clips before there was a model for it.
- The Game — how the quiz worked, the ranks, the leaderboard.
- Archive & Developer — the recovered source, plus a reusable open-source NetCloak→PHP renderer.
Frequently asked questions
What was GuruHits?
GuruHits was an online music quiz that ran from 2001 to 2014. Players heard a five-second clip of a song and had to name the song or the artist, earning points and climbing a rank ladder from Novice to Guru.
Who made GuruHits?
It was built by Joe Savelberg, founder of the Belgian web company Euregio.Net. He came up with the idea in 1997 and ran the whole service single-handedly.
Why did licensing the music take almost four years?
When GuruHits started in the late 1990s, no collecting society had a tariff for playing song clips on the internet. SABAM, Belgium's authors-rights society, had to invent one — a correspondence that ran from a first letter in 1998 to a workable licence in 2001.
What technology did GuruHits run on?
A classic Mac OS stack: the quiz engine was an Apple HyperCard stack called as a CGI, served by the WebSTAR web server with NetCloak handling the page templating. The same HyperCard environment also powered LoveTest and other quizzes for decades.
Can I still play GuruHits?
The original licensed game is not back online, but a small public-domain demo recreates the experience. It uses only royalty-free audio, so there are no music-licensing concerns.
What happened to the original site, and what was recovered?
Streaming was switched off around mid-2014 and the SABAM contract ended that year. A quarter-century later the HyperCard stack, the song database, the high-score tables, the audio clips, the screenshots, and the full licensing correspondence were recovered and preserved — that archive is what this site documents.
For my sons
Chris and
Alex,
born in 2022 and 2023 —
long after GuruHits went quiet,
and reason enough to dig it back up.