GuruHits

Archive

The recovered GuruHits archive holds the HyperCard stack, the song database, the high-score tables, the audio clips, the page templates, and nearly four years of SABAM licensing correspondence — preserved exactly as found.

The recovered material

Remarkably little of GuruHits was lost. A quarter of a century after it was built, the project was recovered almost in full and frozen as an archive — not a reconstruction, but the original files themselves, kept exactly as they were found.

What survived:

  • The website — the complete document root: the NetCloak/NetForms page templates, the .macro includes and .flx form definitions, images, and the in-tree song database and score tables.
  • The game engine — the working HyperCard ACGI binary, the compiled stack that actually ran the quiz. It still runs today under a HyperCard emulator. The recovered HyperTalk inside it is on The Stack.
  • The song database — guruhits.db, a tab-separated catalogue of the songs (artist, title, cover, shop link, on/off), in classic Mac line endings.
  • The audio — surviving five-second clips, in the period's four formats (AIFF, AU, QuickTime, and RealAudio).
  • The high scores — the pre-rendered top-100 and per-category leaderboard tables, exactly as the engine generated them.
  • The screenshots — captures of the HyperCard stack and the live site.
  • The correspondence — the licensing dialogue with SABAM and others, the primary source behind The SABAM Files, plus the hosting and infrastructure letters behind Technology.

How it's organised

The archive is kept as a single, ordered tree with an untouched master snapshot at its centre — a frozen copy that is never edited. Working copies are studied and documented around it, but the originals are treated as read-only: encodings and line endings are preserved, broken links to long-dead hosts are noted rather than "fixed," and historical revisions (.bak, .ori, -old siblings) are kept alongside the live files. The goal is preservation first.

What's published here

This site is the curated, public face of that archive. Where the raw files contain real personal data — players' names in the score tables, third parties in the correspondence — the published pages show them redacted (first name and last initial); the archive itself keeps the originals intact.

Two parts of the archive are offered directly for developers: the recovered HyperTalk on The Stack, and a reusable, open-source NetCloak → PHP port of the templating engine on the NetCloak page.

Building this site

There's a closing symmetry worth recording. The original quiz took two weeks to code and almost four years to license. This history site — recovering the archive, writing the chapters, reconstructing the NetCloak engine, and putting the playable demo back online — took about a day: roughly eighteen hours of work across a single weekend (Saturday 20 – Sunday 21 June 2026), a quarter-century after GuruHits launched, built with help from Claude, Anthropic's AI. The building, this time, was the easy part.