GuruHits.com
A SABAM-licensed HyperCard music quiz (1997–2014), recovered and documented
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. The idea dates back to 1997, but it took nearly four years of correspondence with SABAM — Belgium's authors-rights society — to license short song clips online, at a time when no collecting society yet had a tariff for internet music.
Behind the scenes it ran on a classic Mac OS stack: an Apple HyperCard quiz engine called as a CGI, served by the WebSTAR web server with NetCloak handling the page templating — the same environment that powered LoveTest and other network quizzes for decades. Streaming was switched off in 2014 when the SABAM contract ended.
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 all recovered. Today GuruHits.com documents that story, shows the original code, and lets you play a faithful public-domain reconstruction built entirely from royalty-free audio.