Vid Grid

Overview

Vid Grid is a tile-matching full motion video puzzle game originally developed by Geffen Records and published by Jasmine Multimedia Publishing for Windows on September 13, 1994. It was later ported to the Atari Jaguar CD by High Voltage Software in 1995, where it was included alongside with Blue Lightning as one of the pack-in games for the peripheral when it launched. It is the first entry in the franchise of the same name. In Vid Grid, the players have to resolve and finish a jigsaw puzzle in time as their main objective, before the music video that is being played on the background ends. Conceived by Geffen executive Norman Beil and produced in conjunction with Jasmine Multimedia as a joint-venture, the game was one of the first titles to use Microsoft's Video for Windows multimedia framework, which allowed to play and encode digital video up to a maximum resolution of 320x240 pixels. The game includes a total of 10 music videos of different rock genres (including grunge rock from Soundgarden and Nirvana, hard rock from Van Halen and Aerosmith, and heavy metal from Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica). During each puzzle, the video itself is chopped up into a grid and each piece is scrambled. As the video plays, players must reassemble the pieces to its original form. As players progress through the game, each puzzle gets progressively tougher to solve (including larger amounts of pieces, different puzzle requirements, and flipped videos). The game received two spin-off titles: Country Vid Grid (for country music videos) and Kid Vid Grid (for cartoons).