Last week, many regions of the world bade farewell to music on MTV, the cultural phenomenon which irrevocably altered the way we consume and experience music forever.
While its closure was announced back in October, it was reported that the channels MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live would all cease broadcasting on December 31st in markets such as Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungry, Ireland, Poland, and – of course – Australia.
Fittingly, the station ended as it began, with MTV airing The Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star – the same song which famously opened the station back on August 1st, 1981.
However, one developer was not content with simply sitting back and letting MTV be swept into the ash heap of history, instead putting their sights upon a new project called MTV Rewind.
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It's an incredibly simple concept, with MTV Rewind effectively recreating the glory days of the station by offering modernised versions of the station. Boasting 33,710 videos in its database, viewers can select their channel of choice and dive into a musical rabbit hole, complete with vintage, era-appropriate commercials appearing on screen.
You can take a trip back in time and watch the full first day of MTV if you wanted to, or you can dive into the eras of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s. One channel offers content from the Yo! MTV Raps program, another goes into the Headbangers Ball series beloved by metalheads. You can also view the stripped-back MTV Unplugged channel, or the alternative 120 Minutes program, if you’d prefer.
Notably, it’s not specific episodes of these programs that you’re watching, rather tracks selected as if they either did, or would have been broadcast on those channels.
For example, the MTV 70s ‘channel’ shows what MTV would have looked like had it been launched in the ‘70s, and many of the tracks in some of these channels never actually aired on the original network back in the day.
“MTV was a cultural institution that changed music, fashion, and youth culture,” the developer (who goes by the name Flexasaurus Rex) wrote. “Then they stopped showing music videos and became reality TV.
“I felt a wave of sadness when the announcement hit. Nothing felt like it could fill that void. So I started coding.”
In some comments shared to Reddit, they explained that it was built as a “passion project,” featuring “zero algorithm, just random discovery.”
At the time of its launch a few days ago, the project boasted just 25,762 videos, but that’s since grown by almost 7,500, with the entire undertaking being completed in around “48 hours from start to finish.”
“Spent most of the time scraping and curating 75,000 music video IDs from IMVDb, organizing them by decade,” they explained. “The player itself was surprisingly quick - just YouTube's API + some JavaScript for the channel switching and commercial injection.
“The vintage commercials were the fun part - spent last night finding Blockbuster, GAK, and the 1984 Apple ad to randomly mix in.”
MTV Rewind is free to view as well, though if you’re a fan, you can sling a few dollars to the developer to help it continue into the future.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s worth noting that a similar project was launched by Adelaide developer Patrick Galbraith last decade, focusing instead on the classic Aussie program Rage.
His undertaking – dubbed Rage Again – allows viewers to view the classic playlists broadcast on the late-night music show at their leisure. You can check out Rage Again here, and the nascent MTV Rewind here.
