Brand Spotlight: Heard It All Before

Gather round a group and turn up the music! Founder Kristen Daniel shares how “Heard It All Before” a game for hip hop and soul fanatics, educates and entertains. 

Tell us how you came up with the concept to create a game based off of hip hop and soul? 

This game came out of nowhere really. We were all, you know, during a quarantine sitting on our couches, I'm sure. Just like you might've been just bored. I was alone during quarantine, me and my dog kind of sitting on a couch and I had this little amateur DJ table, but my turntables were broken and then the thought crossed my mind. What would I be deejaying? I started to think about music, which then took my mind to coming up with a game where you guessed samples, because I love playing originals and samples for friends and family. I just came up with the concept and started playing around in a tool called Canva and came up with a prototype of cards. 

Then I started thinking how could you listen to a song so that you can identify a sample? And that's where the thought for coming up with the QR code got incorporated. 

Music saved us all during the pandemic! So how do you play the game? 

So you can play with two or more people. There are four cards. Two of them are cards where you're listening to a song, a snippet of a song, to hear whether or not you hear some songs that come from that song. So that's an original card. So if I hear Soul Makossa, then I'm wanting you to hopefully get a Michael Jackson song or Rihanna, “Please Don't Stop the Music.” 

There's a sample card and you might hear a song that is a little bit newer, and you're looking for the older songs. So “Party ain’t a Party” by Queen Pen, you know that that's going to be an Earth, Wind and Fire song. And so then the other two cards. One is a mystery card, which is what makes the game really unique. Mystery cards are titles and songs that we actually change constantly on the back end. And so the game is physical, but we actually have a database so You're never getting tired of your game so you can choose a mystery card and you won't know if you're getting a sample or original. 

And then bonus cards are just to help teams take the lead and win because the first team to 20 is the winner. So, this is how you're playing a game, going around with friends and listening and yelling out and hopefully your team will win. 

You have to have a real deep love for music and a real deep knowledge of music for you to come up with this concept. What is your relationship with music? 

I've always loved music. I played instruments in the band, I played the piano growing up. Don't ask me to play either the piano or the clarinet right now. I’ve always been interested in deejaying. I would like to spend more time really sharpening that skill. And then in my younger

years I wanted to be an entertainment attorney. So I just there's, there's always been some type of proximity to music. 

What do you want people to feel when they engage in this game with their friends or family? 

It's about discovery and learning. We Say it’s for music lovers and learners. We want the game to be, for everybody, not just the average music expert.