Vid Grid

A music video plays in a window. The window is divided into squares that are scrambled. The player must unscramble the squares by sliding them into an adjacent position while the music video is playing and before the music ends. The quick cuts, scenery changes and other distractions of a music video are what make Vid Grid challenging.

Vid Grid starts easy, with just 9 puzzle tiles in a 3x3 grid, but gets progressively more challenging as the number of squares increase, up to a 6x6 grid. In level one, players can simply drag-and-drop squares into position. After that, they can only move the squares by sliding them into an open adjacent position, just like a typical sliding tile puzzle. In the most difficult level, some of the squares are upside down.

Vid Grid was first conceptualized by Geffen Records head of new media and former Billboard magazine editor Norman Beil during a jigsaw puzzle play session with his children in late 1993, where the idea of moving jigsaw puzzles intrigued him and it also occurred to Beil that music videos could be the ideal puzzle pieces. Beil then proceeded to contact Jasmine Multimedia Publishing, the company where he previously worked before, to pitch them the idea in early 1994 and acted as the game's producer during its development, which was done in conjunction between Geffen and Jasmine Multimedia as a joint-venture.

Jasmine founder Jay Samit stated that it was one of the first times where any company created the technology to "go inside" the video within its borders and move the puzzle pieces as the music video itself played, while Beil stated that development went smoothly due to the straightforward design and that the engineers at Jasmine managed to break the video barriers. In addition, Beil also worked closely with Jasmine's engineers after consulting with one of his children on the strategies and levels of difficulty found within the game. Samit also claimed the videos featured were four times larger than those found in other titles at the time and that the video compression (which was done with the Cinepak video codec) took over a day to digitize one minute of them. By June 1994, Beil and his team had a working prototype ready for demonstration and the game was showcased for the first time to the general public at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show of the same year.

Vid Grid was well regarded upon its release on PC and as of April 8, 1995, it has sold 100,000 copies and received the "Best Multimedia Software" award at SCES 1994. The Jaguar CD version was also well received, due to being one of the pack-in titles for the peripheral when it launched, with praise towards the gameplay.

After the release of Vid Grid, Geffen Records and Jasmine Multimedia created two spin-offs that were released in 1995, with each one having a distinctive thematic and selection of music videos respectively; Kid Vid Grid (which prominently features cartoons from Hanna-Barbera) and Country Vid Grid (which focuses on country music as the name implies). On a May 1995 article by Billboard magazine, Jay Samit commented on the possibility of creating other titles in the series but themed around musicians from countries across the world such as Argentina and Germany. In 1997, two years after its release, the game's trademark was abandoned.