How to Master Who Made This?
TLDR: Who Made This? asks you to name the creator of a work. You pick one topic before the run · Paintings, Music or Literature · and each topic keeps its own best streak. Every round gives you four names. The pools are small and fixed, so learn the names in each pool and the streak follows.
Understanding the Game
Who Made This? is a streak game with one question: who made this? A correct pick continues the streak. A wrong pick ends it. Your best streak is saved in your browser, and you can sign in to sync it across devices.
Before the run you pick a topic. The picker sits above the board and offers three: Paintings, Music and Literature. Your pick is staged, so the round on screen does not change at once. Press Generate new game to start a fresh run on the topic you chose. Each topic stores its own best streak, so a strong run in Music never overwrites your Paintings record.
The three topics have three different round shapes:
- Paintings draws the picture in full on a canvas. You see no title and no date, only the work.
- Music plays a short melody on the shared piano. You listen · you never play it back.
- Literature shows the title of the book as text, in your own language.
After every answer the game names the creator, the work and the year in one line. That reveal is the only place the game teaches you, so read it after a win as well as after a loss.
Each pool is small and fixed, and no work repeats until its pool is empty. One full cycle therefore shows you the whole topic. That is the fastest way to find the gaps in what you know.
The Core Skill: Creator Association
The skill this game builds is creator association · you link a work to the person who made it, from the work alone.
You see a shape and a palette, or you hear a phrase, or you read a title. From that you name the maker. The pools are small, so the link becomes automatic after a few cycles.
Building Your Knowledge Base
Treat each topic as its own short list. None of the three is large.
Paintings · 17 works by 12 painters. Five are figurative and each is unmistakable: Turner’s The Shipwreck (1810), Hokusai’s The Great Wave (1831), van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), Munch’s The Scream (1893) and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905). The other 12 works are abstract, and they decide your streak. Learn one signature for each painter:
- Kandinsky · a crowded storm of curve and colour, with no grid.
- Picabia · sweeping curved planes, busier than Kandinsky but softer.
- Malevich · a flat black shape on a plain white ground, nothing else.
- Mondrian · white cells inside heavy black lines, filled with primary colour.
- Newman · one large flat field split by a narrow vertical band.
- Albers · squares nested inside squares, in close tones of one colour.
- Rothko · soft blurred rectangles that float, with no hard edge.
Music · 10 melodies by 8 composers. The range is narrow: Pachelbel’s Canon (1680), Bach’s Prelude in C (1722), Arne (1740), Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (1787), Beethoven, Chopin (1839), Mendelssohn (1840) and Satie’s Gnossienne (1890). Beethoven holds three of the ten, so he is the single best guess when you are unsure.
Literature · 21 works by 16 authors. These are canonical titles from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Orwell, Kafka and García Márquez. Four authors carry nine of the works between them: Dickens has three, and Austen, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have two each.
Tip: Albers and Rothko cause the most losses in Paintings, because both stack colour blocks. The edge tells them apart. Albers draws a crisp line around every square. Rothko lets each block bleed into the one behind it. Check the edge before you answer.
Tactical Approach to Multiple Choice
Every round offers four names and exactly one is correct. The count does not change · not with your streak, not with your age, and not between the topics.
The three wrong names come from the same pool, drawn at random. They are not matched to the period or the style of the work on screen. That is the single most useful fact in this guide, and it works in your favour.
The Elimination Funnel. Because the wrong names are random, a list often mixes a 17th-century composer with a 19th-century one, or a figurative painter with a colour-field painter. Cut it in two passes. First ask the broad question · figurative or abstract, Baroque or Romantic, Victorian novel or modernist one. That removes most names. Then match the signature. Two passes usually leave one name.
Tip: A maker with several works in a pool is likelier to be the answer. In Paintings, five painters hold 10 of the 17 works. In Music, Beethoven holds 3 of 10. In Literature, four authors hold 9 of 21. When two names remain and you cannot separate them, take the one with more works in the pool.
Common Mistakes
You try to name the work. The game never asks for a title. Malevich painted both Black Square and Black Cross, and both answers are Malevich. Name the maker and move on.
Warning · a long streak does not mean a harder pool: the game draws every round from the same fixed pool and never orders it by fame. Round 40 is as likely to show The Starry Night as round 1. If your streak breaks often, one maker you cannot place is the cause · find that maker and study the reveal line.
You switch your answer on a second work by the same hand. Players see a painter’s or an author’s second work, assume the game would not repeat a name, and change their pick. It would. Dickens has three books in the Literature pool and Beethoven has three melodies in Music.
You skip the reveal. The reveal is one line and it carries the maker, the work and the year. Skip it and the round taught you nothing.
Count your pool coverage: Paintings holds 17 works, Literature 21 and Music 10. Play one full cycle of a topic and note only the ones you missed. A pool this small means five or six gaps stand between you and a clean run.
You judge a melody on its first two notes. The Music rounds reward patience more than the other two. Let the phrase finish before you commit.
Practical Mastery Routine
Short daily sessions beat one long session. Ten minutes a day suits pools of this size. Play one full cycle of a single topic, then stop and review the misses.
Rotate the topic by the day, not inside a run. You pick one topic per run, and each keeps its own record, so use whole sessions: Paintings one day, Literature the next, Music the third. Your weakest topic deserves two days in three.
The Research Cycle. After a loss, spend one minute on the maker you missed. Read the reveal line, then find one more work by the same hand. Ask what the two share · the edge and palette for a painter, the harmony for a composer, the voice for an author. That shared trait is what you will recognise next time.
Tip: Play in your own language. Creator names and work titles ship in all 25 PlayMemorize languages. A name you read comfortably is a name you recall faster, and it leaves your attention on the work itself.
Beyond the Game
Three sister games run the same three pools as separate cards, each with its own streak and its own guide: Who Painted It?, Who Wrote It? and Who Composed It?. Use them when you want one topic on its own page. Who Made This? also appears as a tab inside the History Quiz hub.
Away from the screen these pools are a real map. The painters cover the 150 years from Turner to Albers. The composers run from Pachelbel to Satie. The authors run from Shakespeare to García Márquez. None of the three lists is long, and all three are worth knowing.
The real prize: streak length is a milestone, not the goal. The goal is that you place a Rothko, a Satie or a Kafka before you read the label. These pools are small enough to master, and the habit they build is not small at all.
Pick one topic, play a full cycle, and read every reveal. Your guesses will turn into recognition faster than you expect.
Who Made This?
Recognize famous paintings, melodies, and book titles by their creator. Three topic pools, a best streak for each
Play nowWorks on any device.