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See a person and a year, pick which deed was actually theirs.

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About this page & FAQ

About PlayMemorize He Did What?!

PlayMemorize He Did What?! is a free history attribution quiz, played as the inverse of Who Did. One internationally-known figure appears with the year of one of their deeds · your job is to pick which deed was actually theirs from a multiple-choice list of plausible decoys. One wrong answer ends the streak; how long can you go?

Adjustable difficulty. The number of choices and the strength of the decoys are both tunable. Easy mode pulls decoys from any era, so anachronism alone often gives the answer away · Hard mode prefers decoys from the SAME era, so the player has to know not just "did Newton describe gravity" but also which Newton-adjacent claims (Halley's comet, the calculus dispute, the alchemy notebooks) are real and which belong to a contemporary.

Same data, different questions. He Did What?!, Who Did, When Did, and Order by When all draw from the same hand-curated pool of historical events. Practising one helps with the others.

Part of the PlayMemorize family of free brain-training games. Runs entirely in your browser, works offline as a Progressive Web App.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does He Did What?! work?

A historical figure appears with a year · "Isaac Newton, 1687". Three to six short event labels follow, exactly one of which is actually theirs. Pick the right one to extend the streak.

Q: How is it different from Who Did?

Who Did shows the event and asks who was responsible. He Did What?! flips it · the person and year are given, the deeds are the choices. Same dataset, different cognitive direction.

Q: How are the decoys picked?

At low difficulty, decoy deeds come from any era · the player can rule most out by century alone. At higher difficulty the game prefers same-era decoys, where the player needs to know which contemporary claim is real and which is misattributed.

Q: Why "He Did What?!" if some figures are women?

The title is a cheeky exclamation, not a gender claim · the in-game prompt uses neutral phrasing and the catalogue includes Cleopatra, Marie Curie, Sally Ride, Vera Rubin, Henrietta Leavitt, and other historical women. Treat the title the way you would "Hey, look at this!".

Q: Where do the events come from?

A hand-curated pool of internationally-known events shared with the When Did, Who Did, and Order by When games. Roman, Renaissance, Industrial, and Modern eras are all represented.

Q: Is it free?

Yes, completely free. No account, no ads, no paywalls. Best streaks are saved locally in your browser.