Human brains are terrible at comprehending deep time. We tend to compress history into broad buckets like "Ancient Times," "The Middle Ages," and "The Olden Days." Which Came First? is designed to break those buckets and expose the bizarre, often counter-intuitive chronology of our world. It forces you to compare two disparate events and make a snap judgment on which is older.
The "Cleopatra Effect"
You’ve probably heard the factoid: "Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon Landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid." It sounds fake, but it’s true. This game is built on hundreds of these temporal anomalies. We pit pop culture against ancient history to mess with your perception of time.
- Biology vs. Architecture: Did the last Woolly Mammoth die before or after the Pyramids of Giza were built? (Hint: The answer might shock you).
- Tech vs. Empires: Was the fax machine invented before the fall of the Samurai in Japan?
- Universities vs. Nations: Is Oxford University older than the Aztec Empire?
Why We Play
This isn't just about memorizing dates (which is boring). It’s about context. By placing events side-by-side, we build a scaffold of history in our minds. You stop seeing history as a list of dates and start seeing it as a flowing narrative where samurais could technically have sent faxes (spoiler: the timeline aligns closer than you think). Test your intuition and see how well you really know the order of things.