The story behind the game.
Hi — I'm Gard Pedersen, a Norwegian developer and music nerd who built Beat Bandit as a side project because I kept wishing this exact game existed every time I was at a party.
There's no team. No studio. Just me, a laptop, and a genuine obsession with making something that's actually fun to pull out when friends are gathered around a phone.
The concept came out of a simple frustration: most party games feel like homework. You're reading rules, waiting your turn, writing answers on cards.
Beat Bandit flips that. Everyone picks a song — something they already have an opinion about — and the tension comes entirely from reading the room. Did that song choice feel too on-the-nose? Too vague? Was that person nervous, or are they just bad at music?
The Bandit mechanic keeps everyone second-guessing. Even when you know the word, you start to wonder if you're being too obvious.
Beat Bandit is a single HTML file. No framework, no build step, no npm. Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — deployed on Netlify.
I kept it this way on purpose. It loads instantly on any phone, no app install required, and I can ship a fix in minutes. Sometimes the simple approach is the right one.
Music is powered by the Deezer public API — JSONP requests, no auth, no rate limits for normal usage.
If you've played the game, found a bug, have a word pack idea, or just want to say hi — I read every message.