What is Hollywood Link?
Hollywood Link is a free, browser-based movie-trivia quiz game. Players test their knowledge of cast, directors, release years, and on-screen links between actors and films — solo or in real-time head-to-head duels against friends. No download, no installation, no paywall, no ads.
Two game modes
The game ships two distinct modes that each reward a different kind of film knowledge:
- Movie Link — you're given a movie and asked to identify another movie connected to it through a shared cast or crew member. Great for players who enjoy mapping out filmographies and tracing who worked on what.
- Actor Link — you're given an actor and asked which other actor shares the screen in a specific film. Rewards knowing ensemble casts and who appeared with whom.
Five difficulty levels
Each mode is split across five difficulty tiers, so the game scales with how much of Hollywood history you've actually absorbed:
- Level 1 — Household names. Blockbuster leads, franchise anchors, and films everyone has heard of. A comfortable warm-up.
- Level 2 — Regular moviegoer. Mainstream releases from the last few decades, with some well-known supporting cast.
- Level 3 — Film buff. Cross-era questions, acclaimed directors, genre classics, and less obvious co-stars.
- Level 4 — Cinephile. International films, auteur filmographies, arthouse releases, and characters played by character actors.
- Level 5 — Completionist. Deep-cut trivia, obscure filmographies, and the kind of connections only a letterboxd power user would spot.
Scoring and leaderboards
Every correct answer adds one point to your running total for that mode and difficulty. Incorrect answers cost nothing but do reduce your percentage-correct stat, which is the tie-breaker on the leaderboards. Each mode and difficulty has its own global board, plus a friends board that only shows people you've connected with. You need a verified email to appear on either board — guests can still play the game, but their scores stay private until they save their progress.
Where the questions come from
The question catalogue starts from the public Kaggle Movies Dataset, a widely used movie metadata dump that covers cast, crew, release years, and genres. A batch-generation pipeline turns that metadata into candidate questions, which then pass through an AI-assisted distractor check (to rule out duplicate correct answers — a common pitfall) and a manual review pass before being published. An admin quality-scan tool continuously re-audits the live pool and emits correction files that fix question bugs as they surface.
Real-time duels
Signed-in players with a verified email can challenge friends to head-to-head duels. Both players see the same question at the same time; whoever answers correctly first wins the point. Duels run over WebSocket for low latency and are the only part of the game that requires an account.
Who built it
Hollywood Link was built by Bram Luyten for the 2026 AI Vibe Jam. If the game wins prize money, 100% of it goes to Charity Water. The stack is Spring Boot + Thymeleaf on the backend, hand-written CSS with progressive enhancement on the frontend, SockJS/STOMP for real-time duel messaging, and Heroku for hosting. Source code and issue tracker live on GitHub.
Who it's for
Hollywood Link is built for people who enjoy film for its own sake — casual moviegoers who want a five-minute mental diversion, film buffs who want to test themselves against harder tiers, and anyone who has ever gotten stuck in a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" spiral. It's not a speedrun game, it's not competitive esports, and it's not going to quiz you on box-office numbers. It's just a place to enjoy knowing things about movies.
Languages
The UI and question prompts are available in English, French, Polish, Spanish, and Japanese. Use the language switcher at the top of any page to change locale — your choice is remembered across sessions.