The longest answers in the game, and more Beatles than any other decade.
The 1960s is where the album stopped being a container and started being a statement. At the start of the decade a long player was mostly a way to sell singles you already owned, padded out with covers. By the end of it, records were being sequenced, titled and packaged as single works, and the idea that an album could be about something had permanently arrived.
You can see the shift in the titles themselves, and that is what makes the decade behave so distinctively as puzzle material. Sixties titles are frequently sentences. Not phrases, not single words, but complete grammatical statements with subjects and verbs in them. Will You Love Me Tomorrow is a question. Like a Rolling Stone is a simile. Come Together is an instruction. Songwriters were still working in a tradition where a title announced what the song was about, plainly, in the words people would actually use.
That plainness sits alongside some of the strangest naming in popular music. The same decade produced Rubber Soul, a pun so slight it barely survives being explained, and a wave of band names built entirely on wordplay and misspelling. The gap between the two tendencies is enormous, and both are represented here.
Rock is heavily present, which reflects both the decade and the fact that sixties rock has stayed in circulation more consistently than almost anything else from the era. The Beatles alone account for more Cryptune answers than any other act in the game by a wide margin, which is less a curatorial decision than an admission that their catalogue is unusually rich in titles that break neatly into clue-sized pieces.
The handful of pre-1960 entries in the game are gathered onto this page rather than given a section of their own. There are only a couple, and they belong to the same world of plainly titled, sentence-shaped songwriting.
The 1960s accounts for 76 puzzles in Cryptune, split 42 songs to 34 albums. The average puzzle from this decade has 2.7 tiles, and 9 of them are single tile puzzles, meaning the whole answer is one word.
The longest answer from the decade is Will You Love Me Tomorrow, at 5 words. The most common clue types across those puzzles are synonym with 137, direct with 32 and opposites with 22.
The acts appearing most often from this decade are The Beatles (16), The Rolling Stones (7), Cream (6), Bob Dylan (4) and The Doors (4).
Expect long answers. This decade has the highest average tile count in the whole game, and by some distance the most answers of four or five words. If you open a puzzle and find a row of four tiles staring back at you, the sixties are a reasonable first guess before you have decoded anything at all.
Long answers bring their own gift, though. The more words a title has, the more of them are small connecting words, and small connecting words tend to arrive as direct clues, which cost you nothing to solve. A tile reading "a" is the word A. Get those out of the way immediately and the puzzle shrinks to two or three real problems.
Because the titles are so often complete sentences, grammar helps you more here than anywhere else. Once you have two words you can usually work out what part of speech the missing one has to be, which narrows a synonym clue enormously. And when you are properly stuck on a sixties puzzle, the base rates are not subtle: run through the most heavily represented acts in your head and see whether anything clicks.
The 76 puzzles from this decade cover 72 different titles, listed alphabetically with the act responsible. A handful appear twice in the game, once as a song and once as an album, and are listed once here. Puzzle dates are not shown, so this tells you what is in the game without telling you what is coming tomorrow.
Want to know how the clues themselves are built? The clue school takes each clue type in turn. Or go back to all decades.