The most evenly balanced decade, and the home of the opposites clue.
The 1980s is the most evenly split decade in Cryptune, with almost exactly as many albums as songs. That balance is a real feature of the decade rather than a quirk of selection. This was the last period when a major album was an event and the single was simultaneously at its commercial peak, and both formats produced titles that stuck.
Video is the reason usually given, and it is at least partly right. When a song arrives with pictures attached, the title has to work as a caption. Eighties titles are consequently short, punchy and often built around a single strong preposition or contrast. Take on Me. Make it Big. Born in the USA. These are titles designed to be legible on a screen for three seconds.
The decade also brought a technological flattening. Drum machines and synthesisers meant that acts working in completely different genres could sound like they came from the same room, and the naming followed a similar convergence. A metal album and a pop album from 1987 can have titles of identical shape.
What keeps the decade interesting as puzzle material is how frequently those short titles turn on a single small word doing a lot of work. On, in, up, big, me, you. These are the least interesting words in the English language and the eighties built an enormous number of memorable titles out of them.
The most represented acts here are a genuine spread rather than a single dominant figure. Where the sixties has an obvious centre of gravity, the eighties in Cryptune is a cluster of major names each contributing a handful, which is a fair reflection of a decade with several parallel mainstreams.
The 1980s accounts for 86 puzzles in Cryptune, split 44 songs to 42 albums. The average puzzle from this decade has 2.5 tiles, and 21 of them are single tile puzzles, meaning the whole answer is one word.
The longest answer from the decade is Here Comes the Rain Again, at 5 words. The most common clue types across those puzzles are synonym with 138, direct with 42 and opposites with 33.
The acts appearing most often from this decade are Madonna (5), Metallica (5), Michael Jackson (5), Prince (5) and George Michael (4).
This is where opposites clues cluster. The eighties has the highest count of them in the game, and the reason is structural: titles built on small oppositional words give a clue writer an easy and fair way to point at ON by saying "off", or at BIG by saying "small". If you see a very short clue with a very common word in it, check whether it is pointing at its own reverse before you go hunting for a synonym.
Read the small words twice. The single most common way to lose points in an eighties puzzle is to decode four tiles correctly, assemble them confidently, and discover you wrote "on" where the title says "in". The difference is one letter and the whole answer.
Three-tile puzzles are more common here than in any other decade, which makes this a good section to practise the middle game. You have enough words to triangulate but not so many that the answer assembles itself.
The 86 puzzles from this decade cover 78 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.