Brooklyn developer's game asks players to date and map old New York photos

A Brooklyn app developer built a daily online game that shows players an old photo of New York City and asks them to guess the year it was taken and where.

Khadija Aslam, 26, who goes by Deej, said the idea for When Taken NYC came from a trivia night at the Seneca in Ridgewood, Queens, where a round asked teams to date old photos of the city by decade.

"We did not win HAHA but we killed that round," Aslam told Urgent Matter in an interview by text message. "I remember one photo from like the 40s of guys in bowler hats fighting in a bar."

"I'm also obsessed with other geography type games like MapTap, Geoguessr, etc. so I put both ideas together to make When Taken NYC!" she said.

Aslam, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant and has been in New York for eight years, said the game took a couple of weeks to build.

"This is my first time making a game like this and I love it!" she said.

Each day's photo comes with a slider of years from 1850 to 2026 and a city map where players drop a pin. A leaderboard lists each player's score alongside how far off the guess was, in years and miles.

Wednesday's photo was the game's 43rd. By then, the day's top score was 603, from a player who missed by 15 years and 1.4 miles.

Players who sign in can appear on a 30-day leaderboard, the site says.

The game sits on the site of Backline NYC, an app for the city's music scene. Its About page says the team behind it has felt "the desperation of needing a drummer, an amp for a show, a single place to find our friends' shows."

The page says independent designers and engineers in Brooklyn build the app and lists Aslam's email for anyone who wants to learn more. The site also has two map quizzes on the world's countries and capitals.

Aslam said each photo has a short write-up for players who want the backstory. Photo cards she shared with Urgent Matter list the location, date, photographer and license, with a link to the same spot on Google Street View.

Aslam said she has shared the game mostly with friends, who shared it with theirs. It had drawn more than 1,000 guesses at the time of the interview, she said.

"People do really well for the most part!!" she said.

Aslam said players who know their history usually score better, as do those who zoom in to study details.

"Photos with clear shots of buildings or streets and people-focused photos are easier because you can really zero in on location and use the fashion as a tool," she said.

Aslam said some of her friends are New York City teachers who put the game up on classroom projectors and play it with students.

"I think it's a great educational tool to get kids talking about the history right outside their doors," she said.

She said many of the photos show historic events, including Stonewall, the March on Washington and the Apollo 11 parade.

"It's fun for students because it challenges them to think critically about history and use clues to solve it like a little puzzle," she said.

When Taken NYC joins other projects putting New York's history online. Urgent Matter previously reported in October 2025 that the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center planned to launch Nueva York Chronicles, a digital archive of oral histories, archival images and essays on Latin American immigrant communities across the five boroughs.

Most of the game's photos are in the public domain, Aslam said, and come from the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and Wikimedia.

"I've found some amazing photos that are copyrighted though, and I would love to include them but getting permission from the photographer has been a challenge," she said. "If any copyright lawyers are reading this I'd love your help!"

Works published in the United States in 1930 entered the public domain on January 1, 2026, the U.S. Copyright Office said in a December 31 blog post. For works created since 1978, copyright generally lasts for the creator's life plus 70 years, the office said.

"Many of the photos are in black and white but the color photos are my favorites," Aslam said.

She said she favors shots of people taken somewhere players will recognize, even if only by borough.

“My favorites are the photos that tell a story or make you go 'hm what was going on here!'" she said.

Aslam sent Urgent Matter five favorites that have run in the game so far. One is a June 1974 photo by Danny Lyon of teenagers on a stoop at Lynch Park, on the border of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Lyon shot it for DOCUMERICA, an Environmental Protection Agency project, the game's credit shows. He photographed Bedford-Stuyvesant that year during a stretch of on-and-off federal photography work from 1972 through 1974, the National Archives says.

Another, credited to the Bain News Service, shows two people dancing the tango on Brighton Beach around 1913, surrounded by men and boys in bathing suits.

A third, by Al Aumuller of the New York World-Telegram & Sun, shows a man in a pointed, shiny hat and an emblem-marked tunic leading a crowd on Fifth Avenue at East 40th Street on November 16, 1950. The game titles it A Martian on Fifth Avenue.

The other two carry a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to copy and adapt a photo, including for commercial use, as long as they credit the photographer, link to the license and release any adaptations under the same terms.

They are Kenneth C. Zirkel's photo of women dressed as mermaids on a convertible during the Mermaid Parade on Surf Avenue in Coney Island on June 27, 1998, and Yves Le Bail's 1977 Chinatown street scene, which the game titles Flares and platforms in Chinatown.

Aslam said she is "worried about running out of good photos."

"So far, I choose them based on how quirky and interesting they are, so the photos might get a bit more boring," she said.

The game now takes photo submissions. Its submission page asks especially for shots of people, fashion and street life and says guest photos run every Friday.

Aslam said submissions bring the same copyright worry she has with her own picks about whether the sender has the right to share the photo.

"I haven't thought about expanding outside of NYC,” she said. “There's such a rich photographic history here that would be hard to find elsewhere.”

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