ABBA - The Name Of The Game

What this video is

Released on 14 October 1977 as the lead single from ABBA's fifth studio album The Album, 'The Name of the Game' arrived at the apex of ABBA's commercial dominance, particularly in the UK where it reached number one for four consecutive weeks. The song represented a creative evolution for the group — a more progressive, art-pop inflected composition built from six distinct structural parts, influenced by the…

Why it matters

This video is a landmark document of the pre-MTV promotional clip era, representing the mature phase of ABBA's video identity as shaped by Lasse Hallström. Its domestic realist aesthetic — intimate setting, natural light, non-performance narrative — stands in direct contrast to the theatrical…

The director

Lars Sven 'Lasse' Hallström (born 2 June 1946, Stockholm, Sweden) is a Swedish film director who first became internationally known for directing almost all of ABBA's promotional music videos between 1974 and 1982, as well as the 1977 feature film ABBA: The…