Reception
"The Name of the Game" was not as successful as ABBA's previous singles since 1975. It was more of a Top 10 success, only topping the British charts. It was the second of three consecutive UK No. 1 singles after "Knowing Me, Knowing You", and before "Take a Chance on Me".
The song was a Top 5 hit in ABBA's native Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa and Rhodesia, while peaking inside the Top 10 in Australia, West Germany, Switzerland and Mexico. On the Hot 100, where ABBA had not been embraced as strongly as in Europe, "The Name of the Game" bowed at No. 82 on 24 December 1977 and peaked at No. 12 on 11–18 March 1978.
An edited version of "The Name of the Game", which omitted the entire second verse of the song, reducing the length of the track from its original 4:51 to 3:58, was released on a promotional single in the USA. The U.S. radio edit of "The Name of the Game" then – apparently by mistake – found its way onto the 1982 Polar Music compilation The Singles: The First Ten Years, and then onto a number of hits packages issued on both vinyl and CD in the 1980s and early 1990s. This edit also appears on the original 1992 version of the group's Gold: Greatest Hits album. Not until the 1999 remastered edition of Gold: Greatest Hits did the song appear in its entirety on that compilation.
When PolyGram released the first digitally remastered CD version of The Album in 1997, the fact that one of the nine tracks was nearly a minute shorter than it was supposed to be somehow managed to elude the remastering engineers – the U.S. edit was again used by mistake and the first edition was subsequently withdrawn.
"The Name of the Game" was sampled in 1996 by the Fugees for their hit "Rumble in the Jungle", the first time that an ABBA song had been legally sampled by another act.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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