Millions of People Played HQ Trivia. What Happened to It?
Episode 1 of our new documentary podcast series, ‘Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia,’ examines the viral sensation that was HQ Trivia, and asks: Why do the things we love on the internet always disappear?
The live trivia app HQ Trivia was once the obsession of the internet, garnering millions of players and an international spotlight. But then it all went wrong. Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia tells the story of the once-viral trivia app and examines vagaries of the attention economy.
Subscribe: Spotify / Apple / Stitcher
Back in the fall of 2017, a new game started to catch on in certain corners of the internet. It was this live mobile game show you could play on your phone. Twice a day, you’d get a push notification reminding you to tune in. Then you’d answer some trivia questions. And if you made it to the very end, you’d get to split a cash prize with whoever else won. The game was called HQ Trivia.
Pretty early on, the trivia maniacs discovered it. People like Eugene Byon.
“I’ve been interested in trivia for my entire life,” Eugene says. “I was a big game show nut ever since I was in diapers. My mom tells me that when The Price Is Right came on, even as a toddler, I would jump up and down and scream some of my very first words, which were, ‘Come on down.’”
Eugene is an IT professional from Houston. But in his free time he appears on game shows. He’s been on Pyramid, The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune. He’s been on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire … twice. Here he is during one of those appearances, with Chris Harrison:
“I was blown away that HQ figured out a way to provide a daily, in-studio, like, quality trivia game show experience to the public,” says Byon. “Because it really did feel like, to me, that I was back on the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire stage.”
What Eugene is getting at there is important. HQ stirred something in people. It got them going.
That energy was contagious. And it made people want to play all the time. I remember a good four-month stretch when I was logging on every day at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. on the dot. And I wasn’t the only one. Pierre Drescher, the chief technology officer of the New York–based startup Bento Box, was playing after hours too.
“One specific time I was with my fiancée then and now-wife at a restaurant and we discretely tried to play HQ,” says Drescher. “I think we were done with our meals, so it wasn’t too, too rude, but there was definitely a couple of other tables who started playing.”
Pretty soon it seemed like everyone knew about HQ. The startup world. The media. Teens and their parents. People from cities and the suburbs. Even some folks abroad. Eventually it would be played on morning talk shows, Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve, and by celebrities around the globe. At its peak, over 2.3 million people were logged on to HQ at once. The game was an international sensation that attracted multimillion-dollar advertising deals and, ultimately, a $100 million valuation.
And that was all because it was live. HQ reimagined the mobile viewing experience so that games could be communal and interactive. Yeah, the cash prizes were part of the draw. But at the end of the day, HQ wasn’t really about the money. It was about stakes and adrenaline.
Check out this clip from early 2018, of a woman named Lauren May, as she realizes she’s won the game:
Lauren won $11.
The excitement people felt from playing HQ caused the media to take notice. “TechCrunch was the first to report that HQ was a thing in, I think it was October 17, 2017,” says Kerry Flynn, a reporter at CNN. “And that was the first time I played, because I had heard rumors that the founders of Vine were working on something.”
Like Flynn said, its founders—Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov—just so happened to be two of the three guys who created Vine, a social network based on looping videos. For a brief moment, Vine was the incubator for online culture. But it was bought by Twitter and, like so many beloved social networks, was eventually shut down.
Rus and Colin both walked away from the Vine sale as young millionaires with serious cred within the tech industry. But in the workplace, they couldn’t have been more different. Rus was obsessed with images, both those he designed and his own. Colin, on the other hand, loathed attention. He was smart and creative, but shy. In a lot of ways, Rus’s and Colin’s skills complemented each other, and once HQ started catching on, they saw a second chance to build something, and this time … really own it.
“It only took a month to reach being a viral sensation,” Flynn says. “And how I saw that is, anecdotally in New York, just going out to bars or anywhere and you would just see people at 9 o’clock take out their phone and you could tell that there was Scott Rogowsky just on their phone.”
Usually there’s a simple reason why something goes viral: It’s shocking, or hilarious, or rage-inducing, or it involves a really cute picture of a fluffy cat.
But I have a slightly more specific theory for why HQ caught on so quickly: It was filling an entertainment need that most people didn’t even know they had.
Over the past decade or so, access to television has become stupid easy. On-demand services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and YouTube, coupled with the magical technology of DVRs, make it so that users can watch whatever they want, whenever they want. But a more flexible viewing schedule has also made watching TV less communal and more isolating. Even with the bounty of content available to choose from today, there’s still a hunger for something participatory.
When I opened HQ and the game started streaming, I could actually see, from second to second, how many other people were playing along in the top left corner of my screen. As the game got bigger, having that reminder that thousands—eventually millions—of people were doing the same exact thing, at the same exact time, was just thrilling.
“When you’re in that game and you see that there’s over a million people, you feel like you’re at an important event,” says Rusty Wyner, an early employee at the company. “You’re at a live thing that’s happening, and it’s only important because there’s so many people. So I feel like that number makes anyone connected to it feel special.”
That’s no longer the case. Just like that, the tradition of playing HQ faded from workplaces across the U.S. No more afternoon games. No more Scott Rogowsky. HQ died, then it came back again. And now it’s just another app that used to be popular.
That sudden shift in attention is something I think about a lot.
I’m what they might call a lifelong “early adopter.” I grew up in a little town called Sunnyvale, California, smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. Both of my parents are engineers by education. Steve Jobs went to my high school, and the campuses of Apple, Yahoo, and Google are all a short drive away from my childhood home. I came of age at the dawn of the social internet—the era of Napster, AIM, and Xanga—and I joined Facebook back when you needed a college email address to get in. And like many other people my age, I have a long list of services and social networks that gave me a sense of community, that I loved to my core, and that are now completely nonexistent.
When I first started reporting on HQ, I wanted to know: Why do the things I love on the internet always die? What do we lose in our hypercharged attention economy? And is my own fleeting attention span to blame? But the further I got into the story, I found that HQ was also a cautionary tale. Of a company’s existential hand-wringing. Of a deeply dysfunctional work environment. And of the dangers of going too viral too early. HQ has had more than a few extra lives. Over the next eight episodes, we’ll re-live all of them.