HQ Trivia imploded quickly, but its legacy lives on | CNN Business

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When Scott Rogowsky auditioned to host an unreleased online quiz show called HQ Trivia in 2017, after a decade of gigging on the New York City comedy scene, he didn’t thinking it would be their ticket to instant fame.

Not long after landing the job, however, the Game Show on Your Phone app, from the founders of the once-popular six-second video platform Vine, became an overnight national sensation . At its peak, millions of users, including celebrities, would open the app at once to answer a series of trivia questions for cash prizes. It combined the best elements of mobile gaming, live video, and television production, and brought them together in an experience that people could participate in at home, at the bar, or anywhere in real time.

“We went from a valuation of nothing to $100 million in six months,” Rogowsky told CNN in his new film “Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia.” “We had a Super Bowl ad, billboards in Times Square. [I] I couldn’t walk down the street without being harassed for selfies.”

But the company imploded almost as quickly. Its success was undone by corporate clashes, executive changes and the death of one of its co-founders, Colin Kroll. Three years after the company shut down, however, the game’s legacy lives on with other companies trying to get large audiences in a fractured digital environment to tune in at the same time. But like HQ Trivia, these efforts rarely seem to last.

Twice a day, for 30 minutes, the world stopped as players watched one or more people receive a significant amount of money instantly on HQ Trivia, and viewers got their own chance as well. The players who won divided the pool among themselves. Sometimes the earnings were high ($250,000); other times it was only $11.

Rogowsky, with his charismatic and quirky charm, emerged as the Internet’s beloved “Quiz Daddy” and had a front-row seat to the hottest new thing in technology. As of March 2018, the app attracted more than 2.3 million users for each trivia session.

Behind the scenes, however, tensions rose between Rogowsky and HQ Trivia co-founder Rus Yusupov, who was reportedly jealous that Rogowsky became the face of the company. Yusupov and Kroll were also said to be feuding on different views. At the same time, Kroll’s alleged past aggressive behavior while on Vine was said to make it difficult for investors to participate.

There were also technical problems. As the app grew in popularity, it became increasingly buggy and crashed regularly for users. Some players claimed they never received their payouts, others started to get bored. daily use it started to fall.

Rogowsky left in March 2019 to pursue other opportunities, nearly three months after Kroll was found dead in his New York apartment. Rogowsky now owns a vintage clothing store in Los Angeles.

The app was officially shut down in February 2020 when players received a cryptic notification sent to their phones: “HQ is live. Just kidding. We’re off the air indefinitely.”

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Over the years, other tech companies have launched similar services in apparent efforts to capture some of the magic that made HQ Trivia, with mixed success.

Facebook launched a gaming platform in 2018 that was canceled in the United States the following year. Most recently, TikTok launched a multi-day test program that included multiple rounds of trivia and a live host with cash prizes. The company encouraged businesses to also use it as a way “to engage with their communities.”

Wordle, a word game where users have six attempts to guess a five-letter word each day, achieved similar online virality to HQ Trivia last year as the service made it easy to post on social networks on how many attempts it took to get the answer.

In an interview last year, Wordle’s creator said part of the app’s power is its ability to create “a shared experience,” especially during the pandemic when friends and family stayed apart from each other. of others However, unlike HQ Trivia, Wordle does not require its users to share this experience at the exact same time of day.

BeReal may be HQ Trivia’s most lasting legacy, even though it’s not a trivia game. The popular social app is trying to get all of its users to stop what they’re doing and take a selfie at a specific time of day. The goal is different: to create authenticity, but like HQ Trivia, it asks users to be in the moment. But even BeReal is seeing declining users.

“Other than live sports or the Oscars, there are very few live events that people report,” Mike Miley, author of “Truth and Coincidences: Game shows in truth and fiction,” said of HQ Trivia’s legacy in the CNN documentary. “[Game shows] they’re looking to find their own unique twists on that formula and capture people’s imaginations, and HQ was able to scratch that itch in a unique way that hadn’t happened before.”

For a deeper look at the rocket-like rise and sudden implosion of the once-ubiquitous mobile game show, the CNN film “Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia” premieres on Sunday, March 5 at 9:00 PM PT.