Millions of People Loved HQ Trivia. What Happened?

The following is an excerpt from Alyssa Bereznak, reporter and host of Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia

Back in the fall of 2017, a new game called HQ Trivia 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. 

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.

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 Trivia 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 host 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 course of Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia, we’ll re-live all of them.

How long have you been working on this podcast?
I remember getting a Slack while I was on vacation last spring about the potential idea; a week or so later I returned to the real world and started working on it. So: over a year. I have not been on vacation since.

When did you first learn about HQ Trivia?
I wish I had a good story about how I discovered HQ, but I can’t for the life of me remember the first time I played it. I consume internet culture much like a whale opens its mouth underwater to feed. I logged on one day in the fall of 2017, started scrolling, and HQ just became part of my world.

Where did you record this podcast?
We did interviews in offices, apartments, studios, Zoom, you name it.  But I recorded the narration during quarantine, which meant: In my closet, atop a yoga blanket, and against a special lower-back pillow for lumbar support. Just trying to give you the best sound quality I can!

Why do the things we love on the internet always die?
Well, I wouldn’t want to ruin the show for you. But I’d say it has a lot to do with the blueprints that Silicon Valley has drawn for “successful” companies, and the metrics we use to measure “success” in general. General executive-level incompetence helps too. All this and more, coming soon on a podcast near you.