I never played HQ Trivia back in the day. I was aware of it. I saw the articles and heard podcasters yammer on about it. But I don’t recall it rising and I don’t recall collapsing… it was there one day and gone the next in my corner of the world. So I decided to learn me something via this (HBO) Max / CNN documentary.

Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia is, indeed, about the viral cell phone trivia game. How it rose from the ashes of Vine and then died. And that’s about it.

The history of its creation is more interesting than its collapse. I found the first half interesting, learning about the founders and how they created Vine then moved onto this. But the doc falls apart in its second half as the show goes viral, runs into some PR problems, and eventually falls apart. The problem is, nothing particularly interesting happened in that decline… not even the glitches referred to in the title of the doc are really all that momentous. It was largely a slow, uneventful collapse like many, many such tech fails.

It doesn’t help that they couldn’t get interviews with the founders (one for a very good reason). They did interview the MC fellow plus some other employees, investors, and reporters… but their stories couldn’t goose my interest all that much.

I suspect if the game gets your memories flowing, you might enjoy this doc. Almost none of it felt important or interesting to me.

Score: 68