Glitch: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia is now streaming on Max.
Do you remember HQ Trivia? For one brief, shining moment in 2018, the app looked like the future of media: A live trivia game hosted by comedian Scott Rogowsky, at its peak HQ attracted 2 million users – and soon after, it just disappeared. Director Salima Koroma’s documentary Glitch: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia pulls back the curtain on a seeming marketplace success that was in truth just another Silicon Valley smoke-and-mirrors flame out. Whether you played the game or not, the doc is an engaging tale of its two disparate creators, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, who were too busy undercutting one another to chart a sustainable future for their creation.
Glitch opens in 2012 with the heyday of Yusupov and Kroll’s first tech success, the video app Vine. Years before TikTok, the pair essentially engineered the short video revolution and then promptly sold their creation, pre-launch, to Twitter for $30 million. Following Twitter’s controversial decision to shut down Vine, Yusupov and Kroll pivoted to HQ, and Koroma charts that progression through a variety of archival materials, news footage, slick app-like graphics, and a thorough assortment of talking-head interviews featuring the duo's collaborators, former employees, Rogowsky, HQ superfans and tech journalists of the era including Taylor Lorenz and Kurt Wagner. It’s a relatively complete story of both the front-facing, zeitgeist success of HQ Trivia and the behind-the-scenes problems plaguing the startup. Rogowsky, in particular, provides a lot of candid and witty context regarding the absurdity of his unexpected fame, and his very weird bosses.
The founders only appear in Glitch via B-roll; Yusupov did not sit for a new interview, and Kroll died of a drug overdose in 2018. But their lack of direct involvement isn’t prohibitive to telling the depth and breadth of their stories. As the manager and attention-seeker of the pair, Yusupov frequently made the rounds to every media outlet that would have him, so he’s well represented in Glitch. Kroll was the more awkward and camera-shy engineer, portrayed as the “visionary” who created the coding and infrastructure that allowed both Vine and HQ Trivia to exist. Their frosty business relationship feeds the conflict that drives Glitch’s central thesis: Yusupov and Kroll’s egos and conflicting priorities doomed HQ Trivia from the start. There are accusations of backstage betrayals, and leaked stories of poor behavior and boardroom power plays that paint HQ as a rather hostile workplace for both Yusupov and Kroll and their eventual staff. It’s surprising to learn that Rogowsky’s smiley, “Quiz Daddy” persona was an effective smoke screen for the troubles percolating just offscreen.
Glitch is edited with a lot of energy and clean storytelling. Pierre Takal’s kitschy score, featuring electronic loops and accordions, also adds a lot of cheeky verve to the piece. The only stumbles come in the last 10 minutes, as the doc fails to provide information on where the main players are now, and HQ’s overall impact on the interactive app ecosystem. It also “ho-hums” this story as one of many VC startups that charm their investors with razzle dazzle and then fold under the weight of their lies. That alone deserves a tech expert’s opinion about the damage that rinse/repeat cycle has on the industry. Lastly, it ends on a low-blow note by framing Rogowsky’s current career as a punchline that isn’t very kind to someone who is presented in the doc as collateral damage. Compared to the rest of Glitch, it's an uncharacteristically unclassy move.
