What is HQ? All about the viral trivia game ahead of HBO Max’s Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia

Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia, a brand new documentary, will debut on Thursday, July 20, 2023, exclusively on HBO Max. Salima Koroma is the director of the movie, which had its world premiere on March 5, 2023, on CNN. The movie centers around the unexpected rise and epic fall of the once immensely popular trivia mobile game HQ. It was first released back in 2017.

Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia will showcase insightful interviews given by former HQ Trival hosts Scott Rogowsky and Sharon Carpenter and a set of journalists and expert technologists, including Taylor Lorenz, Scott Galloway, and Laurie Segall.

Since Rotten Tomatoes dropped the official trailer for Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia, viewers have been quite curious to learn all about the once world-famous video game HQ.

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Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia chronicles the story of the beloved game developed by Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov

Launched in 2017, in the form of a "game show on your phone" app, HQ soon became the talk of the town, luring in millions of users, including many notable Hollywood celebrities, to play the addictive and quite entertaining mobile trivia game.

Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll served as the developers of the game, which was developed for iPadOS, iOS, tvOS, and Android users by Intermedia Labs.

The app allowed its users to take active participation in an array of everyday live trivia games. Users could also win prize money or split prime money among each other by playing the mobile game.

HQ Trivia was the very first game in the app. In this particular game, the players had a total of ten seconds to give answers to several multiple-choice questions. With each question, the difficulty level increased. Later, a number of other interesting games such as HQ Tunes and HQ Words were added to the app.

The app on Android and iOS began to have several technical glitches soon after the app became extremely popular around the world. The glitches went on to spark outrage among the players of the mobile game.

Many users started complaining about the app's freezing, lagging, and untimely elimination in the middle of the games. These glitches massively affected the usability of the app.

A poster for Glitch: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia (Image Via Rotten Tomatoes)

Another tragedy struck when one of the developers of the app, Kroll, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment from an alleged drug overdose on December 16, 2018. Reportedly, on February 14, 2020, a memo regarding the ceasing of the company was sent to the staff members of the app by the parent company, Intermedia Labs.

As per the memo, the staff was informed that the company would "cease operations and move to dissolution".

However, four days after the memo was sent by Intermedia Labs, the other designer of the app, Rus Yusupov, revealed that another tentative deal with a different company was on the way regarding the app's purchase and its operations.

In March 2020, the app reportedly went on to resume its daily trivia games, which finally stopped on November 17, 2022. Although HQ has yet to officially declare its shutdown, there have been no HQ games since November 2022.

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Don't forget to watch Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia, which will arrive on Thursday, July 20, 2023, on Max.