Articles
QuizUp, HQ Trivia, Kahoot, the pub quiz and the record-breaking champions: what a decade of trivia actually showed. Checked facts, sources at the foot of every piece.
Did a theatre manager really invent the word “quiz” overnight, to win a bet?
The story is too good: Dublin, 1791, a wager, street children paid to chalk a made-up word across the city. It has been repeated for two centuries. One date takes it apart.
The best-selling quiz game ever made was sued for $300 million over Columbo’s first name
An author planted a fake first name in his encyclopedia to catch anyone copying it. Trivial Pursuit copied it. What happened next says something essential about what a question actually is.
How QuizUp, the trivia app with 100 million downloads, vanished from the stores overnight
Pulled from the app stores on 20 January 2021, switched off on 22 March. It never ran out of players — the price it sold for says exactly what it did run out of.
This app gave away up to $300,000 in a single game — two years later it was gone
2.38 million people on the same question at the same second. A host every night, a prize pot every night — and a sponsor only on some of them.
Why these two trivia games are still here, in the decade that killed QuizUp and HQ Trivia
While QuizUp shut down and HQ Trivia dissolved, two trivia games were thriving. They took opposite routes, and neither looks like what the others were attempting.
Trivia outlived the apps built to replace it — it went back to the pub
76% of customers say they will turn out for a quiz night, and 85% of those come back. A generation drinking less and clubbing less has a lot to do with it.
The French student who won 646 game shows in a row — and €2.5 million
A 20-year-old history student stayed on the same French quiz show for 21 months and left with €2,566,931. What his run actually says about general knowledge.
Your next night in needs a quiz.
Install EpiQuiz and start the first game tonight.
