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QuizUp, the wildly popular iPhone trivia game, has more than 100,000 questions about everything from botany to Batman, most of them written by a volunteer army of geeks. Videogame geeks, economics geeks, even Fifty Shades of Grey geeks.
More than 7 million people are playing the free iPhone trivia game from Plain Vanilla. The game essentially saved the Icelandic developer, which almost went bankrupt. Its first game, a preschool learning app, was beautifully designed but a commercial flop. "We were kind of naive," admits CEO Thor Fridriksson. "We thought if we made a really good product it would just sell, but that's not the case."
That's when the team had an idea: A social app modeled after Trivial Pursuit, the way Zynga's Draw Something took on Pictionary and its ilk.
"Nobody plays Trivial Pursuit on their own," Fridriksson says. "Very weird people, maybe." So while there were already thousands of trivia games on iPhone, many of them popular, none of them nailed the social features that would make the games a Draw Something-sized phenomenon. For example, Logos Quiz Game features no simultaneous multiplayer options and exclusively quizzes players on famous company mascots and brand marks. Despite its significant shortcomings, the app has been downloaded over 30 million times since its release in January 2012.
In contrast, QuizUp has a slick, colorful interface, support for both asynchronous and simultaneous multiplayer, and sports exponentially more questions thanks to Plain Vanilla's aggressive recruiting of question-writing "experts" in various fields. Fridriksson says more than 30,000 people have applied to become question makers.
One of the driving ideas behind QuizUp was that people probably would get a lot more passionate about, and involved in, the game if it featured a wide variety of very specific categories – say, for instance, individual TV shows, authors, or movies. Each category would have an online discussion board built around it so fans could discuss their shared interests. Plain Vanilla assembled a content team and instructed it to recruit fan communities. Such people more knowledgeable and passionate about a given topic than anyone at Plain Vanilla. They wanted people like Fifty Shades of Grey expert Anissa Garcia.
Garcia, a 34-year-old freelance writer from Austin, Texas, loves Fifty Shades of Grey. After reading the whole series with her book club and discovering a movie is in pre-production, she posted a fan page on Facebook that would allow fans to debate who should be cast as the book's central character, Christian Grey. The page soon grew to more than half a million users, most of whom had very strong opinions. (Irish actor Jamie Dornan got the job after it was abandoned by Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam.)
"Any time we even speculated about who'd get the part, girls would just go crazy," Garcia says. "They'd fight with each other, and they got upset by the whole Charlie Hunnam thing."
Knowing how passionate fans of the series could be, Garcia was very careful when fact-checking questions she created for the Fifty Shades of Grey section of QuizUp. She reread the books carefully, crafting questions that ranged from easy (Q: Who interviews Christian Grey the day he meets Anastasia Steele? A: Anastasia Steele) to superfans-only territory (Q: What's the name of the company Christian Grey buys? A: Seattle Independent Publishing).
QuizUp's various discussion boards average more than 100,000 posts per day, across a wide swath of human interests. The board for 50 Shades is filled with the same sort of debates Garcia saw on her Facebook page. "I'm so glad they chose jamie dornan… He's soooo hot!!!," is a typical example. Meanwhile, one click away is the physics board where QuizUp fans earnestly debate string theory.
Before you head over there, what's the name of Christian Grey's helicopter? Here's the answer, noob.
Don't have an iPhone? Plain Vanilla says Android and iPad versions of QuizUp are coming soon.
