Boom/Bust: HQ Trivia

⭐ 6.0/10

(Originally written by Tim)

I loved HQ, and Joe will never let it down that I claimed I would play it every day for the rest of my life (although I will always argue that I would if I was still on the west coast, since the timing of the games is so much better). Anyways, this podcast is an 8 part series around the rise and fall of the gameshow startup.

I was pretty defensive during the whole thing, because the podcast host seems to really scoff at the whole thing. She claims to have loved the game, but talks about the company as if it was a complete failure. I will get back to that later.

The stories around the rise of the company are truly fascinating. Some really cool stories I didn't know about around how it was founded and who was in charge. But these people in charge sounded terrible, and as the game lost popularity they kind of drove it in to the ground, another thing I had no idea about. One of the co-founders dies in a drug overdose, which kind of sparks the eventual demise, and was the climax of this podcast for me, made me feel pretty emotional.

The podcast ends with an entire episode about how the people making the podcast find out that the people they interviewed kind of tried to compete with this podcast, fighting for rights to get some of the profit from it, or making a competing product. Its this weird battle that they spend way too long talking about that I think makes them talk about HQ so negatively the whole time, as a failure and not as a success.

Another thing that was pretty silly is that this podcast features ads exclusively for some HQ knock off! It struck me as kind of petty, and sort of selling out - they spend all this time analyzing how a game like HQ was setup to fail, and then are like, but download this new trivia app and help us make money! It made me irrationally angry and kind of ruined the podcast for me honestly.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but not as many limited ones like this, like a season of TV. I found the editing in this one to be kind of over the top, with strange music choices at strange times, and every episode trying to end with a poetic conclusion or over the top claim. The content was very interesting, but I didn't think the delivery was great, and the host was pretty annoying.

The best part of this whole thing was hearing Scott Ragowsky's voice again. The world needs its trivia daddy back.