Reddit became an escape room last night in its first ever interactive game

Cozmo, the family-friendly robot, went on an adventure through the weirdest place on the internet last night: Reddit. For the first time, Reddit, in partnership with Cozmo creator Anki, played host to an interactive livestream game of Escape the Room.

Scroll down to replay the live stream

The users on the so-called front-page of the internet had to work together to get the palm-sized robot out of Reddit’s strangest places. I’m looking at you, r/hailcorporate. Teaming up with The Lodge, Anki built a real-world physical manifestation of Reddit’s best subreddits. Your job was to help Cozmo escape each and every subreddit room. This was only accomplished by working as a community. Players needed to navigate to the correct subreddit and vote in order to make Cozmo perform actions. Everything stemmed from Cozmo’s power cubes, which are real-world items that affect the robot’s environment, eventually leading to his escape.  

In the r/showerthoughts room, for example, players had to help Cozmo power the shower and adjust the temperature by voting to add cold or hot power cubes. And in r/rarepuppers, they had to help Cozmo interact with dogs by directing him to power cubes and performing actions.

“A physical manifestation of Reddit as the backdrop for a collaborative live streamed game where Cozmo is lost and the entire community helps Cozmo escape in real-time,” Nilesh Ashra, Director of Creative Technology W+K Lodge, said. “We’ve pushed to the edge of robotics, engineering and experience design. What happens is up to Reddit and Cozmo.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=A0wdnIAV0x0

While this is Reddit’s first interactive livestream, the website is no stranger to interactive games. The most notable being the social games released on April Fools. r/Place, Reddit’s 2017 April Fools event, for example, saw Redditors come together to create (and destroy) works of art, filling up an entire canvas, one pixel at a time.

“Our communities are at the heart of everything we do at Reddit and they crave deep, interesting, unique content from both users and brands,” says Joe Federer, Reddit’s Senior Brand Strategist. “There is so much nuance to the culture in these communities and with this campaign being the first to bring these subreddits to life in the physical world, we knew we needed to find genuine connection points with the communities.”

Redditors were able to watch and take part on both mobile devices and desktop computers, with the game being streamed live on YouTube, Facebook and Reddit.