Every morning, New York Magazine’s Vulture readers flock to the pop culture website not just to catch up on entertainment headlines, but to get their daily game fix. Just as Wordle has captured a new audience for The New York Times, Vulture’s Cinematrix is proving to be a rallying point for the movie-obsessed.
The grid-based trivia game is consistently the site’s top “story.” It’s an addictive mix of movie trivia and puzzle solving. And it all came about thanks to . . . baseball?
Cinematrix is the baby of Vulture editor Neil Janowitz and contributor Joe Reid. A friend of Janowitz’s sent him a link to the Immaculate Grid, which tests MLB fans’ knowledge of baseball. Nine squares to fill in. Nine guesses.
Immediately, the pair recognized the addictive nature of the game—and saw potential for how the format could be used for movies.
“We always felt our audience were wired for games,” Janowitz tells Fast Company. “So many of our readers and people in our orbit pride themselves on being obsessive about movies and entertainment. This was a perfect way to tap into that.”
The game, at its core, is simple: Three categories are listed on the left side of the grid. Three more are atop it. As the player, you need to find some intersection of each. (For example, if two of the categories are “Margot Robbie” and “Oscar-Nominated Film,” you could go with Barbie, Bombshell, I, Tonya, or The Wolf of Wall Street.) You have nine guesses. Get something wrong and you won’t complete the day’s puzzle.
Vulture doesn’t disclose any traffic numbers about the game, but Janowitz says, “We’re absolutely seeing the response that we hoped for.” It has given a boost to Vulture’s crossword puzzle and exposes players to stories on the site, many of which are available only to subscribers who pay $5 a month. (The New York Times hasn’t specifically categorized the effect Wordle has had on its subscriber count, but has said the game brought in “tens of millions” of new users.)
Part of the game’s appeal is that it can be enjoyed equally by both casual fans of film and full-blown cinema nerds. Most of the nine boxes have a fairly obvious answer if you have a working knowledge of movie history. But film geeks challenge themselves to find more obscure answers and end the game with a higher “rarity” score, a bragging right for finding answers few others managed to.
Reid, who comes up with the daily puzzle mixes, admits that he sometimes has to control himself to maintain that equilibrium.
“If I had my druthers, the game would probably be a lot more psychotic,” he says. “I tend to go for the more challenging, the better. Having the ability to bounce ideas off [our] group has been really productive in terms of keeping the game balanced between challenging but acceptable.”
What’s surprising about Cinematrix is that no one on the Vulture staff is dedicated to it full time. Janowitz says that’s something the publication is “working pretty quickly to address,” but for now he calls it a labor of love for the people attached to it.
Vulture works with MovieGrid for Cinematrix. That game, which is somewhat similar, launched six months before Vulture’s offering, but that gave the developers some insight, which they used to coach Vulture on how to anticipate user reactions.
And players certainly have reactions, especially when they think they’ve found a fringe answer that the game doesn’t include (as when some users incorrectly believed that George Clooney was in Ocean’s 8). Typically, that sort of feedback can yield headaches for a publication. But in this case, it’s more of a dialogue.
“It has been this unexpected and thrilling touchpoint with our readers where we get tons and tons of emails from people who are invested in the game and they’re all so good-natured,” Janowitz says. “Even if they’re ostensibly complaint emails, they’re all so encouraging.”
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