Chapter 1: Boredom, broadcast live
It all started in the most ordinary way, scrolling TikTok in the evening. One live stream after another: someone eating in silence, elsewhere the same three hour loop, another host not even looking up when a viewer sends a gift worth real money. And a question hit me that would not let go: why is nobody here actually playing with their viewers?
TikTok live has everything a great game needs: a chat people enjoy typing into quickly, likes that can pour in by the thousand, and viewers who want to be entertained. Nobody had just connected the pieces. So I decided to try it myself. How hard could it be?
(Spoiler: very hard.)
Chapter 2: A prototype held together with tape
The first version of Kvízákov was, with all due affection, terrible. A handful of questions, one screen, scores copied by hand. But that first weekend prototype showed the thing that mattered most: when a question appears on screen, the chat simply cannot not answer. People who had never met started arguing over whether it was A or C. And I knew I was onto something big.
What followed were weeks of nights spent on problems I had never even considered: how to process hundreds of comments a minute without losing a single vote, how to render the game smoothly enough to look good on a phone, how to turn a plain vote into an experience worth repeating. Every solved problem revealed three new ones. I enjoyed it more than anything before.
Chapter 3: First broadcast, 1 September 2025
I picked the date deliberately, the first day of the school year. An educational quiz ought to start when school starts. I sat at the computer, hands on the keyboard, and in the corner of the screen glowed the number 2 viewers. One of them was me on a second phone.
Then the first stranger typed "B" into the chat, and it worked. The vote appeared on screen, points were added, the game rolled on. That feeling is hard to describe. Ten viewers the next evening, fifty within a week. I started broadcasting every day and never stopped. Today Kvízákov has 151 days on air and over 1,000 hours of live broadcast behind it.
Chapter 4: Enter Kvízák
For a long time the game had no face. And then he showed up: a purple furry monster with yellow spots, permanently curious eyes and a smile you cannot say no to. Kvízák. A mascot who welcomes players, celebrates correct answers, sulks when the chat is lazy, and holds up a sign asking for gifts so adorably that refusing feels rude.
With Kvízák the game found a soul. It stopped being "that quiz app on the stream" and became Kvízákov, a place people visit for a purple monster and a crowd that eggs each other on in the leaderboards every night.
Chapter 5: From quiz to game show
Over the following months a simple quiz turned into a full show. Difficulty levels with multipliers arrived, rewarding the nerve to hold out for hard questions. Magic gifts that let players change the course of the game. A treasure chest full of lost points that people fight over. Fireworks carrying gifters' avatars, earthquakes on big gifts, music reacting to what happens, a welcome for every arriving player.
And then the thing I am proudest of: the game lives with the time of day. During daylight it glows in bright colours, and in the evening it sinks smoothly into deep indigo as the sun sets. Just like this website. If you are reading this at night, you are looking at night mode right now.
Under the hood sits a custom game engine, 230 topics and a database of more than 90,000 questions, every one of which the game can read out loud. Ten months of development, countless discarded versions and one rule: every week the game has to be a little better than the last.
Chapter 6: Why I do all this
Kvízákov has a simple mission: to prove that a live stream can be more than background noise for scrolling. That you can broadcast something people enjoy and learn from. That a gift from a viewer deserves fireworks, a tribute on screen and a real effect in the game, not to be overlooked.
Every evening the chat fills with schoolchildren, parents and grandparents. They argue about whether sharks predate trees (they do), count planets and reminisce about the nineties. They have fun and learn along the way. That is exactly the kind of content I want to see on the internet. And as long as the chat keeps typing letters, I will keep broadcasting it.
Ladislav Czech, author of Kvízákov 💜
