About a month ago one of the founders of Seekr Games got to do an interview on a pilot of a variety show called the fairly late night show. The founder TJ had the chance to be interviewed and to show off the product to the live audience, doing a version of a scavenger hunt where some audience members sat in their seats and used their camera's zoom. While a couple other guests got up and walked around to try and find all the objects for the scavenger hunt. Afterwards the host and TJ sat down and talked about the origins of Seekr Games and some of the activities and events that have run from Seekr Games.

Hosted game timestamp: 8:20

Interview timestamp: 21:44

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Transcript

TJ, I happen to know where Seeker Games started because it was in a class that we both had.

Yeah, it wasn't just any class, though. This was actually like a program. Yeah, this was serious. And it's kind of up on the rise right now. It's this program called Sandbox. If any of you guys have heard out there of it, it's a pretty cool program. Basically, they take CS students and business students, and they stick them together, and they say, hey, go start a tech company. We'll give you 18 credits to do so. For me and Thane as well, I mean, that was a no-brainer. Something super fun and easy to do, or not easy to do. It was really hard, but it was a journey and it was something that a lot of kids don't get the opportunity for. You get to have the chance to create a business that could potentially change your life. Yeah, very real thing. I feel like with a lot of classes, you're doing theory but you don't really have the hands-on. This was more hands-on and we'll talk about theory when you get time. So we ran out and made some real businesses.

TJ, maybe you could tell us why Seeker Games? How did that idea start?

Yeah, so Seeker Games started kind of earlier in the summer. I mean, the inklings of it kind of did. Because when you get put in this program, it's like you're a student. And so you're trying to do homework and all these things. And all of a sudden, now you've got to find an idea to build a company that potentially could change your life. And that's not an easy task. later on in the summer after failing many ideas we knew that we had a couple things that we wanted to move forward towards and one of those was we just were passionate about the idea of kind of creating something where people It can bring them together. And it can also get people moving around a little bit more. One of those things that inspired me was Pokemon Go. I'm sure everybody kind of remembers that whole fad. That one summer when everybody was out, running around, catching Pokemon. There was some unknown number of hoverboards for some reason. I don't know why, but that was also the summer of hoverboards. And we wanted to kind of create that again for people. And so we were passionate about getting people to move. And we looked at new technology in the sector and found that AI image recognition was just awesome at that point. And so we developed our first prototype, and that sucked. That was not the one. After the second one, we kind of figured out what to do and what to change. And we ended up coming across Seeker and kind of figured that there's things that other people who had tried to be in this space had done and just didn't do it right. I mean, they made it so you had to download an app or there was no AI validation. So none of it was really gamified. You could take a picture of your dog when the task was a cat and it would say, good job, you did it.

Well, you managed to successfully create something like you guys did Strawberry Days this last year. Could you tell us a bit about what that was like?

Yeah, Strawberry Days was a blast. We did this past summer and it was just this hunt over in Pleasant Grove. We created this big hunt all over just little kind of historic sites. And it was really cool to see everybody join in and participate in this thing. I mean, we had over five hundred people join in and we had two hundred people or one hundred or two hundred people complete it, which is quite a feat considering that the entire hunt for on average probably took people multiple hours. The fastest times are just above an hour. So it wasn't something that was just like an afternoon. It was something that got people out and it was cool to see how engaged people got in this. And they were doing things like one of the tasks was up Battle Creek Falls to go see a waterfall and take a picture up there. And people were doing that. People were doing just that. And there was also like people getting together online and in person to do these things. And we saw people on Facebook groups being like, man, I can't figure out this one. Where is this one? And people on the Facebook groups were commenting back and just helping each other out. And so we, at that moment, you know, with Strawberry Days, it's one of those things where you realize we did it. Like this was the passion that we were trying to to work towards and we've hit that.

Absolutely. Well this isn't the regular use case for Seeker Games. Generally there's a much wider space. You guys are in museums?

Yeah, we're also in museums. We have a couple museums throughout Utah and other places where it's kind of just like a self-guided tour, you try to do it the fastest time possible. So it's pretty fun to see those leaderboards and all the people who join in and just have a good time at these locations.

Very cool. Well, and people can create their own games as well. If people want to be a part of Seeker Games, how do they find it?

Yeah, so you can go to our website, seekergames.com. It's more spelled phonetically seekergames.com. As the tech companies do nowadays. Yeah, as the tech companies do. So that's how you know that we have real tech. But Yeah, you can just go there and create an account and you can create your own scavenger hunt and host it within like a couple minutes or so. And it's just a blast to be able to put that together for friends or family or for events because you have the capability to host it and Everything else is run for you. You don't have to validate the tasks. You just get to sit back, watch, and enjoy. It's a great time.