The interactive game Rival Peak has been a phenomenon on Facebook Watch, and so has its companion aftershow, Rival Speak hosted by Wil Wheaton. Developed by Genvid Technologies, Pipeworks Studios, and DJ2 Entertainment, the interactive Facebook experience had over 100-million minutes watched during its recently-wrapped 12-week season. The first ever-entry into the new Massive Interactive Live Event (MILE) category, Rival Peak's incredible success makes it one of the biggest interactive events of 2021.

Players from over 70 countries, including the United States, India, Mexico, and the Philippines, experienced Rival Peak on Facebook through mobile devices. A hybrid reality show/interactive adventure game, Rival Peak involved 12 A.I. "contestants" of varying and diverse backgrounds who spent 12 grueling weeks unraveling a complex mystery. In real-time, the audience decided what happened, to whom, and when. By casting millions of votes, the audience helped the characters solve puzzles and survive by avoiding elimination, collectively influencing the direction and outcome of Rival Peak. Minutes spent by the audience playing Rival Peak grew at a weekly rate of 40%. By the end of the season, the minutes were over 55x times greater compared to week one. Additionally, Rival Peak's companion Facebook Watch Original series Rival Speak averaged more than 12-million views per episode, totaling 155-million views by season's end.

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Screen Rant spoke to Wil Wheaton about how he came to host Rival Speak, the unique challenges of producing the hit series during the pandemic, how the audience reacted to both Rival Peak and Rival Speak, and whether his character, Wesley Crusher, could reappear in Star Trek.

Screen Rant: Rival Peak is such a cool concept. How did you get involved with the game?

Wil Wheaton: The creative team approached my team something in autumn of last year and had this pitch. What excited me about it was, "Oh, these characters are A.I. but they don't know they're A.I." And there's a meta-story that exists between Rival Speak and Rival Speak, you can interact with either or both. And there are three possible story experiences that you can get: one is just doing Rival Peak, one is just doing Rival Speak, and one is putting them together. And each experience I think is very satisfying to the audience.

I was very excited to do something that was brand new. That's what I've been doing for the last 20ish years of my career, trying to expand the ways that we can express ourselves creatively and use technology to challenge the ways we think we have to tell stories. I really really liked what they were doing. I loved the idea of it, I loved the weirdness of it, and I couldn't say yes fast enough.

Screen Rant: I watch you on Star Trek: The Ready Room but Rival Speak seems so much more performative and crazy. When I watched the last episode of Rival Speak, I was really impressed because it was so entertaining.

Wil Wheaton: That's a real difficult place to jump in! We built a lot of scaffolding and laid a lot of groundwork to get the audience to a place where they could accept the weirdness of what was happening in the final three episodes. You jumped in at a really weird and challenging point in the story.

One of the things I really liked about this from the very, very beginning was the clarity that I was playing a character. I was playing "a" Wil Wheaton who was not necessarily this Wil Wheaton. That gave us all kinds of freedom. It gave me creative freedom to try different things, to put on different attitudes, and then to embody different versions of myself using the skills that I have from Ready Room and all the after shows I've hosted to play a host. But on Rival Speak, that's all scripted, that's all character work, and I loved that. I love the idea that the audience gets to affect what happens in Rival Peak, and then in Rival Speak, we react to it in a scripted way.

Screen Rant: I loved the levels of the performance you were doing. It was like a mix of Troy McClure and Badgey from Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Wil Wheaton: Thank you. That is almost word for word what I was going for. [Rival Speak's Wil Wheaton] is the host, and he is the hostiest host who ever hosted anything. And he is the best host! So he does all of that stuff, but he's not your friend. He's not on your side. He's gonna shiv you at the moment it's good for him to shiv you. You are gonna get shived! So I loved that about him. So he very much has that Troy McClure-slash-Badgey DNA in him.

Rival Peak

Screen Rant: The 12 contestants in Rival Peak have really interesting backstories. A lot of thought went into designing the diverse group of characters. Did you have a particular favorite, besides yourself, "Wil Wheaton"?

Wil Wheaton: I did not participate in Rival Peak at all. I felt that was a conflict of interest. I didn't want to affect that part of the story at all. I didn't think that that was ethical. But you can't help but get characters that you like. In no particular order, Inola, Jeb, and Nosh, with Winter and Nosh being a neck-and-neck photo finish. I really loved them. I kind of wanted Nosh to win, I thought that would have been really, really cool. She's a really interesting character.

Screen Rant: What were the challenges of hosting Rival Speak? Especially in the pandemic era. I feel like the show suits the times we live in. We're all sitting at home but watching these characters live this interactive adventure.

Wil Wheaton: We used the XR Digital Projection technology to build that set. That set is very small, maybe 300 square feet. But we made it look like a massive, giant sphere in Portal. One of those kinds of things where the laws in our universe don't necessarily apply. There are episodes where I spent the entire episode walking to camera-right, and I have walked miles in the course of the episode, and then in the last couple of minutes, I take two steps and I'm right back where I started. And we can do things like that, messing with the environment, that messed with the reality of where I was.

Most great art comes out of a limitation, and our limitation was we're working during a pandemic. So practically, we can only have a small number of people on set. We have to be very careful following protocol so everyone is safe and healthy. We would do an entire episode in one day in about 12 hours and our director would go directly into editing. Our head editor was editing while we were in production. So while we're getting stuff done in the morning, he's getting that material before we've even begun the afternoon's work. There's less than 24 hours to turn the episode around. It's really amazing! The technical challenges inherent in pulling this thing together were interesting to watch. But it was really fun and exciting to watch them turn episodes around so fast.

Screen Rant: It sounds like an incredible operation.

Wil Wheaton: Yeah, an extremely talented crew and everyone working together in a really great way. They were wonderful. It was really a privilege to go to work with them. Every day when I'd go to work, I had the same sense of joy and the same sense of satisfaction and creative freedom that I felt as a kid playing with action figures. The days were long but we had so much fun, and I would leave the set after being awake for roughly 20 hours, and I'd come home but it would take me hours to unwind because I was so pumped up from how much fun we had doing the show that day.

Screen Rant: Is there going to be a season 2 of Rival Peak and Rival Speak?

Wil Wheaton: If they want me to do it, I'm gonna do absolutely everything I can to say yes. 'Cause it was really, really, really fun. They are unbelievably great people to work with. Facebook was a great partner as well. I didn't have to go into meetings and have creative fights, but I talked to the people who did, and the impression I got is that we were largely supported creatively. Which doesn't really happen all of the time. And I'm really grateful for that.

What we were doing was risky. The story that we're telling in Rival Speak is weird, and it's surrealist, and it's existentialist. There's a ton of Byzantine physics dialogue in it. There's a lot of complex subtle storytelling. I gotta tell you, when someone would leave a comment where they would tell you that they were getting what we were laying down, that was always such a big deal for me. Because I knew the show was weird. It's a big ask. Are you gonna come along and accept that this host is actually a computer program that's iterated hundreds of times throughout the course of the season? Are you gonna get on board with that?

I thought a lot about Maniac on Netflix when we were making this, because there's a lot of weird stuff that happens that isn't straight-up explained and spoonfed to the audience. Or the first four-ish episodes of WandaVision. We don't really know what's going on, we just commit to it and trust that the audience will get it. I feel like we got there. I mean, we were viewed 120-million times (laughs). So I'm guessing that people appreciated what we did.

Screen Rant: It must be so satisfying when you get the feedback that people got it and responded in kind.

Wil Wheaton: There was a moment when someone said, "I feel like Wil is either the main protagonist or the main antagonist of Rival Speak and I don't know which is true." And I was like, "That is exactly what we want you to think!" When it started, our first couple of episodes had a few million views and we were really excited about it. And then around episode 3, I think, we started to get into TableTop numbers. We were doing 3-5 million. Then all of a sudden, it tipped to 10, then it tipped to 12 and it stayed there. And we're doing 12-million views an episode all the way through until the final.

And I know that they had great creative partners in the Twitch community, which I think is super cool. Each person playing Rival Peak and watching Rival Speak is going to have a different narrative experience based on who they're experiencing it with, and I love that the folks in the Twitch community were on board. I just thought that was really cool.

WIl Wheaton Rival Speak Host

Screen Rant: You're a huge gamer and you're involved in Rival Speak. How do you stay on the cutting edge of gaming culture? You always seem to be in the vanguard of gaming.

Wil Wheaton: I really appreciate that. I don't think it's necessarily correct. The people who are really on the cutting edge of gaming are like, the top 30 on Twitch who are playing things as they're coming out. I'm very much a casual gamer. I find a game that I like and I play it to death. I don't think of myself as someone who is in the vanguard of gaming. What I do try to do is be as close to the cutting edge of new artistic ways of storytelling. That's what I love. Part of my love language is finding ways to take an audience through a narrative experience that hasn't really been explored before.

And that's what we were doing with [Rival Peak], that is sort of a competition/reality show but also has a tremendous science fiction narrative happening that supports it. Nothing like that has ever been done before. Maybe the super short answer to your question is: I think I have pretty good instincts and I have a wonderful team around me that helps offer perspective on things that I might miss. And I'm really grateful and really lucky that super creative people keep wanting to work with me. And I keep happening to end up, as you said, in the vanguard.

Screen Rant: Obviously, I can't not ask you about Star Trek. Has there been any conversation about you coming aboard any of the current Star Trek shows? There's all kinds of ways for Wesley Crusher to appear in Picard, Lower Decks, and Discovery.

Wil Wheaton: If we had those conversations, I would not be able to tell you because of NDAs. What I will tell you is I am a massive fan. I love Picard, I love Discovery, I love Lower Decks. I'm holding my breath and counting the seconds until Strange New Worlds premieres - I can't wait. This is an incredible time to be a Star Trek fan. It may be the best time to be a Star Trek fan since the 4th season of Next Generation, which coincided with Deep Space Nine. If they gave me the opportunity to revisit Wesley and there was something in him that was worth revisiting, I would say yes in a second.

Next: Star Trek: Why The Next Generation Endures Over The Original Series