Glitched Ego Potions & Glitch Grenades Activations
Rec Room / Development: June and July 2025 / Writing / Viral Advertising
Created by Sk0l (source)
In June of this year I let a bug slip into production. Luckily, it was a pretty amusing one. Instead of halting the presses, I was approved to spin the issue into a LiveOps event with a bit of narrative framing. When our latest payload went live, an arrogant hacker made an announcement in Rec Room's official discord, alluding to a change in an item we sell that temporarily increases the size of your avatar's head. After some investigation, players discovered this hacker had modified our Ego Potions to affect everyone in the room when consumed. This was a fun narrative event and lowering the cost of these items as part of the spectacle showed us that we had priced these items too high for too long, while reaping maybe the greatest few days of revenue that item had ever seen. Just a fun bit of evasion, which then set the tone and served as a teaser for a then upcoming hacker themed event, called Glitch Grenades.
While working as QA for our first competitive leaderboard event, I was invited to continue using my writing talents to support Glitch Grenades. My handling of the bugged Ego Potions allowed us to frame the event with a small narrative arc, building anticipation for players, and supplementing a thing marketing budget with cheaply produced materials that seemed to draw attention from the Discord and content creators. In the lead up to the launch of Glitch Grenades, I made several small posts using the same hacker character. Each was picked up by our content creators in their daily and weekly reports on Youtube and Tiktok. And community reception was good, especially during a time when our players were growing alienated by a perceived drought of playful creative theming in Rec Room.
Devlogs
01/27/2026 - "Memorial for War of the Harvest Nobles Pt.2"
01/14/2026 - "Memorial for War of the Harvest Nobles Pt. 1"
Media
Created by Sk0l (source)
