On Super Bowl Sunday, we launched the Totino’s Bucking Couch Bowl. It was a one-of-a-kind live event hosted on Twitch, the world’s leading social video platform and community for gamers. For a full three and a half hours, we gave fans the power to control a couch that bucks like a mechanical bull. Mayhem ensued as four of their favorite gaming influencers competed in a series of video games while riding our Bucking Couch.

First, we had to create world’s first mechanical Bucking Couch. This required completely re-engineering a mechanical bull engine to give it a few new tricks, and then we modified it to securely hold an aluminum-framed couch on top of it. Wild furniture, check.

The week leading up to the Super Bowl we released a teaser video on social and Twitch to stoke interest. Then on the day of, we took over Twitch’s homepage to invite users to our live broadcast. In the chat, users had full control over the couch via an API that tracked specific keywords typed by the chat. At the end of each voting period, the couch would respond accordingly. We also allowed viewers to vote on a series of “disruptors” to screw up gameplay, like a giant pizza roll mascot and a Mom who served pizza rolls and vacuumed in front of the screen.

After only 3.5 hours of mayhem, we racked up nearly 1.8 million minutes of viewing time (that’s almost 3.5 years!). Over 300,000 people typed 166,740 messages through the chat to control the couch. Chatter about the Bucking Couch Bowl was 92% positive. We even organically trended to number one on Reddit, where people left pithy comments like, “This is the future of gaming” and others called it “the pinnacle of mankind.” Which is exactly what you hope will happen when you strap a couch to a mechanical bull and put it on the internet.