Seven years after launch, Tinder suffered from user fatigue. We needed to give Gen Z a meaningful way to match and breathe new energy and cultural relevance into the brand.

Swipe Night is a first-of-its-kind, live-action, interactive miniseries produced and engineered to live solely inside the Tinder app where you make a series of choices that drive your personalized story forward and impact who you can match with. The choices are the key: while fun on the surface, they reveal something deep about your personality, give you a pool of more compatible users to choose from, and serve as icebreakers after the experience. For example, will you save the frightened puppy or the injured girl? You only have seven seconds to decide.

By bringing entertainment into the app to engineer compatibility, Swipe Night is a brand new way for people to match and connect.

It’s Sunday night and you open Tinder, but instead of swiping on people, you enter an interactive, live-action, apocalyptic adventure where you swipe to make high-stakes, highly-revealing decisions. Shot first-person POV, you are the protagonist of the story- you and your three best friends must decide what to do with just three hours until the end of the world (thanks to a massive comet). When you encounter a choice, you only have seven seconds to decide, so you have to go with your gut. Hurry, will you save the frightened puppy or the injured girl?

Each choice results in a personalized story path filled with talk-worthy easter eggs, like TV star Hart Denton trying to steal your car or rapper Rico Nasty inviting you to hide out with her and 30 puppies in a bunker. Throughout, you experience mobile features like haptic feedback to intensify the chaos, push notifications from the characters, and a live-view counter to see the number of other users playing. After each episode, you enter Night Mode: a redesigned version of Tinder that prioritizes users who made similar choices to you and displays everyone’s choices on their profiles, making it easier to match and start conversation. New episodes go live each Sunday, creating an unmissable weekly event that brings everyone onto the app, all at once, swiping together.

Because of the interactive nature of this experience and its branching narrative, each 5-8 minute episode required shooting 15-20 minutes worth of content. This four-part miniseries was built by an unprecedented team including Gen Z creators, Tinder engineers who enabled in-app streaming video for the first time, and a game designer who crafted a branching narrative with thousands of plotlines, blending interactive storytelling with Tinder’s iconic swipe feature. It’s a game-changing hybrid of entertainment, marketing, dating, and technology.