It was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? Over the last couple of days, the internet has swarmed around a mortifying moment during a Coldplay concert when the event crew zoomed in on the audience the hopes of finding a cute couple that could inspire cheers from the crowd. Instead, the camera caught what appeared to be an illicit moment between two executives who immediately turned away from the spotlight in embarrassment. The apparent scandal, which is all over the web, has now been transformed into a video game where the entire point is to find the couple in the crowd.
Created by Jonathan Mann, known for his long-running “song a day” series, Coldplay Canoodlers is a short, if not inspired, take on the viral kiss-cam moment. Players move their mouse around the pixel art crowd, where the game will randomly place the couple. Every time you pinpoint the couple, the actual footage of the viral moment will play and your score goes up. The game then resets and the couple will regenerate somewhere else for you to find. It’s like if Where’s Waldo? was made by tabloids.
For those out of the loop, the moment that’s been immortalized in this game involves two people who work at a tech company called Astronomer, a data orchestration company reportedly worth over a billion dollars that leverages things like AI to streamline and maintain workflows. It’s been used by gaming companies to help them “orchestrate very complex processes,” according to a blog post.
The reason all of this has blown up so much is because the duo in the video are married to other people, and the moment was extremely visible. In some footage of the fiasco, Coldplay front man Chris Martin can be heard wondering if the two people on the kiss cam are having an affair given how quickly they stop embracing each other once the camera is on them. Another aspect that’s got people craning nosily their necks is because it involves two people in tech working at a company where the culture has been described as “toxic.” There’s an element of schadenfreude in seeing two powerful and apparently disliked people exposed, basically. Some of the backlash has also been unfolding on LinkedIn, of all places. Nearly every aspect of it has added to the spectacle, like the fact the CEO praised his employee rather publicly right after hiring her.
The game was “‘vibe coded,”’ Mann says, which refers to a practice where someone uses AI to create an experience, like an app. The user doesn’t have to know how to code, that’s what the AI is for — instead, the human provides the vision and the AI generates it. The game was quickly put together in less than 24 hours, and while there are a few bugs, for the most part it works as intended to the degree that some people may not even realize AI was ever involved.