Coldplay’s Viral Kiss Cam Couple Are Now the Stars of Their Own Video Game

What started as an awkward moment on a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert has now evolved into a pixelated fever dream.

Coldplay Canoodlers, a video game inspired by last week’s viral incident, is now live and attracting the same level of attention as the scandal that inspired it.

The original moment featured a married tech CEO caught getting overly friendly with a colleague during Coldplay’s show. Captured on the venue’s kiss cam, their reaction, which sat somewhere between guilt and panic spread across social media at lightning speed. Now, indie developer and internet lifer Jonathan Mann has turned that footage into playable satire.

The concept is pretty simple. In Coldplay Canoodlers, players step into the shoes of a kiss cam operator at a fictional Coldplay concert, panning across an 8-bit stadium crowd in search of the infamous pair. Spot them kissing and rack up points. Miss them and try again. The game is scored with a lo-fi 16-bit rendition of Viva La Vida, because of course it is.

Mann, who is best known for his long-running Song A Day project, said he coded the game in a single evening as a creative experiment. He admitted he missed the viral peak by a day or two but posted the finished result anyway. The game took off regardless, gaining traction on TikTok and clocking thousands of plays. He later dropped a song about the making of the game, creating a bizarre feedback loop of viral-on-viral commentary.

Even Chris Martin weighed in, joking from the stage, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” before cautioning the audience at the band’s next show about who might end up on the big screen. Not to be outdone, Liam Gallagher used the opportunity to land a few unscripted punches, reassuring Oasis fans in Manchester that there would be “none of that Coldplay snidey fucking camera shit.”

The internet may have the attention span of a goldfish, but Coldplay Canoodlers proves one thing. If you give the world an awkward moment, someone out there will turn it into a video game within 24 hours. And it will slap.