High School Musical Challenge

About

The High School Musical Challenge is a social game in which participants text the lyrics to the song "Gotta Go My Own Way" from the film High School Musical 2 to their significant others, fooling their partners into believing that they had ended the relationship.

Origin

On August 17th, 2007, the film High School musical 2 was released.^[1] In the film, the character Gabriella (portrayed by Vanessa Hudgens) sings the song "Gotta Go My Way" (shown below).

About seven years later, on September 8th, 2014, Twitter ^[2] user @austinkeller tweeted, "SHE TEXTED HER EX THE LYRICS TO GOTTA GO MY OWN WAY FROM HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 😂😂😂 I'M CRYING." They included screenshots of the text message, receiving more than 6,800 retweets and 7,100 likes in five years (shown below).

Spread

The following year, Twitter^[3] user @MarvMichelle_ tweeted a similar text exchange, referring to it as the "High School Musical Challenge" (shown below, left). More continued to perform the challenge in various forms over the next four years. On September 19th, 2016, YouTuber Jenn Isabel posted a video about the prank, which received more than 740,200 views in three years (shown below, right).

On April 2nd, 2019, Twitter^[4] user @evemeralda tweeted the challenge with the caption "so i did the high school musical challenge to my bf and he’s so stupid." The post received more than 70 retweets and 800 likes in 24 hours (shown below).

The following day, PopBuzz^[5] published a story about the trend.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References