Game on.
Screw the scoreboard.
On Monday, our app (theater.games) went live in the App Store.
I've wanted to make an app since the first time I held an iPhone—and never once believed I actually could. When the day finally came, I told no one. I closed the laptop and took the dog out.
I posted about it online the next day, a little sheepishly. That was the celebration. No champagne, no balloons—just the quiet click of a thing I'd wanted since I was a teenager becoming real, and me, wondering why it didn't feel like anything.
That's what I want to sit with this week: the strange hollow of crossing a finish line. What it actually feels like from the inside, versus the version we all play in our heads.
Here we go.
The View From Inside
My parents found out from the internet.
They saw the post the next day, and the text came fast: this is amazing—why didn't you tell us? I didn't have a good answer. From where I was standing, it didn't feel like news. We'd been building it for months, and it had quietly been live for a beat before the "official" launch, so the morning it became "real" felt like any other morning at the laptop.
But the question did something. It made me step back far enough to see it—and from that distance, the distance a parent has, or a stranger, or your own self ten years ago, it looked like what it was. I helped build an app from scratch. It landed. It lives in the same store as everything else on your phone. Which is, objectively, sort of wild.
You just can't always feel that from up close. It's hard—maybe impossible—to see the scale of something from inside it.
Referee
The truth is, I've been building games since I was seventeen.
I was a ComedySportz referee in high school—the guy with the whistle, turning theater into a competitive sport for a room full of strangers. I spent six summers running the improv program at a boys' camp in Wisconsin, whose whole purpose was getting kids to be silly in front of each other. For five years I hosted red carpets for Broadway.com—a hundred and twenty-five opening nights—where the bit I ran was a new game for every show that opened.
In that way, theater.games is less of a pivot than even I initially thought. It's kind of the exact thing I've always done—hand a stranger a game and dare them to play. This time, however, it's in a form that finally outgrows the room. I didn't leave theater for tech. I found a bigger room.
My co-founder, Ian, has been a close friend of mine for almost a decade. Fun fact: I met my husband in his apartment. Neither of us has a computer science degree, but what we did have was a new set of tools that let you build software in something close to plain English, and a willingness to be beginners at something enormous. And that willingness—to be visibly, cluelessly new at a hard thing—turns out to be its own kind of theater game. Same muscle. You have to be okay looking foolish long enough to get good.
The Long Road
I've started maybe a hundred things in the last twelve years.
I'm a hobby picker-upper. I get an idea, go all in, push and push and push—then burn out and drift to the next one. Classic creative-brain wiring. Most of those hundred things are in a drawer or closet somewhere.
This is the first one that's felt less like a sprint and more like a road.
I think the Fourth Wall taught me that. I've been writing this thing for a year and a half, and the quiet shock of it is that it just kept going. People kept reading. It grew. Nothing about it was a lightning strike—it was showing up, week after week, until showing up week after week became the whole thing. That's the lesson I carried into theater.games. I can't see where the road ends, but I can finally see that it is one, and that it runs as long as I want it to.
Which means the work is just the next small step. And then the next one. We have enormous dreams for this—directions that light me up at 2am—and the healthiest thing I do all week is set them down and ask what actually has to happen today. Usually the answer is gloriously boring: schedule tomorrow's puzzle. Make sure there's a new one waiting when someone opens the app with their coffee.
And someone does. People play every day. Thousands actually. A few have told me it's become part of their morning, or that it put them back in touch with a high school theater friend they'd lost contact with. That's the part that feels aligned—the small daily proof that the thing does what I hoped it would, which matters more than any badge in a store.
On Monday, nobody brought me balloons. And that's okay.
I've gotten to do a handful of things I used to only daydream about—stood on a stage I'd only ever seen from the audience, made a cast album with my own voice inside it, opened a show I helped build. And every time, the moment was quieter than the daydream of it. The daydream comes with a swell of music underneath. The real thing just kind of...happens.
Adding "made an app" to that list this week felt exactly the same—smaller in the moment than it ever was in my head, and no less real for it. You don't get the swell. You just get the thing.
So whatever you're dreaming of, or working on: keep at it. Because when you cross the finish line, there'll be another one waiting.
And you bet your butt I'll be cheering you on from the grandstand.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt