

Soon we had a prototype, which we called DynaBlocks. What would the next phase of human interaction be? Could we help create it? We were also inspired by the work of futurists and science fiction writers such as Arthur C.
Roblox home roblox simulator#
Our physics simulator was on the cusp of something interesting, but we wondered what it might be like to add avatars, a social element, and a hyperreal 3D world and run in the cloud. Even as we sold that business in 1998 to MSC Software, where I worked for two years before taking a sabbatical, the notion of enabling meaningful cocreation stuck with me and with Erik. The seeds of Roblox were planted for me during the creation of Knowledge Revolution, the company behind Interactive Physics, which I started with my brother Greg and the simulation gurus (and future Roblox team members) Erik Cassel, Keith Lucas, and Tim Loduha. And for us, community is the path to creating what many now know as the metaverse. Other companies offer creator economies and user-generated content (UGC), but at Roblox user innovation is not a nice-to-have alongside other things.
Roblox home roblox how to#
Thanks to the creativity of our global Roblox community, users can walk fashion show runways, experience an eagle’s flight, figure out how to build a city, and flee natural disasters with their friends. Built by a California developer now in her 20s, it has attracted billions of visits and numerous collaborators. Royale High is a virtual high-school experience where people can dress up any day of the week and socialize with friends. Let’s Be Well is an experience about overcoming depression that a 12-year-old Canadian user, coping with his father’s suicide, designed to help destigmatize mental illness. But now we have nearly 50 million active daily users and millions of developers building experiences. Sixteen years after the launch of Roblox, our focus on creation by the community (instead of for it) remains. Even in that primitive form, users engaged more deeply when they were the ones doing the building. Erik and I had already seen the power of user-generated content on Interactive Physics, a platform we’d launched and run with others to support physics learning through 2D modeling. Together they-not us-could design clothes, construct buildings, make discoveries, run businesses, spend time with family, play sports, and attend concerts. Our core idea to get there was a platform supported by a community of creators who built everything on it. We imagined an online space where people from anywhere in the world could share experiences with friends, just as they would in person. Our vision from the start was to build an entirely new category of human coexperience-nothing less than the realization of the next phase of human interaction. We also chatted constantly with those early users about what they wanted to see on the platform. Erik and I were the moderators, keeping our community safe and civil. “Peak times’’ meant maybe 30 or 40 people playing at once.

When Erik Cassel and I launched the precursor of our online platform Roblox, our users were friends, family members, and about 100 tech enthusiasts we’d recruited via Google ads. Roblox achieved it with a culture that values long-term thinking, employees with a founder’s mindset, a laser focus on end users, and an organizational structure that helps them stay creative and engaged. The company’s decision to embrace UGC opened it up to a whole new world of innovation, well beyond what its employees could envision or manage. Thanks to their own creativity, Robloxers can now walk fashion show runways, experience an eagle’s flight, or figure out how to flee natural disasters with friends.

Sixteen years later Roblox boasts nearly 50 million active daily users and millions of developers, who have created experiences such as Let’s Be Well, a game about recovering from depression, and Royale High, a virtual high school. Everyone agreed that user-generated content (UGC) would be the key to making the platform great. The idea was simple but ambitious: create an online space where people from anywhere in the world could do anything-construct buildings, run businesses, battle enemies, play sports, attend concerts-together. When Roblox launched, in 2004, its user base was made up of friends, family members, and about 100 tech enthusiasts recruited via Google ads to serve as impartial advisers.
