From Roblox hobbyists to Hollywood

Matt Hufton still struggles to comprehend the numbers.

“We had a few hundred people playing one day,” he says. “Then basically overnight it jumped to 60,000 people playing at once.”

At the time, Hufton was finishing his engineering degree at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland and working at agritech start-up Halter. Game development was still a side project. Something he and his friends had been tinkering with since they were teenagers.

That overnight surge changed things.

Today, Hufton is one of the co-founders of Grandma’s Favourite Games alongside Alec Kieft and Cameron Angland. Their latest Roblox game, 99 Nights in the Forest, has become one of the platform’s biggest breakout successes, attracting tens of millions of players globally and leading to a feature film deal with 20th Century Studios, Disney’s live-action film studio. (Roblox, for the uninitiated, is a collaborative immersive gaming and creation platform.)

The premise: survive 99 nights in a haunted forest while rescuing lost children and avoiding the creatures hiding in the dark woods. The game blends cooperative survival gameplay with kid-friendly horror, a combination that clearly resonated with players.

For Hufton, the success was never part of a carefully engineered master plan.

“I knew I loved programming and game design,” he says. “But I hadn’t really planned to have a career in game design specifically.”

Growing up in New Plymouth, Hufton and Angland had been friends since primary school. They met Kieft online through Roblox when they were around 13. Like many young programmers, they learned largely through experimentation, building small projects for fun long before they imagined it could become a viable career.

Engineering felt like a natural fit because it aligned with the kind of problem-solving he already enjoyed. During university, Hufton balanced study, work at Halter and game development on evenings and weekends.

“It was basically a hobby the whole way through school and uni,” he says.

Their first collaborative games generated modest income. Enough for “spending money”, as Hufton describes it, but not enough to live on. Then came Mall Tycoon, which reached tens of thousands of concurrent players almost overnight.

“You can kind of see based on the longevity you’d expect from the game that maybe this could support me for a year or two,” he says. “That was enough runway to really commit to it full-time and see if we could make it work.”

The decision reflects a career path increasingly familiar to younger innovators: combining stable study or employment with side projects until an opportunity proves viable enough to pursue seriously.

New Zealand’s gaming industry is also growing rapidly. According to the New Zealand Game Developers Association, the sector is on track to become a $1 billion export industry by 2027, employing more than 1,400 people in highly specialised roles.

Despite the scale of their success, Hufton says the team still relies heavily on instinct rather than formal product testing.

“We make something that’s on trend and something we personally think is interesting and fun.”

That approach shaped 99 Nights in the Forest. The game itself emerged almost accidentally while the three founders were temporarily living together again.

“We were all together, so we thought we should make something,” Hufton says. “We didn’t go into it thinking it would become this huge thing.”

Even now, predicting success remains difficult. Before launch, the team quietly tested the game with only a handful of players at a time, watching how they behaved and where they became confused or engaged.

“We still release games having no idea if they’re going to be successful or not,” he says.

The Hollywood adaptation has opened another unfamiliar chapter. Hufton, Kieft and Angland are attached as executive producers while learning how the film industry operates in real time.

“It’s just such an incredible medium to be able to go into,” Hufton says. “We feel super lucky that we get to do this as a job.”

Alongside film development, the team are looking forward to releasing 99 Nights in the Forest merchandise, including plush toys. The trio continue to work from Auckland on the development of the game, with updates due for the American summer.

For students considering innovation-led careers, Hufton’s story offers a reminder that meaningful opportunities often emerge gradually through curiosity, experimentation and sustained side projects rather than carefully mapped-out plans.

Sometimes, the tipping point arrives unexpectedly overnight.