The Rise and Fall and Rise of Zach Letter, Co-Founder and CEO of Wonder Works

When I looked at Roblox as a platform, I'm like, “Wait, this seems exactly the same as when I found YouTube in 2007.” I'm like, “It's you make a title, a thumbnail, and you try to put out something decent and attract as many eyeballs as fast as possible leveraging an algorithm.” —Zach Letter

This week, Design Desk profiles Zach Letter, Co-Founder and CEO of Wonder Works Studio. Founded in 2019 in Dallas, Texas, Wonder Works has emerged as one of Roblox’s leading game development studios over the past eight years.

Given the nature of the beast, Wonder Works has taken a large number of swings at success over the years. A sampling of original or co-developed games they’ve made, or have been deeply involved in supporting, include: Overlook Bay (2Q 2020; this was eventually revamped/rebranded to Overlook RP), Traitor! (4Q 2020), TIMMEH! (3Q 2021), Forever 21 Shop City (4Q 2021), Puma and the Land of Games (2Q 2022), Solarpunk Simulator (1Q 2023), Singapore Wanderland (2Q 2023), Overlook Bay 2 (3Q 2023), Highland Park RP (1Q 2024), SpongeBob Tower Defense (4Q 2024), Steal a SpongeBob (3Q 2025), Survive Bikini Bottom (4Q 2025), and Duck Duck (2Q 2026).

It's exhausting just reading that list. There are many others.

Due to the nature of the beast, there have also been big ups and downs along the way. This week and next, Design Desk will trace two specific peaks and one deep valley—which nearly destroyed Wonder Works.

This two-part profile was inspired by a podcast that Letter and Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, had in June. Letter’s candor was remarkably refreshing from a studio co-founder and CEO. The wide-ranging discussion highlighted important, interesting compare/contrast points between how Roblox dev works and how traditional game dev processes work. As you likely guessed, the former is vastly compressed versus the latter, and Letter seems to prefer this arrangement.

Letter’s candor may be partly fueled by something else: He’s a millennial/Gen Y who made a name for himself on YouTube. In fact, his main YouTube channel, AviatorGaming, drove over one billion views in the 2010s. Letter still has over 1.3 million YouTube subscribers today, even though he stopped posting in 2019 (to co-found Wonder Works). Most of his videos involved roleplaying in Minecraft (i.e., Glenwood Prep and Glenwood Daycare). At some point toward the end of his run on YouTube, Letter switched horses and began posting Roblox-based roleplay content. This is all meant to simply underscore that (1) Letter has thick skin because he’s lived a large share of his life in the public eye as an “internet famous” YouTuber and (2) he came to Roblox dev with a deep understanding of what Gen Y/Z/Alpha gamers want from user-generated content (UGC) sandbox platforms, plus a profound sense of how to reach and retain these gamers.

Speaking of the public eye, we won’t get into Letter’s infidelity and last year’s messy divorce from Megan Letter, a popular streamer who goes by MeganPlays. This omission is in no way meant to minimize the gravity of what happened. This topic wasn’t addressed in the original Letter-Posner podcast, and the internet is awash in virtual Gen Y/Z/Alpha knives pointed at Letter, regardless. Awkwardly and/or intriguingly, MeganPlays is still the Co-founder and President of Wonder Works. Perhaps she’ll have the last laugh if the studio keeps pumping out hits under Letter’s direction…and the water cooler gossip there must be peak. Welcome to The Office 2.0, where everybody’s an aspiring influencer “brand.”

As we’ll explore more next week, SpongeBob Tower Defense was and remains an especially massive Roblox hit. In the 4Q 2024 to 2Q 2026 timeframe, the game has been a top five performer in tower defense, a top five licensed game, and a top 20 overall grossing game. That level of success doesn’t happen accidentally. As we’ll see, Letter’s YouTube roots played a role in the success of several Wonder Works titles.

One last housekeeping note before getting into this profile: Roblox Corp. has been struggling in the past year, to put it mildly. In the wake of rolling out stricter age-based security and verification measures, and questionable changes to the algorithms that fuel discovery and recommendations, the net effect has been an overall decline in users (the platform had >150 million daily active users late last year and had ~125 million through 2Q 2026), , and it has forecast a decline in Y/Y revenue in 3Q 2026 (-14% to -18%). Roblox’s stock price is down by about two-thirds in past year.

Ouch.

It’s not just Wonder Works that’s been on a wild ride on Roblox in the past two years...So grab some popcorn and buckle up.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter and and share this with a special Robloxian in your life!

Fishin’ is Good in Overlook Bay

These solo dev teams, or these dev teams of two to three, are our biggest threat right now because they can work 24 hours a day, and they have the same tools we have. I've seen it level up in a lot in the past year or so. That creates that narrative off-platform that helps create this flywheel where people are coming from YouTube and TikTok to Roblox and then Roblox to YouTube and TikTok.—Zach Letter

An early question Greg Posner put to Zach Letter in their June podcast involved his decision to jump from the warm, secure waters of a successful YouTube career into the riskier, murkier waters of Roblox development.

“After spending over a decade on YouTube,” Letter responded, “I really mastered the algorithm…When I saw that platform, I felt like a lot of the skills I learned over that decade on YouTube would translate.”

“Now I never designed a game, but I feel like that's my most toxic trait: I feel like I can do anything as long as I put my mind to it and work really hard.”

Insightful word choice there…

On YouTube, “You had to figure out the quickest way to capture somebody,” continued Letter. Some niche YouTube communities may “only be a million people but do tens of millions of dollars in direct-to-consumer merchandise a year” with creators they adore.

“What I found on YouTube is these communities can sometimes be parasocial in a way…They have that connection to the influencer and to the brand, and they want to really support them because they feel like they're in this together.”

Parasocial is a one-sided psychological relationship in which someone feels a deep connection to someone else, or even a fictional character, that they don’t know personally.

“On Roblox, that's just amplified times a million,” Letter clarified, “but it's not parasocial. It's real.”

He circled back to YouTube.

“When I started on YouTube, it was just like a bunch of dudes sitting in their mom's basement, like, throwing up videos, and you're all just degenerates messing around…Nowadays, you have the MrBeast-ified YouTube where it's like, ‘No, I have 100 employees. We have all this analytics…I'm analyzing every little aspect of what the view duration is and trying to stretch that from eight to ten to twelve minutes...”

“We wanna create that flywheel where, if our game is successful, it's making millionaires of the content creators that make videos on our game, whether they're on TikTok or YouTube, because we can provide stable updates, lots of new content, and we own their content schedule.”

Our biggest goal is with our influencers: We want them seven days a week on our game. We don't force that, but it's up to us to make enough content that they feel compelled to do seven videos a week.

Posner asked Letter if he’s established a reusable process in terms of standing up such cross-platform community flywheels.

“We do have a framework,” Letter responded. “We actually just overhauled it…We don't start from square one every single time. We have, like, a great trading system, great inventory system. We have things that we pull [in] to kinda speed up the process.”

“We still really try to be six to eight weeks to produce a game. For us, it's really, like, ‘Let's get something out in front of people and then evolve the product and co-dev [co-develop] it with that audience that we find.”

“I think part of what makes us unique,” he continued, “is that I have that a decade’s YouTube experience, early UGC, like…understand[ing] community first.”

“In Hollywood right now, what some of these UGC talents are going on to do, with the movie Obsession, and Backrooms,” he added, has come about because platforms like YouTube have instilled in its creators a “mindset necessary to succeed on these fast-moving platforms, and with this new demo, like Gen Alpha and Gen Z.”

It’s true: Both Obsession and Backrooms, which were immensely profitable 2026 horror films, were directed by former U.S. YouTubers (Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, respectively, and both movies leveraged guerrilla/viral marketing techniques).

“A Gen X and a boomer are willing to probably watch eight minutes of ads every thirty minutes,” continued Letter. “They still have cable probably.”

Guilty as charged!

“Then you start getting into millennials and you're probably seeing, you know, 60%+ cut the cord, and they don't have cable, and they're not watching regular television. They're streaming pretty much everything.”

“When you get to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they're probably not watching more than thirty seconds of ads on fifteen minutes of content,” he added. “Gen Alpha, they're probably watching next to zero because they're on TikTok and Reels, and they're not really consuming long form content.”

As a YouTuber, I always say, “You have these peaks and valleys, and your peaks are short lived and your valleys are long, treacherous depths that you're stuck in for a year at a time. For every peak, be grateful, and then, [in] every valley, start learning and start gathering information so you can prepare to summit again.”

“In my career on YouTube, a decade’s career, I peaked it, I summited, probably 10 times, you know?” reminisced Letter. “You constantly are there, but it's almost impossible to stay, and you have to relearn what has changed, and what's new. If you have the resilience, you can summit again.”

Summiting Roblox on the First Try

Back in 2020, Wonder Works’ very first Roblox project was a hit: Overlook Bay. An early question that Posner asked Letter involved what went right there, and a lesson he learned from the experience.

Letter climbed into the way back machine, grinning.

“When we founded the studio in November 2019, we worked on this game,” he began, tentatively. “What I thought was gonna take only two months, took, you know, seven.”

“When we released this game, what I really learned in its success was that you cannot just design games on a computer, especially for a platform that is available on mobile, tablet, Xbox, PlayStation. What we found [is] our performance wasn't really there.”

“On PC it was great but as soon as you got on a mobile device, like, it exploded.”

“We had such a surge of users right on day one, because we had this platform on YouTube that really helped drum up the game's hype over a couple months of advertising at prerelease, that we didn't really get this nice, like, alpha, beta, build up. It was like, ‘Here's the product. We hope it's great. We're a dev team of three.’”

“What I learned is you really only get so many chances when a product's live. Like the Miyamoto quote, you know, ‘A rushed game is forever bad, but a delayed game is good eventually.’”

I tried to track this quote down online, without success. There’s indeed an aphorism associated with Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Japanese video game designer who’s behind several of Nintendo’s iconic franchises, that states, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."

I tried to track down the origin of this quote down online, without success. There’s indeed an aphorism out there that’s been attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Japanese video game designer behind some of Nintendo’s most iconic franchises, which says, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” It doesn’t appear, however, that Miyamoto ever said it. This article goes down a rabbit hole on this topic, but the bottom line is that something similar appears to have been said by an exec at Origin Systems, a U.S.-based game studio, circa 1990.

“That’s what I learned most from Roblox,” Letter told Posner. “We just really wanted to meet a release date. I think we set, like, three or four release dates throughout those seven months, thinking we can meet it as early as February, and then the game basically released in June.”

“In success,” he added, “LiveOps actually rears its ugly face and lets you know, ‘Hey, this is a live service game. That dev you did for the seven months, that was, like, a fraction of the work. What you're about to do every Friday for the next fifty-two plus weeks, that's the real work.’”

Posner switched topics. He noted that a recent article he’d read said that boomers are an underappreciated market opportunity.

“They have money,” said Posner. “They’re gonna be retiring soon…What are some of these older IPs that haven’t been touched” and that they might respond to—he used Star Trek as an example—and companies like Wonder Works might tap into.

“With our first ever game, Overlook Bay,” Letter responded, “a lot of parents, you know, wanted to play with their kids, find ways to connect. And Roblox was very hot in 2020, especially during the pandemic, when the game released. Around five years later, six years later, when we were kind of deprecating those games, the parents were still playing.”

“My Instagram has, like, a bunch of moms and dads that follow me. I ended up being in a bowling league in my local area.”

LoL. Go on…

“I was bowling against another team one day and this guy came up to me,” Letter recalled. “He's like, ‘You made that Overlook Bay game.’ He pulls out his phone, and he's fishing. He's level 100 in fishing.”

“He's like, ‘I don't really mess with the pets, but I loved fishing, and collecting all the fish.’”

“He was obsessed with a certain part of the game.”

“We think about that a lot, too. Where it's like parents are also playing with their kids. And if you make the right game, it can be something, like Mario, where a parent can be having a lot of fun playing with their kid.”

After the success of Overlook Bay, Letter and Wonder Works naturally wanted to rinse and repeat.

Alas, it was not to be.

“We had the success with Overlook Bay at the very beginning of the company,” he reiterated to Posner. The next obvious step was to make “Overlook Bay 2. I want to take everything we've learned from Overlook Bay one and apply it to Overlook Bay 2 instead of, like, you know, live servicing Overlook Bay one and trying to make that a better game.”

“Let's start fresh….I made people,” meaning developers at the studio, “move over to this new game, and have to, like, do [make] the same loop again.”

It was so much more refined. It was so much more polished. All the assets were so much more beautiful. But they lost everything they cared about, and they lost the original charm. And it ended up being this huge thing that just exploded in our face where, like, the first game did amazing, and this game didn't even get 5,000,000 visits.

Is that Death Valley on the horizon?

In the case of “the first game, we spent $60,000 over those seven months to get out. This game, we probably spent $500,000 over, like, two and a half months, and it just made, like, literally zero.”

“On Roblox, this was another hard lesson: More polished doesn't mean better game.”

Sometimes you can have a game that looks like the traditional LEGO blocky style baseplate, very simplistic, but the loop is so satisfying and good. None of the other stuff matters. For me, when we went from [Overlook Bay] one to two, it's like the loop was the exact same….[N]othing innovated there but everything was prettier. More polish didn't matter in that that case…Less is more sometimes.

“Our first game was a massive hit,” summarized Letter. “It's like I went to the casino. I put some money down and it became 10 times what I put down. It's like, ‘I love gambling. Woo-hoo! Sign me up.’”

A cold streak, however, was looming just over the horizon. It would indeed contain “long, treacherous depths” and push Wonder Works and Letter to the breaking point.

Tightening the Belt to the Last Notch

They understood, “Hey, this is a startup. Things are going to be bumpy.” We all knew this kinda coming in. This isn't EA. This isn't Activision. I'm like, “I need people with that personality that are willing to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and do a real hard day's work.”—Zach Letter

While developing and refining Overlook Bay 2, Wonder Works labored on various co-developed projects to help pay the bills. An example from early 2023 was Solarpunk Simulator. Comic Relief US sponsored the project, which raised awareness about child poverty and solicited donations; it attracted nearly six million visitors by the end of the year. Singapore Tourism Board also funded Singapore Wanderland that year. It featured minigames set in virtual recreations of landmarks in Singapore, and also attracted ~6 million visits in 2023.

After the success of Overlook Bay, Letter had gone on a hiring spree. A revamped Overlook Bay 2 debuted on Roblox in September 2023. Between the late 2020 launch of the original Overlook Bay and the launch of its successor, Wonder Works had risen from a single-digit number of employees to around 90. It wasn’t just that v2 lost its heart during and after the peak “casino” experience, the studio also lost much of its soul, culture, and rudder.

In their podcast, Posner asked Letter to recall “the moment you realized” that Wonder Works was in real trouble.

Letter pondered the question for a beat.

“Pretty quickly after we got to 90,” he finally answered, soberly. “Being who I am, and not wanting to give up on something, you know, I just thought, ‘I need to figure this out.’”

“We had a lot of success in originals, and went from six—those were the people that helped us have that success—to 90, which was mostly, you know, campus hiring, going to different colleges in this area, here in Dallas, Texas, and recruiting.”

“We shot up to that number in just a matter of months,” recalled Letter. “When you do that, one, you have no middle management. Two, I have never run a company that large.”

“At the time, Roblox IPO'd,” he continued.

Roblox Corporation went public in March 2021.

“It was like, ‘Let's be the first studio on Roblox to 100 people. That's how you create value, more headcount.’ And it's like, ‘Sounds right to me. I guess EA is big, right?’ We went on this monstrous growth path, just consuming every type of talent around us.”

“But no one really understood what our North Star was, what we were trying to accomplish. We lost our culture. You could feel that within, like, a month of starting to scale.”

“Once we were, like, thirty, forty, I was starting to feel like, ‘Oh, we're losing our identity here. And there's a lot of people sitting idle, not knowing what to do next.’”

Part of the problem, added Letter, was that the studio didn’t have “the design muscle to design six or eight projects” at the same time. “I was our only designer on all of our original projects, everything we've done to that point.”

“I can't design six to eight projects, plus weekly live ops for six to eight projects. That would be impossible.”

Agreed. Not without an aneurism.

“And then Roblox is so unique. It's like hiring somebody from NBC Universal to come and manage a YouTube channel. It's like, ‘Well, they're great at managing film and television.’ But they've never managed anything in this medium before…[T]here's just, like, different rules and a different cadence of developing.”

“We just started feeling all of those pain points,” Letter summarized. “Projects that need to go in a month and a half to two months are taking significantly longer, suffering scope creep…[E]veryone was trying to fit more of a mold of, like, a mobile or AAA type studio” workflow.

“You said in our pre-call that you were burning about $600,000 a month,” Posner interjected. Ultimately, “you decided that you needed to make” deep staff cuts. Can you shed more light on that decision?

“It was a heavy decision,” recalled Letter. “I'd say we probably suffered with the decision…for about eighteen months. We sat in that discomfort.”

“Our studio turned into a work-for-hire studio, hyper-focused on sales cycles,” he continued. “I went from being a designer to, like, our head of biz dev. I was just trying to sell that next opportunity so we could pay that $600,000 payroll.”

“I could see the writing on the wall,” though. “Competition had increased. In work for hire, that's never good, because you start bidding against each other....Deals that would be seven figures eighteen months ago ended up being low six figures at that time…[Y]ou've lost 80% of the budget you used to have per project.”

“As you were being bid to the basement,” he added, “a lot of these studios were putting out subpar content, which just continued to drive the price down because performance of these games would be poor.”

“I had hired a COO, who was a great guy. His experience was at a very large tech company, where a small experimental team might be 500 people.”

“They don't care if that goes belly up because they're a multibillion-dollar company. And he came in, and he was part of the big hiring initiative and what we were doing.”

“His suggestion was, ‘Hey, let's just let everybody go. Fold the company and give everyone a larger severance.’”

“I was like, ‘One, I don't feel like that's just to all of our investors and everyone that's believed in this company, to just fold because we made this big mistake. Two, I understand it's not fair to the 78 people that ended up being affected during this this move that I made but, I felt like, also, I only get one opportunity, most likely, to have a startup, especially if it fails.’”

After summiting Roblox with Overlook Bay, Wonder Works took outside investment to help accelerate scaling.

“I ignored that guidance. I decided, ‘Hey, we're gonna go from 90 to 12.’ I felt like there was a dozen people at our company that, even through how truly toxic our work culture became—it was a tough place to work, and…[we] lost all sorts of camaraderie and our work culture was toxic—these 12 people never bought into that.”

“We were also on-site, in office, at this time, not remote,” Letter recalled. “You would be coming back to an office that's empty. I did feel like it was best to shut the office down and go remote just to avoid, ‘the ghosts of the hallway's past,’ you know…”

“It ended up being the best decision for the company. I just wanted to hire people, like Michael Scott says, ‘I only like hiring people.’”

Michael Scott is the name of the character that Steve Carrell played in the long-running TV series The Office. According to this site, which pulled together many of Scott’s “best” leadership insights, there was indeed an episode in which Scott said to Ryan Howard (played by B. J. Novak), “A good manager doesn't fire people. He hires people and inspires people…People, Ryan. And people will never go out of business."

It’s possible, though, that Letter was instead thinking of this Scott line: “The only difference between me and Donald Trump is that I don’t like firing people. Who takes joy in saying, ‘You’re fired!?’ You know what I’d say, ‘You’re hired,’ that’s what I’d say.”

Either way, it was “exactly how I feel,” Letter told Posner.

“It was a tough decision. And then, obviously, we completely emptied the C-suite too, where I became the only point of contact, in a managerial sense, for these 12 people.”

“No middle management still in our company now. It just starts with me and it trickles down, basically. I feel like the dozen we have are all self-sufficient.”

“Don't wanna quote The Office too much here but…when Michael left, and they didn't have a manager, everyone's adults and they're all just getting work done. That's how I feel our studio operates now because everyone truly understands what the vision is and what we're trying to do.”

Oh, go ahead, Zach.

Fine, I’ll do it for you (courtesy of the same site above):

To be clear, there was an episode in season 7, back in 2011, when Michael was out and the backup manager got sick, and The Office ran smoothly without a manager...briefly. Then Dwight Schrute (played by Rainn Wilson) became interim manager and everything immediately descended back into an inefficient, albeit hilarious, mess.

“You get to these 12 people,” Posner said, “but how do you decide who those 12 people are?”

“With the dozen,” Letter responded, “it was a sit down basically solo with me because I knew I was going to have to make these decisions. The C-suite was very split. It was just gonna be on my shoulders.”

[Pull quote:] I wanted to find 12 people that emulated, like, my energy, as if they were as much of an owner of the business as I was. I treat whoever works for our company now with the most respect…I want to have good people around me so I can reward them as we grow, and we can all feel that sense of ownership. Obviously, everyone at the company now is a partial owner of the company, and has equity.

“It was really just finding people with the right attitude.”

And then, right out of left field: “I literally just made a job offer to my mover.”

What?!

“I just moved into this house last week…He just had the right attitude, and I'm like, ‘Dude, like, you have this amazing attitude.’”

WTF? Didn’t you just describe a heart-wrenching episode that had to do with over-hiring imperfect cultural fits?

“He liked video games and was talking to me during the move, and I'm like, ‘Would you like an opportunity to, like, start in QA at my gaming studio?’”

QA is shorthand for quality assurance.

If he liked video games, well then…there’s still a remarkably low chance this rando mover guy will be a great addition to your Roblox QA team, Zach!

Letter put some more butter on his muffin. And “If you have other ambitions,” he continued, “I'll give you a million opportunities. And he accepted that.”

I bet he did, Zach! That guy better have put your chairs in the exact right place!

“I just wanna find the right people because I feel like I can make anybody fit, as long as they have the right attitude.”

Wow. We jumped right into the plotline of an episode of The Office there.

It's “attitude over experience, honestly, because, like, Roblox is such, like, a frontier of, like, the wild, wild, west that experience doesn't always translate one to one.”

Well said, Michael Scott!

Posner went back to the well of the great downsizing, which happened at the very end of 2023 or early January 2024. Letter already noted the toxic culture, but Posner asked how the team rebounded from that level of fear, uncertainty, etc.

Letter reminisced. The remaining workers were indeed wondering, “Is this the last hurrah?”

He recalled the rah-rah speech that he gave to “the twelve” who, at this point, were in the studio equivalent of Death Valley at high noon, with no horses and no canteen.

“I was, like, ‘Obviously, things aren't good, but doing this move has bought us a little bit of time. And I believe with you guys, if you're willing to stay and by my side, we can make great things...I don't think we’re a one trick pony that had one great game. I know this is bad, and it's sad, and I know there's a lot of fear, but if we dig in, you'll never have to worry again.’”

SIGN ME UP, COACH!

“No one left” after that, he recalled. “I was, like, pleasantly surprised.”

“These were the Goldilocks zone people, these dozen. Just right. Perfect in every way. I felt like I could build the company I wanted to with them. There were many great people that didn't make the cut, that I believe still could go on to do amazing things, even with our company…[W]e actually have hired a couple of them back now, as we've gone from 12 to about 15 people.”

In retrospect, Letter acknowledged he shouldn’t have “hired not hired so many people. I gave good severance still to everybody. I wanna say it was either three or four weeks, to each person, which isn't amazing,” but many of those who were laid off were there for <6 months.

Letter said his goal was “to give as much as I could without putting the other dozen in total jeopardy, where we have, like, two months to turn something around.”

This deep cut episode “was in my nightmares for two years because it was just, like, probably the most traumatic thing I've ever had to do in my life.”

“I appreciate that honesty,” said Posner, after Letter concluded relaying his version of Wonder Works’ 18-month slide into Death Valley. “Sometimes you need to go through those mistakes, as tragic as they are, to help grow and learn. I think your battle scars kinda make you stronger on the other side of it.”

Letter nodded.

At that point, though, he didn’t know another successful run at the summit of mount Roblox was waiting in the wings.

In that moment, Letter wasn’t in Death Valley either. He thought of himself as a panhandler, asking for loose change and bumming cigarettes outside a Las Vegas casino at 3am.

There I was, he said to Posner, “outside the casino, asking if I can have 50¢ to just spin one more wheel, you know?”

“I feel like that's how it was,” he continued. On the summit of Overlook Bay, “It was literally, ‘Wow, I was right. Roblox is like YouTube. I'm a genius. We're killing it. We'll scale. That's what the investor is saying. That's what we should do. We can replicate this 50 times over. Make a trillion dollars.’”

Then lady luck turned her back.

“And you quickly learn, ‘No. Nothing in gaming is guaranteed. This is a science.’ Just like every video I released wasn't my new number one video of all time. I think it took that humbling to really be like, ‘Okay, wait. There's significant risk with everything you do in life. Let's really focus here. Let's get off this high horse of ‘everything we're going to touch is going to have some type of success. It might not all be gold, but some of it could be silver.’”

Then lady luck cracks you across the chops.

“It's like, ‘No, a lot of it could be literally garbage.’ It's like, really just sitting back, reflecting on that, soaking in all those lessons. I think really [that] has helped these last two years, of what we've seen happen here at Wonder Works.”

We’ll ride the rocket-train back to the summit of mount Roblox next week.

A tease: There was a right time, right place elevator pitch to Jennifer Sharp, Head of Games & Emerging Media at Paramount, which led to a handshake; soon afterwards, Letter was pinching himself, and muttered under his breath, “I can’t believe that I just got SpongeBob to be my tower defense license!”