A road-trip game that kept getting played.
The Movie Game started as a road-trip game. Emily had the mechanic in her head for years — every movie has actors, every actor has been in many movies, so any two movies can be connected by a third. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, daily. Ahead of a long drive in April 2025, Josh threw together a version we could play on the road.
We kept playing it. Friends played it. A small following formed organically. The product worked — it had real, if small, traction.
In May 2026, we picked it back up — this time to build something we think movie lovers would actually love. One week with Hyperagent as the design and strategy partner: a free GTM playbook, a redesigned post-game, a new share-string vocabulary, a Statistics rebuild, an identity card system (The Plaque), a watchlist, a How-to-Play modal. We exported the resulting plans to Replit as the build environment. Sixteen surfaces shipped in a week.
The product playing today is the result of that week-long sprint — two humans, two AIs, and a budget of about $500 in tokens.
We published a build-in-public case study covering every iteration, every correction, and every decision behind the redesign. Read it here ↗
