In 2020, roughly half of all children under 16 in the US were logging into a single virtual space. This episode traces Roblox from its 2004 origins as Dynablocks, a physics sandbox built by two engineers after their work on educational simulation software at Knowledge Revolution, through the pivot around 2008 to rely entirely on user-generated content written in a modified version of Lua. We look at how Robux, the 2013 Developer Exchange program, and limited items created a career path for teenage developers and a speculative market for digital goods.

We then cover the dark side of that economy, including beamer hackers who steal session tokens to bypass two-factor authentication, the pandemic surge to 120 million monthly users, the Lil Nas X virtual concert, the push to age up with spatial voice chat, facial tracking, and a 17-plus rating  ...