Madeline Stephanie "Maddy" Thorson (born March 18, 1988), formerly known as Matt Thorson, is a Canadian video game developer best known for Celeste and TowerFall. She has ran the game studios Matt Makes Games (2008-2019) and Extremely OK Games (2019-present).
Her early work was made with Game Maker under the name "Helix Games" and some of her first games were published by Adult Swim Games. In 2012, she bought a house along with Alec Holowka, Chevy Ray Johnston, Hannah Boyd and Noel Berry and dubbed it the "Indie House", where Matt Makes Games was formally incorporated. After joining Holowka at a game jam, they began working together on what would become TowerFall which released on June 25, 2013.
Thorson and Berry began working on Celeste together in August 2015 as a game jam title and began working full-time on it in January 2016. Celeste released on January 25, 2018 to widespread acclaim. Thorson famously came to terms with being a trans woman during the development of Celeste, which has a transgender protagonist, Madeline, who was initially speculated to be trans after players spotted trans pride flags in her bedroom. However, the development team did not initially comment on this as they didn't want to make a fuss about Madeline's gender identity
.
In 2019 Matt Makes Games was relaunched under the name Extremely OK Games (EXOK for short), partly to show that the company was more than just Thorson's efforts. At the same time they moved to a new office in Vancouver big enough to house the entire team - who were formerly based across various locations worldwide - in one building. The first game to be released under the EXOK branding, Earthblade, is slated to be released after 2024, with Celeste updated with the new company name following the renaming. However, TowerFall will remain published under the Matt Makes Games branding.
