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@a16z Roblox turns 20 today. In 2004, David Baszucki and Erik Cassel left MSC Software to found Roblox, building on ideas from Interactive Physics, an educational simulation tool they’d made together back in the late 1980s. Two years later, on September 1, 2006, the platform they built launched to the public, starting with friends, family, and a few hundred early testers recruited off Google ads. What began as a small, slow-growing experiment in letting people build and share their own games became an early bet on user-generated content, years before the creator economy became mainstream. Two decades later, that bet has compounded into a platform where the company doesn’t make the games; millions of independent creators do, with Roblox giving them the tools to build, distribute and earn from what they create. Today, Roblox is one of the largest interactive platforms on Earth, with 144 million daily active users in Q4 2025, up 69% year-over-year. Creators earned more than $1.5 billion in 2025 alone. What started as a two-person prototype has become an economy of its own.
