My grandfather didn't start his composing career until he was my age.
Before that, he spent years as a musician in Hollywood. Writing music for television. Theme songs you've heard a thousand times — The A-Team, Magnum P.I. Hunter.
He won a Grammy for Rock Profiles.
Then, later than most would dare, he built the career he's best remembered for.
He died in 1988.
I named one of my production companies Rockford, partly in his memory. Partly because of what he taught me — that it's never too late to make the idea work
I had a lot of ideas in my twenties and thirties. None went anywhere.
I was a Broadway producer, a Tony nominee, obsessed with gaming in a way that never seemed to add up to anything.
Then in 2015, I started chasing a problem nobody had solved:
How do you build a branching narrative experience for a live stage?
I spent a quarter million dollars figuring out what I was actually building. Took a pandemic to force me to sit down and get it right.
I kept looking.
Turns out I was just in my grandfather's early years.
If an audience member walks out of my show talking about the technology, I've failed.
If they walk out never mentioning it at all?
That's 100% success.
But that's not what you're taught in tech.
The conventional wisdom is visibility equals value. If people aren't noticing what you built, you failed to communicate it.
A year ago, the CEO of Gearbox (the studio behind Borderlands), Randy Pitchford told me:
"It's not the tech that matters to me. It's the design that the tech is supporting. That's the thing you've solved that nobody else has solved."
The audience isn't buying a ticket to Gamiotics.
They're buying a ticket to an experience.
The second the tech becomes the point, it becomes a gimmick. And gimmicks are good for one joke, but ultimately I need this thing to support a two-and-a-half-hour performance.
The software has to have a purpose every time it's used. Woven into the story. Invisible.
Good tech disappears.
The first time I told my theater ushers they didn't have to ask audiences to put their phones away, one of them looked at me and said:
"You just made our job so much easier!"
For years, investors pushed back hard on this. They worried it’d be a distraction and everyone would just end up on “Facebook.”
But my technology runs through the browser on your phone. No app, no download. Just scan a QR code and you're in.
From that moment, the audience has a two-way connection to everything happening on stage. They're voting, making choices, influencing the story in real time.
The phone isn't a distraction. It's the mechanism.
The 8-15 year olds coming to my show have never known a world without a smartphone.
For them it's not even a phone — it's just how you access the world.
Putting it in their hands and saying "use this to play the show" is like water off a duck's back.
I'm in my mid-40s. I span that divide. I remember before smartphones very clearly.
But I'm not designing for how I grew up.
I'm designing for the world we actually live in.
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