Three Kiwi developers are active in the Roblox community, frequently flying to the company's offices in the United States.
Three Kiwi developers are active in the Roblox community, frequently flying to the company's offices in the United States.
After landing a major movie deal for their breakout game, three New Zealand developers say Kiwis are “batting way above average” on the global platform Roblox.
Alec Kieft, Matthew Hufton, and Cameron Angland are set to executive produce a feature film of 99 Nights in the Forest with 20th CenturyFox.
The survival horror game has become the platform’s seventh most played of all time, marking the third successful project from their studio, Grandma’s Favourite Games.
A move to film, however, was never part of the plan.
“We just kind of were doing it as like a fun thing since we were all together,” Hufton told the Herald. “I think it’s cool that it’s become so much bigger than what we originally planned to create.”
99 Nights in the Forest developers (from left) Cameron Angland, Matthew Hufton, and Alec Kieft met as teens on Roblox.
The survival horror game, which challenges players to survive 99 days in a forest while battling hunger and an aggressive evil deer, began as a “one-week game jam” last March, Kieft said.
“There was a game called Dead Rails which was popular at the time, which was like a collaborative survival experience where you’re on a train battling zombies. We liked that and we wanted to do something in that realm.”
Angland said the game’s success was also a bit of a “full circle moment”.
He and Hufton met Kieft on the platform when they were just 13. While they grew up together in New Plymouth, Kieft is from the Kāpiti Coast, nearly a four-hour drive away.
“We would hang out and play Roblox and stuff when we were all kids”, Kieft said.
Over the past 15 years, they have met and worked with other New Zealand-based programmers as the platform has changed and grown.
The Kiwis' hit Roblox game, 99 Nights in the Forest, challenges players to survive a spooky forest setting. Photo / Grandma's Favourite Games
“I think one of the coolest things is that, like, when we started it was very small, very niche”, Hufton said, “it felt like this little corner that we’d found on the internet”.
Now, Kieft believes Kiwi developers are “batting way above average” on the mammoth gaming site, which has around 151.5 million daily users.
“Last year, two of the three massive games that ruled the summer of 2025 in America were New Zealand-run, which is like absurd given that we’re a country of five million people.”
A Roblox spokesperson agreed that Kiwis had “long punched above” their weight as they shared their support for the trio.
Although they have been developing games from the basement of their shared home fulltime for the past five years, Kieft said 99 Nights was in a “league of its own” compared with their previous solo or collaborative projects.
The trio of Kiwi developers are active in the Roblox community, frequently flying to the company's offices in the United States.
He said the team were excited to let “a successful film studio take a shot at it” and bring “the story to life in another way”, a task the president of Disney Live Action and 20th Century Studios, David Greenbaum, seemed happy to take up this week.
“99 Nights in the Forest has already connected with millions of players worldwide, and we’re excited to build on that foundation for audiences everywhere", he said.
