Matt Colón
The Legend of Zelda fan project lived in a folder on Matt Colón’s hard drive. It had grown for years. It was good. It was also not going anywhere. A licensed property can never ship. A working engineering manager at Adobe with three kids and a fourteen-year marriage does not have the spare hours to start over on something he can release. The Zelda folder stayed where it was, a kind of unrequited love.
He had grown up at the keyboard. Apple IIc, Colecovision, NES, SNES, Gameboy. He had drawn since preschool, picked up violin at six, added piano and guitar. He had taken his coursework in computer graphics and artificial intelligence at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Every input had pointed at games. Every paying job had pointed at enterprise software. The two stayed in separate folders for over a decade.
Years before he ever wrote a line of GFL code, Matt met Nathan Blair through the game development community. The conversation stayed in the back of his head. In 2019 he came back to it. Games For Love had a real project that needed real engineering. Channel Surfing+ was a VR arcade channel where hospitalized kids could play 2D arcade games inside the headset. The project was not fan code. The project was original work, shipping to children in hospital rooms, with team review and a Discord channel where progress got posted every week.
Matt builds. The Channel Surfing+ work is what his Zelda folder always wanted to be. He has been delivering for GFL since then. Engineering Manager at Adobe by day. 2D game developer for kids in hospital wings by night. He shipped Dark OmniChess on his own time, and keeps adding games to Channel Surfing+ on GFL’s.
“The act of creating produces rejuvenation, but the act of shipping produces growth.”
The folder of unshipped fan code became a folder of shipped commercial code, then a folder of shipped charitable code with kids’ names attached to the playtests. Three children at home. Three Adobe enterprise teams at work. One Discord channel where every Friday a new build gets a thumbs-up from the team.
GFL needs more pros like Matt. The League of Pros office hours sponsor at $100 funds one mentorship session between a working professional and an emerging developer. $500 funds a full pro-led game-jam mentorship day. $1,000 sponsors a League of Pros initiative end-to-end. The pros show up. The pros need budget around them.
