Madeline Stephanie Thorson (born Matt Thorson, 18 March 1988) is a Canadian video game developer, known as one of the lead creators for the video games TowerFall and Celeste, developed under the studio Maddy Makes Games (previously Matt Makes Games). Since September 2019, Thorson has worked as Director of R&D at Extremely OK Games.
TowerFall is an action indie video game created by Maddy Thorson through her company Maddy Makes Games. In the game, players control up to four archers in a multiplayer platform fighter. It was released on the Ouya microconsole in June 2013 and was later ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Linux, OS X, and Windows as TowerFall Ascension and to the Nintendo Switch under its original title of TowerFall.
TowerFall was Thorson's first commercial game. It followed from a June 2012 game jam single-player prototype. Thorson tested the game on her indie developer colleagues with whom she lived, and developed its capacity as a party game. Its mechanics were inspired by games of Thorson's youth, such as Bushido Blade and GoldenEye 007, and influenced by demo feedback at the Evolution Championship Series fighting game tournament. TowerFall was known as the standout title for the Ouya at the console's launch. In its first year, the game sold around 7,000 copies on Ouya, resulting in a gross revenue of about $105,000. When the Ouya exclusivity expired, Thorson signed another exclusivity agreement for the PlayStation 4, where Ascension received an expanded single-player mode, and new levels, weapons, and gameplay variants. A PlayStation Vita release followed in 2015, and Xbox One and Switch versions have been released as well. A standalone eight-player edition for Windows released in 2016.
Celeste is a 2018 platform video game developed and published by indie studio Maddy Makes Games. The player controls the player character Madeline, a young woman with anxiety and depression, who endeavors to climb Celeste Mountain, a fictional version of Mount Celeste. During her climb, she encounters several characters, including a personification of her self-doubt nicknamed "Badeline", who attempts to stop her from reaching the mountain's summit.
Development of Celeste began in August 2015, when game developers Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry created a version of Celeste for the PICO-8 during the course of a weekend; Thorson, who served as producer, and Berry, who served as the lead programmer, wanted to expand the PICO-8 version into a full game. Inspired in part by Thorson's own TowerFall (2013) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), the gameplay was designed to be minimal and to mirror the feeling of bouldering. Celeste was designed to be accessible, featuring game mechanics and an "Assist Mode" that make the game more forgiving and less challenging. To create a more "introspective" game, the developers added themes of self-forgiveness into the narrative, which grew to become intertwined with the gameplay. Celeste's soundtrack was composed by Lena Raine.