101 Studios

Matt Sever's frustration with medical education sparked the idea for 101 Studios. During college at the University of Michigan, he realized pre-med weeding classes were "horribly boring and structured in a way where it wasn't easy to study or learn." His roommates felt the same pain. The breakthrough came during a casual dorm conversation: his roommates could remember every Pokémon from a decade earlier, but couldn't recall what they'd studied the day before. "That was the big 'Aha!' moment," Sever recalls. Growing up as a serious gamer—his family played Dr. Mario for hours, and he'd spent countless post-sports hours on Nintendo games—Sever saw a path forward. He enrolled in a University of Michigan course called "Games and Learning" led by professor Barry Fishman while simultaneously pursuing a graduate degree in Hospital and Molecular Epidemiology. The combination of gaming expertise and educational psychology gave him the foundation to believe gamification could transform medical education.

Sever's background was uniquely suited to the venture. A data science professional with stints at companies like Quicken Loans, he'd also formed a ska band called "Gunday Monday" to test his entrepreneurial instincts in the music industry. That band taught him music production, which would later generate all the sound effects and music assets for 101 Studios, plus valuable leadership experience managing eight musicians.

The team started "super lean." Sever's co-founder Dave built a custom game engine from scratch while Sever produced all music and sound effects and worked with Paul Slusser, a friend of the family who'd worked on AAA titles like Orcs Must Die, to create art assets. The result: a prototype featuring just four screens and two fightable enemies. Their flagship game, called Antibody, cast players as microscopic soldiers shrinking down to fight bacteria, viruses, and fungi inside sick patients—essentially a Pokémon clone where random monsters were actual pathogens and attacks corresponded to real medical treatments. Each encounter functioned as a flashcard for med school exams.

After roughly three months, they had a 15-minute playable demo level where you fought foot fungus under a toenail. The prototype worked conceptually—testing showed the core mechanic of using random game encounters as flashcards was engaging—but the execution hit a wall. The demo only ran on PC, was plagued with bugs, and consumed far more time to produce than anticipated. "Producing a larger game was going to be significantly more work than we anticipated. This was the main issue that killed the project," Sever admits. The team had invested roughly $800 in art assets, with the rest built in-house.

101 Studios pursued a B2P (Business to Professor) model, betting that if they could get university classes to adopt their tool, they'd gain recurring customers every semester. Professors would theoretically customize games for their specific courses. This strategy immediately proved flawed. For six months—three months building the product and another three networking—Sever talked to professors. The reception was consistently lukewarm: "Every professor we talked to liked the idea, but wanted something hyper customized for their specific class." Some professors said they'd only use it if it included features X, Y, and Z. Others simply weren't interested in using it for their classes, despite praising the concept in the abstract.

Nothing worked. The fundamental problem was a mismatch between what customers said they wanted and what they'd actually pay for. Sever had built a product difficult to scale and customize for specific classroom needs. "People liked the concept of 'a video game that is fun to play and will help you ace the big exam' but it was very hard to build that in a scalable way that actually delivered," he explains. After repeated failed sales pitches and mounting evidence that no one would buy what they'd built, Sever and his co-founder pivoted. Rather than shutting down 101 Studios formally, it transformed into League of Fighters, a League of Legends-inspired fighting game that leveraged the team's existing network and assets. That project proved "dramatically more successful" and attracted a large audience—a stark contrast to 101 Studios' near-zero traction.

101 Studios never generated revenue and was essentially abandoned when the pivot to League of Fighters occurred. The total financial loss was minimal—mostly time—with only $800 spent on art assets. The real lesson came from the failure itself. Looking back, Sever's key insight was brutal: "It would have been smarter to listen to significant amounts of user feedback first before building something complicated." He now advocates for building the simplest possible MVP and getting user feedback before investing months in product development. His current project, an automated video game coach called TryHarder, reflects this hard-won wisdom about the importance of customer validation before engineering effort.