Through working in GameMaker, she was connected to others in online forums who were also interested in making games, including Chevy Ray Johnston.

[5] She developed a number of small pay-what-you-want games through GameMaker in high school and through college,[5] including Jumper and several sequels, FLaiL, and An Untitled Story.

When they completed this, they recognized the opportunity to flesh out the game into a full release, forming the basis of Celeste.

Second, the change coincided with a move to a new set of offices in Vancouver to house the entire team, which had been previously spread across the world, including some in São Paulo.

[19] EXOK was technically founded in March 2019, but the first six months had been spent working to move these international developers into Canada and dealing with immigration requirements.

Thorson stated that TowerFall and Celeste would remain published under Matt Makes Games, and that the team had already started the early exploratory work for their next title, codenamed "EXOK-1".

[19] With everyone in EXOK working in the same office, it had made development time faster, allowing them to test through multiple prototype games to come onto their next project within six months.

[20] The team went through three prototypes (named EXOK 1 through 3) which Thorson said "ventured way too far from our comfort zone for them to realistically ever get finished", before coming up with a fourth prototype that evolved into their first game under the "Extremely OK" name, Earthblade, announced in April 2021, described as an "explor-action" game in a "seamless pixel art world".

[25] In January 2025, Thorson, on the company's blog, announced that the game had been canceled, citing the dispute over intellectual property rights of Celeste and struggles with development among the reasons.

Thorson later confirmed that Madeline was trans in a blog post which also reflected on her own coming to terms with her gender identity.