It’s the middle of the workday, and Ok Go‘s guitarist, Andy Ross, and I are trying to figure out which word best represents the nexus of the words “Mars” and “Netflix” (hint: We both picked a movie starring Matt Damon).
This little brain puzzle is par for the course on Ok Go’s new word game, Say the Same Thing. The app digitizes a game that anyone who’s taken an intro to improv course will be familiar with: Two or more participants say a word at the same time, and then try to get on the same wavelength to identify the sum of those two words. The process continues until everyone says the same word.
The game, now available on iOS and Android, is actually a relaunch that’s been a long time in the making. Ross built a first version of the app back in 2013 that got over a million downloads in a week. The app ultimately fizzled out as Ross and Ok Go focused on other projects, but its loyal fans never forgot it. To this day, he says, he still gets messages asking when the game will come back, including from one memorable pair who met on the app and eventually got married.
In recent months, as The New York Times’s Wordle has become a daily habit for people worldwide to connect and compete with friends and family, Ross realized that it was time to revive Say the Same Thing.
“The success of some of the New York Times-style word games reminded us, ‘Hey, we have this really great game that people like, and maybe we should bring it back,’” he says.
How Andy Ross built Say the Same Thing . . . again
The original Say the Same Thing app started on tour.
“When you spend that much time with the same people, you sort of have to pass the time in increasingly more complicated ways,” he says. “This was just a game that we played on the bus.”
In those pre- and early-2010s years, Ross recalls, Ok Go wasn’t selling as many tickets or doing as well as it is today. To earn a secondary income, Ross was using his computer science degree to run an app tech startup, Space Inch, on the side. While playing the word game with his bandmates, he realized that it could make a great app, which led him to coding the interface and server component almost entirely by himself.
When the app launched, it was such a huge success that the server got “totally hosed.” “I would be freaking out about the server going down and then have to go on stage,” Ross says. This time around, Ross says, he and another developer from the original team paid special attention to making sure that the game’s servers can handle a surge of users.
While the core premise of the new app is the same as its predecessor, it has a few new capabilities to tap into the growing culture of social word game playing. There’s now a daily challenge that lets every user try their hand at an AI-generated word pairing and find out how their answer compares to the masses, as well as a leaderboard to track top-performing users. A streak function allows users to keep tabs on how many consecutive days they’ve played the game. And, to open the game up to family and friend group chats, it now has a mode for more than two players—the first two in the game to say the same word win.
Ross sees the game as a lighthearted way to share inside jokes, get to know someone new, and take a brain break. In the future, he says, Ok Go fans might even be able to challenge him and his bandmates on the app.
“I can’t promise how much we’ll play, but anyone can give it a shot,” Ross says.