Behind-the-scenes of one mom’s life as an engineer at Osmo

When Osmo engineer Rachel Palangie’s oldest child, Theo, was a baby she was working on Detective Agency – a game that it would be years before he would be old enough to understand. There was one part that he did enjoy quite early – for Detective Agency and a number of other Osmo games: the hardware that went with it – especially the wand and the maps.

But the real fun, she remembers, came with an impressive array of toy cars housed in the Osmo office with the development of the Hot Wheels MindRacers game. “I would take him by the office if there were days when daycare was closed and I had to stop by to pick something up,” she remembers. “There would be all these cars and this big Hot Wheels garage there and all of this cool stuff that we accumulated while working on the game.  Often he would come home with a car someone had given him. 

“He absolutely loved it especially as small cars like that were probably the closest thing he had to a comfort item at the time, he would switch up which car it was but keep one clutched tightly in his hand. 

“There’s also a lot of working from home – even before the pandemic – because Osmo was pretty good about that, especially when childcare was closed or he was sick, so I would be working with him around sometimes.”

When the pandemic started especially, Theo, like most kids, would want to be in his mom’s lap typing random things on my keyboard and managing to send garbled messages into the team’s Slack channels. And like most parents, she did her best with some of the objects lying around the house to keep him entertained.

“I have accumulated a lot of Osmo hardware over the years including prototypes and assorted pieces not in their official packaging, and at the beginning of the pandemic he found my stash of coding pieces. He was two and a half at the time and his favorite game was to use my Apple Watch charger to fish for coding tiles – it was super cute,” Rachel says.

Theo, like many children of Osmo parents, has already participated in a few playtests – he helped on Little Genius Kit. But now that he’s getting a little older, Rachel’s looking forward to sharing more of the Osmo library with him.

“He was too young for the longest time for all the stuff I was working on, so I’m excited now that he’s a little older for him to play more Osmo games,” Rachel says. “Right now, he’s on the verge of being able to play most of the games and because he’s almost five he’s about to unlock so much – it used to be that I’d play with him but the games were a bit too hard. Now, he’s starting to get to the point where he can actually play them and I’m really excited to be able to do that with him.”