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Change Wizard

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Change Wizard

Change Wizard is a 2015 iOS game developed by Mountain Machine Studios and executive produced by Mike Merrill (credited as “K. Mikey M.”). The game casts the player as a wizard cashier who must use magic to make correct change for customers. It was released on the Apple App Store at $1.99 and supported Apple Game Center for competitive play.

Change Wizard was an offshoot of work happening inside Chroma at the time, and emerged from a “Money Jam,” an event Merrill hosted in which people came together for a short period to build games with the explicit goal of selling them. Unlike a traditional game jam focused on experimentation or portfolio work, Money Jam was structured around commercial release as the outcome.

Concept

The setup is that making change is difficult when you are a wizard. The player views a line of customers at a register and must calculate the correct change on each transaction. To dispense the change, the player casts the “Change-O-Matic spell” by drawing a circle on the screen sized to match the required amount. For example: a customer pays $9.23 for a $9.19 chocolate bar, and the player draws four pennies as four small circles. Once the change is close enough to correct, the player swipes the checkout bar to advance to the next customer.

The game’s framing was deliberately absurd. Promotional copy on release read: “Magic isn’t easy. If it was easy, then everyone would do it and we’d be living in a world of dragons and lightning bolt spells.”

Release and context

Mountain Machine Studios released Change Wizard in April 2015. Merrill wrote an introductory “How to Play Change Wizard” post on Medium on April 30, 2015, explaining the gameplay and crediting the development team. The game was available only on iOS.

The release coincided with the formal launch of Chroma Fund as a crowd-investing platform, though Change Wizard itself was not a Chroma Fund campaign. It was produced on a faster timeline through the Money Jam format, while Chroma Fund operated on a separate track for larger, longer-horizon creative projects.

Reception

Rick Turoczy reviewed Change Wizard for Silicon Florist on April 29, 2015, the day before Merrill’s own Medium post introducing the game. Turoczy called it “a frustratingly fun game” and framed it as an unexpected collaboration between two Oregon Story Board accelerator alumni: Mountain Machine Studios and Merrill (in his Chroma cofounder capacity). The review was playful and affectionate, with Turoczy cheerfully admitting he could not actually master the gameplay himself despite endorsing it.

As far as is documented, the Silicon Florist review is the only formal press coverage Change Wizard received.

The Android petition

On April 29, 2015, one day before Merrill’s Medium post introducing the game, Gene Merrill (Mike’s older brother) launched a Change.org petition titled “Android version of Change Wizard.” The petition was addressed directly to his brother and read, in part:

Change Wizard is a fantastic iOS game that playfully teaches kids to count and make change. It was made in Unity, which is cross-platform. Why isn’t there an Android version? The signers below pledge that they want to buy a copy of Change Wizard on Android.

The petition accused the developer of “being a jerk” for withholding the Android release, acknowledged that the signers had no firsthand experience with the iOS version (because they had Android phones), and was clearly written in the family’s shared sense of humor. An Android version was never released.

This stands as one of the best-documented instances of the two Merrill brothers publicly trolling each other, with Change.org’s activism infrastructure used as the joke delivery mechanism.

Significance

Change Wizard is a minor title in the history of mobile games but occupies an interesting position in the KmikeyM universe. It was the most concrete output of Merrill’s Money Jam format, which treated commercial release (rather than experimentation or portfolio-building) as the goal of a short collaborative production sprint. The Money Jam approach foreshadowed aspects of Merrill’s later creative work: small teams, specific commercial targets, and a willingness to ship weird premises that would be hard to pitch through conventional channels.

For Mike Merrill personally, Change Wizard represents an early executive producer credit and a precursor to the much larger Blippo+ project a decade later. The move from a $1.99 iOS math game in 2015 to a Playdate-published FMV television simulator in 2025 is a short jump in medium but a long one in ambition.

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