JohnnyMonsarrat

In 1993, Johnny Monsarrat sat down at a terminal and drove a robot across campus at MIT - over the internet. Nobody had done that before. The next year, he co-founded Turbine, the studio that would define online multiplayer gaming for a decade. Warner Bros. bought that company for $160 million.

He then spent years writing white papers on the Faith-Based Initiative System for a think tank in Washington, DC. Hand-replying - by hand - to 10,000 strangers' questions about life. Building the world's largest digital calendar of arts events. Lobbying for secular causes.

Now he's in Santa Monica, running a 12-person studio called Monsarrat, and his thesis is simple: the outdoor game category is broken. Five hits. One genre. Collecting stuff. He thinks he can fix all of that.

What Pokémon Go Got Wrong

The problem with the most successful outdoor game ever made, in Monsarrat's reading, is that Niantic thought like a mapping company. Fixed GPS pins. Preset locations. A game world that existed before the player arrived. That's good for maps. It's terrible for storytelling.

Landing Party - Monsarrat's flagship product, currently available free on the App Store and Google Play - does something different. It lays a contiguous game world across whatever outdoor space you're in. No fixed points. The entire map flows around your real environment. Players walk through it. If a game zone lands on a wall, you move it. The fantasy world bends to meet you.

Seven patents protect this approach. Forbes sent a writer to the Augmented World Expo 2023 - the largest AR conference on Earth - and out of everything there, highlighted Monsarrat as one of only two startups worth talking about. Charlie Fink wrote: "I haven't seen anything like this since Pokémon Go."

How Turbine Started (and Where It Ended Up)

Turbine began where many legendary startups have - in someone's mother's house. Twelve people. A wild idea that the internet could be a place where thousands of players inhabited the same persistent world simultaneously. That was not obvious in 1994.

Asheron's Call won DICE Game of the Year. Lord of the Rings Online won PC Gamer's Game of the Year. Dungeons & Dragons Online brought one of the most storied tabletop franchises online. The studio grew to 350 people. It helped create an industry now worth $30 to $54 billion. Warner Bros. bought it.

That history gives Monsarrat something most AR gaming startups don't have: a founder who's actually shipped a game people loved, scaled a studio, and navigated an acquisition. His advisors clearly noticed. The bench currently includes Jack Tretton (former CEO of PlayStation), Mike Ybarra (former President of Blizzard), David Anderman (former COO of Lucasfilm), and Jenna Seiden (former VP at Niantic - the company that made Pokémon Go).

Tretton's assessment of Monsarrat as a colleague: "The best communicator and most 'can-do' guy that I work with."

The Real Thesis: Loneliness

Behind the patents and the pitch deck is something more personal. Monsarrat talks about a global loneliness crisis the way other founders talk about market opportunity - not as a problem to monetize but as a thing worth solving. The game is the mechanism. Getting people outside, into neighborhoods, talking to strangers - that's the actual goal.

It fits a pattern across his career. The Soulburners project - the one that won him a Guinness World Record - involved hand-replying to over 10,000 people's handwritten questions about life. Not a chatbot. Not a form response. His own handwriting. Practical, secular, therapy-adjacent answers to questions strangers were afraid to ask anyone they knew. That's not the behavior of someone optimizing for efficiency. It's the behavior of someone who genuinely wants to connect with people.

The Curriculum Before the Companies

Monsarrat arrived at MIT at 16. He worked at the MIT AI Lab under Rodney Brooks - the researcher who would go on to co-found iRobot and change how the world thought about autonomous machines. His team built the world's first juggling robot. He drove that robot remotely over the internet in 1993, a year before most people had heard of the web.

He also co-invented the "away message" in Zephyr - the world's first instant messaging system - before AIM made it a cultural institution. He sequenced bacterial genomes at Genome Therapeutics before the Human Genome Project completed. He studied computer science and AI at Brown as a PhD student. Then he went to MIT Sloan for an MBA with a focus on entrepreneurship.

The pattern isn't dilettantism. It's accumulation. Every domain he entered left him with skills and networks he would later use in unexpected ways. The AI background informs how he thinks about game systems. The biotech stint gave him comfort with long timelines and uncertain outcomes. The secular policy work sharpened his ability to communicate complex ideas to non-technical audiences.