Monsarrat wants to turn the park at the end of your street into a fantasy world you walk through.
The logo sits still on the page, which is the one place this company never wants you to be. Monsarrat's whole pitch is motion - phone up, feet moving, monsters somewhere past the swing set.
There is a specific kind of ambition in deciding that the problem with video games is that people play them indoors, and then trying to fix it.
Monsarrat is a small augmented-reality game studio in Los Angeles - about twelve people, a development team in Warsaw - with an unusually large claim: it is building the world's first Outdoor RPG. The distinction matters more than it sounds. Most location-based games, Pokemon Go being the obvious one, work by pinning a single creature to a GPS coordinate. You walk to the dot, you tap, something happens. It is, mechanically, a scavenger hunt with better art. Monsarrat's argument is that this is one genre - "collecting stuff" - and that outdoor gaming has stalled there while indoor gaming spent thirty years inventing everything else.
So the studio does something different, and this is the part worth slowing down for. Instead of one monster at one point, Landing Party - the studio's free demo game - lays an entire contiguous fantasy world across whatever open space you happen to be standing in. Hundreds of 3D models spread across the grass. You physically walk through them. The company likes to compare it to the Holodeck from Star Trek, which is the kind of comparison that is either charming or overreaching depending on how the demo actually runs, and by most press accounts the demo runs.
Outdoor games have just five hits and just one genre: collecting stuff. There is so much room, so much space for growth.
The reason to take this seriously - more seriously than you'd take a random studio making the same claim - is who is making it. The founder, Johnny Monsarrat, co-founded Turbine, one of the first companies to build massively multiplayer online games. Turbine made Asheron's Call and Lord of the Rings Online, and Warner Bros. bought it for $160 million. The man has done "invent a category of game that everyone said was niche" once already. The category he invented, MMOs, now generates around $24 billion a year. This is his argument for why the outdoor-gaming ceiling is temporary rather than permanent, and it is a hard argument to wave away.
"We turn parks into theme parks."
The demo you can download today is called Landing Party. It is free, it is on the Apple App Store and Google Play, and it contains twelve missions - mazes, a shooter, puzzles, exploration challenges. It took roughly three years to build, which in a ship-fast era is either a red flag or the entire point, and Monsarrat clearly believes it is the point: outdoor AR only feels like magic if it feels finished.
What makes the technology defensible - and here is where the seven-plus patents come in - is that the game has no fixed locations. It doesn't need a specific landmark or a pre-mapped city block. It adapts a whole game world to a space of any shape or size. Your back yard works. A parking lot works. A small city park works. The patents also cover manual repositioning around obstacles and collision prevention, so the game does not, in theory, march you into a hedge chasing a goblin.
The business model underneath is deliberately unremarkable: free-to-play, cosmetics, progression. That is the boring, proven engine that funded most of mobile gaming. The interesting bet sits on top of it, and it is a bet about human behavior rather than about graphics - that millions of people, handed a good enough reason, will pick the park over the couch. If that bet is right, the model prints. If it is wrong, no amount of clever patent portfolio saves it.
There is also a hardware angle. Through a partnership with XREAL, Landing Party runs on AR glasses, not just phones - which is the version of this that everyone imagines when they picture "the future of AR gaming," and the version that is furthest from mass adoption. Monsarrat is building for the phone that everyone has while keeping a foot in the glasses that some people will eventually have.
A free Outdoor RPG with 12 missions that turns any open space into a walkable fantasy world. Beta on iOS and Google Play, with support for phones and XREAL AR glasses.
7+ patented technologies that adapt a contiguous game world to real-world spaces of any shape, reposition players around obstacles, and prevent collisions with 3D content.
The pitch has a second layer, and it is the one that makes the whole thing more than a novelty: Monsarrat frames outdoor play as a response to loneliness.
The company cites the familiar numbers - large majorities of Gen Z and Millennials reporting they feel lonely - and positions the product as a reason to leave the house, move, and eventually (with planned multiplayer) run into other people doing the same thing. This is the sort of mission statement that can read as marketing gloss, and sometimes it is. But it is also, unusually, the actual design spec. If the game's success metric is "did you go outside," then the mission and the mechanic are the same object, and that alignment is rarer than it should be.
There's a global crisis of loneliness and maybe we could help millions of people get outside and connect.
Whether a free-to-play mobile game is the right instrument for a public-health problem is a fair thing to be skeptical about. But the thing being skeptical about is at least directionally pointed at getting people off screens by way of a screen, which is a more honest paradox than most consumer apps bother to name.
The advisory board is the part that makes investors look twice. It is genuinely strange to see this concentration of industry seniority attached to a company this small, which is either a sign that the insiders see something, or a sign that the founder is very good at getting meetings. Given the résumé, probably both.
Co-founded Turbine (Asheron's Call, Lord of the Rings Online), acquired by Warner Bros. for $160M. Entered MIT at 16; worked at the MIT AI Lab under iRobot's Rodney Brooks; helped build an early juggling robot.
"Johnny is the best communicator and most 'can-do' guy that I work with."
Former president of Blizzard Entertainment, lending platform and live-ops credibility to a studio still pre-launch.
"With foundational patents, Johnny's team is bringing outdoor gaming into major genres."
Funding and status figures are drawn from public sources and press interviews; totals cited across outlets range from roughly $2M to $2.5M raised. Treat exact figures as approximate.
The gameplay is easier to believe once you watch someone walk through it. The studio's channels host demo footage and interviews.