Monsarrat is a Los Angeles-based augmented reality game studio building what it calls the world's first Outdoor RPG. Founded by Johnny Monsarrat - who co-founded Turbine, one of the first MMO companies, later sold to Warner Bros. for $160M - the studio's demo game Landing Party spreads an entire fantasy world across any real-world park or open space instead of pinning one creature to a GPS point. Backed by seven-plus patents, a ~12-person team, and an advisory board of former PlayStation, Blizzard, Niantic, and Lucasfilm executives, Monsarrat pitches outdoor gaming as an antidote to a loneliness epidemic - a reason to walk outside and play.
Linden Lab is the San Francisco company behind Second Life, the user-built virtual world it launched in 2003. More than two decades on, the platform still runs a multimillion-dollar creator economy where residents design avatars, sell virtual goods, host live events and trade in Linden Dollars - a quiet, persistent metaverse that predates the word itself.