Monsarrat unveils outdoor RPG demo with AR gameplay

Johnny Monsarrat helped initiate the era of the massively multiplayer online game with Asheron’s Call in 1999. He hopes to establish a new category of games again with an outdoor role-playing game called Landing Party.

Los Angeles-based Monsarrat, a company named after its founder, launched the game earlier this summer as a mobile game played with augmented reality tech, using a smartphone’s camera and superimposing animated graphics on the real world. It’s been done before, but Monsarrat has filed for patents for features like being able to move the gaming landscape when real world obstructions get in the way.

Monsarrat was previously one of the founders of Turbine, the maker of MMOs including Asheron’s Call, Dungeons & Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online. Warner Bros. bought Boston-based Turbine in 2010 for $160 million.

Now Monsarrat is moving gaming to the outdoors. Such outdoor walking games were defined in 2016 by Niantic’s Pokémon Go, which has earned a staggering $8 billion, including $566 million just in 2023. But Monsarrat said that Pokémon Go gameplay has nothing like the creativity and community of powerhouse MMO games that Monsarrat knows so well.

And while outdoor games can be challenging, they’re not as physically taxing as sports, which are too athletic for a lot of people, Monsarrat.

“Some people don’t want to get exhausted or sweat, or they just want something more creative,” he said. “I think about roleplaying games like what I used to make on PC. They tend to make more money per player. The KPIs are better for role playing games. People get caught up in the story,” he said. “If you join a team, it has team goals. You’ve got to keep playing the game. That improves player retention. You make some friends. You want to see your friends. You’ve got to keep playing the game.”

He added, “MMOs are more efficient on PC, on console, on mobile. And I mean, this is my hypothesis. I think the MMO or RPG games should be more efficient outdoors. So what I’m saying is I don’t have to be a massive Pokemon Go hit to make serious money because the economics should be more efficient.”

Live demo

I played a demo of Monsarrat’s game multiple times during its development. Recently, I played the Landing Party game in a parking lot in my hometown.

During the demo, the game started up and I could see an image on my camera screen. I could help it identify the planet of the ground, and then it was ready to go. It has to know where the ground is so it doesn’t put objects that should be on the ground in the air. It’s easy to move the game map if you encounter an obstacle like a parked car or fence. You simply hold a button down and turn your body, moving the game world as your body moves. Then you reposition it so you can walk in a different direction. That’s one of the patented features.

“It’s like you aree in the park and you have a family playing frisbee. There’s a park bench in your way, and you can move the game around,” Monsarrat said.

With one feature, there is a two-dimensional game zone on the map. You walk through it like the Holodeck in Star Trek. You have to shoot a gun at some big monsters and navigate through rocky or jungle-like areas. It’s meant to be immersive.

If there is a character in the game and you walk right into the character, the whole character and the world gets pushed backward. So you can’t walk through virtual walls. Some monsters appear and you shoot them with the gun and escort a couple of characters to a landing ship so they can escape.

In another quest, you have a Geiger counter and you’re searching for a source of radiation. The sound of the counter gets louder as you near the radiation, and it grows faint if you move away from it. You can play this game with other players, and you can also play via remote multiplayer as well. Eventually, all of this could be a full MMO.

In Monsarrat’s games, there are no fixed locations. Players can enjoy the game anywhere where there is some room to walk.

“Even a small space, if you can walk around, you can play it. Also, the game is more creative. It’s got real community.”

The Landing Party game has around 12 quests. It can be played in a relatively short time. But Monsarrat believes any game can be divided into a number of small quests. The company is in talks with licensors about securing intellectual property for games.

The success of AR and location-based games

Niantic has had some successes like Monster Hunter Now, which has generated $150 million in revenue. But Niantic has struggled to evolve its entry level Pokémon Go, where you collect stuff, into mature products with better performing player retention and monetization.

Monsarrat’s new launch, Landing Party, is backed up by four patents. It’s an outdoor RPG inspired by its founder’s background in MMOs. Instead of placing one creature at a GPS point, Landing Party lays out a fantasy world across an open map space, like a park or a parking lot, where the player walks through to play. The game has no fixed locations, allowing players to set their next game mission in a backyard, a local park, or any other open space, even a small one.

“In the global crisis of loneliness, people are craving a reason to go outdoors,” said Monsarrat. “But some people aren’t drawn to sports. They want an alternative outdoor activity that’s more creative and less athletic. That’s what we’re building, and we see three key market drivers: creativity, community, and convenience.”

Landing Party is so far just a demo game, but it’s free and has 12 missions that could be the future of outdoor video games. It is now available on Apple App Store and Google Play.

Monsarrat is now seeking business partnerships, and funding to build out the future full game. Monsarrat believes that current outdoor games are just focused on collecting and get boring quickly. That’s why he wants to take roleplaying, a strong game type that has proven key performance indicators on PC, console, and mobile — and bring it outdoors.

He noted that Pokémon Go’s technology is a database of fixed map points, which can only support “collecting stuff” gameplay. Its popularity speaks to the power of the intellectual property and the need to get people going outside in the global crisis of loneliness, Monsarrat said. He thinks later Niantic games like Harry Potter, NBA and Marvel failed as fans wanted deep stories and roleplaying adventures which Niantic’s fixed GPS points didn’t support.

Even so, Pokémon Go persists as a top 10 mobile game even though it’s eight years old. That suggests that AR walking games can still be hits. Besides Pokemon Go, other hits include Jurassic World Alive, Monster Hunter Now and Dragon Quest Walk.

As a market, such games are earning nearly $1 billion a year in revenue. Roughly 90% of smartphones now support AR, compared to less than half in 2019. Disney is making a Kingdom Hearts game and Disney Step.

And Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, recently showed off a new pair of AR glasses, dubbed Orion, as a new product coming soon. Monsarrat believes consumers aren’t waiting for AR headsets, as 30% of Americans already use AR for face filters, shopping, and games. Apple Vision Pro didn’t sell well to consumers, but it also cost $3,500. Apple is still investing for the future products.

Monsarrat believes the power of storytelling and more player interaction can help outdoor gaming. And people are already playing AR games.

Origins

Monsarrat was a mentor at a college and met a contestant who had an AR application. Monsarrat saw an opportunity to make tools to make AR games. That summer, Pokemon Go came out and it became possible to raise a small amount of funding.

“They thought like a mapping company. It turned out their fixed map points were not good for storytelling,” he said. “I’m not trying to copycat Pokemon Go. With my background in gaming, I want to build a different type of game. I think of outdoor gaming as a platform. It’s funny that there’s only one type of outdoor game — collecting games. Well, there’s dozens of different game types. Why shouldn’t there be more game types for this new platform, outdoor gaming? So we’re making the role playing part of it.”

Monsarrat started the company back in 2016 and rebooted it in 2021. To date, the company has raised $2 million in funding, after securing some key patents. He has added advisers such as Yucheng Chiang, CEO of Top Golf, Jenna Seiden of Skydance Interactive, ex-Blizzard chief Mike Ybarra, former PlayStation head Jack Tretton, Sandy Kleinman of Universal Studios and Brad Bao, head of scooter maker Lime.

The game has been cooking for a while. He showed the game off at Augmented World Expo and has shown off versions of its at the Game Developers Conference and GamesBeat events.

“Now that we have a demo game, I’m starting to ramp up. I’m looking at making a Hollywood deal and we’re looking at going to launch,” he said. “With a full game, we hope to do it within a couple of years.”

The company has 12 people, with developers based mostly in Poland. Back during the development of Asheron’s Call, the development team took over his mother’s house. During that time, Monsarrat was hit by a car in an accident while he was walking on the sidewalk. He wasn’t seriously hurt, and he took the $30,000 and put it into the company. He changed careers and became a human genome expert and also became a travel writer. But he was drawn back to games and got an MBA.

“I was drawn back because of Pokemon Go,” he said.

But the gameplay has advances that make it easier to play outdoor games, where obstacles can get in the way.

“The most important features we have are all about ease of use. Most players don’t need to live next to a big park. They can live next to a small park, or they want to play in a very small space, like their indoor living room or their own backyard,” he said. “Making the game practical in small spaces is really what it’s all about. And our four patents, and also two that are coming in the pipeline, all relate to that.”