Incredible Indies: Johnny Monsarrat on why there is plenty of room left for AR-powered outdoor RPGs

The games industry has many big-name studios with eager eyes on them, all waiting to see what their next big hit could be. But giant studios aren’t necessarily the home to what could be your next favourite game.

There are thousands of independent game studios and solo developers, all hard at work crafting new game experiences with often unique ways of looking at games. In this series we aim to highlight those very games and the developers behind them.

In this interview, we speak with former Turbine CEO and founder Johnny Monsarrat about his new studio Monsarrat. We discuss his history in the games industry, the studio’s demo augmented reality game Landing Party, and making a location-based title differently to Pokémon Go.

PocketGamer.biz: First, can you tell us a little about yourself and your history with the games industry?

Johnny Monsarrat: Gamers may know me as the original founder, CEO and CTO of Turbine, which was one of the “big three” original MMO game makers. So I arguably co-invented MMO gaming back in the day.

Turbine’s games included Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online.

In school I built robots at the MIT AI Lab and Media Lab for Rodney Brooks, who invented the Roomba, the vacuum cleaner robot. I also played the MIT Beaver, the school mascot. To me, building some of the first MMOs seemed like a natural evolution from all the LARPing and D&D gaming that I did in high school and college.

My favorite game of all time is Dance Dance Revolution, because it puts you in the real world.

How did the idea for Landing Party come about? Have there been any unexpected development challenges in making that idea a reality?

Just before Pokémon Go, I was a mentor to an AR startup, and I saw that AR could be used for games. The start-up only wanted to make AR tools, though, so I thought: “Well, I guess I’m making a game!”

Pokémon Go launched three months later, and obviously it’s a sensation, but the gameplay is not great. It gets boring.

Their secret is that the company behind Pokémon Go, Niantic, was spun out of Google Maps and they’re more of a mapping company than a games company. So I thought, let’s try to do better.

You’ve called Landing Party “the world’s first outdoor RPG”. Could you talk a little more about this? Do you think there’s room for another outdoor AR game in the mobile market?

You talk about “outdoor” games like it’s full. I see how empty it is. PC, console, mobile and VR platforms all have thousands of video games in dozens of genres. Outdoor games have just five hits and just one genre: collecting stuff. There is so much room, so much space for growth.

RPGs and MMOs are popular.We’re just moving them to this new video game platform, outdoor games.

To do that we’re not going to copycat Pokémon Go. Niantic proved with their failed Harry Potter game that their technology (fixed GPS points) just doesn’t support roleplaying. So we built our own technology.

In our game, we lay out a game world across a map region, not just one point. Then we fill that game zone with hundreds of 3D models, which you walk through it to play, like the Holodeck on Star Trek.

Without building around fixed locations, how does Landing Party incentivise people to actually go outside to play?

I don’t get this question often, but when I do, I have to laugh a little. “But how can players survive outdoors? Outside is scary!” Come on. Players are human beings. Pokémon Go proved it: we love the outdoors.

Not to mention baseball, basketball, football, jogging, concerts, festivals and parades. Evolution didn’t build us to sit all day in our mum’s basement with the lights turned off. Walking energises our body chemistry. It literally makes us happy to walk. It’s undeniable.

However, maybe your question comes from a real problem: the 80% of young Americans who are depressed and lonely. When you’re sitting on a sofa, your body chemistry winds down. Of course you don’t feel like going out.

And it feels sometimes like sports are the only outdoor activity. Many people just find sports exhausting and uncreative, or we’re not part of the jock culture.

So we offer a more creative, less athletic alternative to sports, that motivates you to get off of your sofa. Once you’re outside and you’re walking then you’re glad you got there.

Are there multiplayer components to Landing Party, either in the demo or planned for the future?

Coming soon. We’ll have multiplayer in the same park, and we’ll have remote multiplayer in different parks.

And how many people are on the Monsarrat team? How long have you been working on the game?

We have about a dozen people and have been working for about three years on the current demo that’s now on app stores. Landing Party’s got 12 missions and it’s free.

Monsarrat’s an American company, but most of us are in Poland.

How have you found the experience of going independent to develop a game?

We’re still only a start-up, so I guess that makes us indie in size, though not at heart.

We’ve raised $2.5 million, we are in talks to use a Hollywood movie franchise for the game, we have four patents and a substantial demo and we are led by iconic game makers like our advisor Mike Ybarra, who was president of Blizzard. We’re not making an indie game. We’re making a well-funded triple-A game.

How have I found the experience? It’s exciting. There’s a global crisis of loneliness and maybe we could help millions of people get outside and connect with their neighborhood and make real-world friends. And we can do it in a way that’s more creative and engaging than Pokémon Go did.

Considering current market conditions, why did you decide to make a game for mobile now, and how do you plan to get it noticed by players around the world?

We’re doing it now because the boom in AR makes it possible. We’ll get it noticed by raising funding and having a huge marketing budget.

With Landing Party in the demo phase, have you already settled on its monetisation approach? What are your plans to keep the game running long-term?

Like most mobile games, it will be free-to-play and we’ll sell stuff in the game to dress up your avatar, play more or push through levels a little faster.

Finally, what’s next for Monsarrat? Are all eyes on further developing Landing Party or do you have multiple projects in the works? Do you have a release date in mind for the full game?

We’re already defining a brand-new category of video game – I think that’s enough. We need to keep our focus.

We do have a release date in mind but, as software developers joke, it’ll be RSN (Real Soon Now)!