Founder, CEO, and CTO Johnny Monsarrat was previously Founder, CEO, and CTO of Turbine, one of the “big three” first Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game companies. MMOs used the early Internet to form communities of game players, and today earn $24 billion per year.

Turbine made Asheron’s Call, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Lord of the Rings Online, and was bought by Warner Bros. for $160 million.

CMO Sam Saliba was previously Global Marketing Lead for Google Play Games, overseeing partnerships and marketing for all Android mobile games.

Advisors include Jack Tretton, the former CEO of PlayStation, David Anderman, the former COO of Lucasfilm, and Jenna Seiden, the former VP Business Development of Niantic (Pokémon Go).

Monsarrat is headquartered in Los Angeles with an in-house development team largely based in Warsaw, Poland. Many of its team are immigrants from war-torn Ukraine into Poland.

See executive bios and photos.

Monsarrat’s future full game is still under development. It will be a full, multiplayer, roleplaying game that you place into the real world anywhere you want to play. See our vision.

For now, a free test game, Landing Party, is available on Apple App Store and Google Play.

Landing Party is the world’s first Outdoor RPG. It uses augmented reality to place an entire game world into your local park or back yard. Its 12 missions show a variety of roleplaying adventures: mazes to walk through, a shooter mission, a puzzle mission, an exploration mission, and more.

Its technology, including 4 patents:

• Adapts a game mission to fit a real world space of any shape or size,
• Allows players to manually move the game around obstacles such as park benches and bushes, and
• Prevents players from walking through 3D game content.

Monsarrat is only a startup with its first ever demo game. Please be kind with ratings and reviews.

Download game screenshots or see game videos.

Press Videos

See videos of journalists trying our game at Game Developer Conference, who gave these quotes:

• “Very, very new. Never seen anything like it before.”
• “Feels like a totally new idea”
• “They’ve really got some next level stuff… breathtakingly easy”
• “Intuitive, really easy to do”
• “Gives that that next step into a deeper sense of immersion… like I was on the Holodeck”
• “A surprisingly level of physicality, makes the world feel a lot more real than I expected a mobile game to feel.”
• “A lot of potential”
• “As a fan of Pokémon Go it makes me a little sad what Pokémon Go could have been”.

Forbes Article

Forbes chose us as one of only two startups to praise from Augmented World Expo, the world’s biggest AR tradeshow, which draws 5,000 attendees.

Charlie Fink of Forbes wrote “The best parts of AWE… a compelling demo of what it’s like to walk around a real park that has been converted into an alien planet.“

Other Press Articles

• Alex Wawro, Tom’s Guide, I Just Saw the Future of Mobile Gaming Through AR Glasses, and It Looks Wild
• Erik Hartley, XREAL Insider, XREAL Air 2 Ultra and App Demos at GDC 2024.
• AtomBombBody, I just previewed Landing Party. Blown away!
• Video interview with our CEO on The Metaverse and AR Gaming
• Video interview with our CEO on The Future of AR, and AR vs. VR

The Global Crisis of Loneliness

• Even before COVID isolation, a study by Cigna found an epidemic of loneliness, with 79% of Gen Z and 71% of Millenials saying they feel lonely.
• A Gallup poll found that 12% of Americans have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990.
• A CDC report found that 57% of U.S. teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, up from 36% in 2011.

Caused by Social Media

Health experts are no longer saying that “maybe” social media is a cause. The more time we spend on the Internet, the less time we’re spending in the real world with real people, and it’s just not the same. The US Surgeon General 2023 report, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation says that the time that Americans spend with friends decreased 20 hours per month, from 2003 to 2020.

We Can Help

Experts say that to fight loneliness, people should get outside more often and increase the people you come into contact with. But when you’re depressed, sitting idle on a sofa, your whole body chemistry is shut down. Of course you don’t feel like getting up and going out.

Our game can help. We give people a fun game incentive to get outside and walk around, which is good for mental and physical health. Our future game can let you meet someone new, give you a safe daytime public park to play in, and the game acts as an ice breaker and team building exercise, bonding you into being real world friends.

It’s an outdoor alternative to sports. It’s more creative than sports, and gets you moving, but doesn’t require you to be an athlete.

At Monsarrat, we don’t let VR enthusiasts condescend to us about AR.

Virtual Reality

In Virtual Reality, your view is completely covered by a VR headset, and you’re presented with a 3D virtual world. VR devices have many pixels, a stunning resolution, which gives an “immersive” feel, like you’re really there.

There’s definitely a place for VR in entertainment, but it’s impossible for your body not to notice the truth: you’re sitting idle in a chair, in a dark basement, and can’t even see your mom when she comes down to bring you cookies. It’s graphically spectacular, but incredibly isolating.

Augmented Reality: Phone

In augmented reality, you don’t need to buy a headset. Our games just run on your phone. Check out some people who called it the “best innovation at the show” at Game Developer Conference.

Now, it’s true that your phone has less resolution (fewer pixels) than a VR headset, and obviously graphics quality is important to video games. But it’s not like graphics resolution is the only or even the most important factor in games. What about gameplay, player interaction, and storytelling?

Our games don’t separate you from life. They connect you to life. They also have immersion, but of a kind that’s better than VR: you’re walking in the real world! Wow, it feels really real that you’re surrounded by sunlight, open sky, trees, grass, and birds. You could pet a stranger’s dog, buy your mom a gift, take photos of the sunset, or make a friend who could change your life. Your real life.

There’s nothing wrong with VR. Just don’t tell us that AR is inferior. In fact, even though AR is a newer technology, Pokémon Go and other AR walking games have already earned $7 billion, not to mention all other AR apps. VR apps in total (not just games) have only earned $3 billion. 

Augmented Reality: Glasses

You don’t need AR glasses to play our game, but we’ve already given some limited demos of our game on the XREAL AR glasses! See videos.

As for Apple VisionPro and Meta Quest, right now their AR headsets block your vision, and aren’t meant for walking around. But clearly the tech giants are working on future, simpler, transparent AR glasses.

Our partner XREAL is already there. They are the world’s best-selling consumer-priced (inexpensive) AR glasses. They called us “the best AR game we’ve ever seen”.

See the Monsarrat and Landing Party logos in our online media folder.

Our taglines are:

• Can you come out to play?
• We turn parks into theme parks.
• Playing is a walk in the park.
• Games for life. Your real life.
• Most video games separate you from life. Our games connect you to life.

See screenshots of Landing party in our online media folder.

Our videos include:

• Company overview
• Demo reactions from press and conference attendees
• Our CEO’s speeches on the future of AR gaming
• Game mission walkthroughs
• The team in Poland
• Stunt videos, e.g. we take the game whitewater rafting and rock climbing

Founder Johnny Monsarrat

• He previously built robots, including work at the MIT Media Lab and MIT AI Lab for Rodney Brooks, founder of iRobot, which invented the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot. Johnny helped build the world’s first juggling robot, and was the first to drive a robot remotely over the Internet.
• He went to MIT at the age of 16 and played the MIT Beaver, the school mascot, both while getting his BA and MBA. He likens his experience to the Val Kilmer film, Real Genius (1985).
• He is an Ivy League award-winning international keynote speaker, best known for stunts like getting his audience to toss around beach balls.
• Before the Human Genome Project, he was part of a team that sequenced the DNA of bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, which causes staph infections like MRSA.
• Jack Tretton, former CEO of the Sony PlayStation, gave Johnny this quote: “Johnny is the best communicator and most ‘can-do’ guy that I work with.”

Other Facts

• To showcase how our games get you outside and moving, we made nearly 50 stunt videos, pretending to show our game to sharks and monkeys, and taking over Niagara falls and riding a tank. (Do not attempt. Stunts by professionals.)
• Emmy-award winning filmmaker Sam Krueger is making a documentary on Monsarrat, and has done so since our very beginning. Sam was once a stuntman for James Franco, and has worked on 3 films that won Academy Awards.
• The team once got to visit the BBC TV shooting set of Doctor Who and showed an AR game demo to showrunner Steven Moffat and some actors.
• Johnny once took the game backstage at Cirque du Soleil and got a circus performer, a soccer expert, to shoot a stunt video with the game.
• Our videos include an investor pitch with sock puppets, and an investor pitch as a rock song.
• Our team is based in Warsaw, but many of our team come from Belarus or Ukraine, and their families have been caught up in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

See our frequently asked questions.

For questions, interviews, or with speaker opportunities, contact us!