Unleashing Human Creativity with the Power of AI

Series AI’s mission is to unleash human creativity with the power of AI. We are a new game technology and content company founded by a team of gaming veterans from Snap, Kongregate, Riot, Google and more. We are building the future of game development with a suite of AI-powered game authoring tools designed to supercharge the game creation process. We believe that the next hyper innovation cycle will come from human hands enabled by powerful generative AI tools. To help us pursue our mission, we raised $7.9M in our seed round from A16Z GAMES, BITKRAFT, F4 Fund and the Siqi Chen Access Fund.

Long before I ran Kongregate or the Games program at Snap, I was an indie game developer. The early 2000’s was the start of the golden age of web games, and also some of my favorite times as a game maker.

Thanks to the ubiquity of Flash and the rapidly growing browser game ecosystem, you could build and test new game ideas faster than at any time in the history of games. Going from idea to validation took just a matter of months, and in an environment of rapid product cycles and fast releases, innovation thrived. This tight feedback loop led to a period of hyper innovation, establishing many new game genres and mechanics. It’s no surprise that this environment led to the creation of many of today's generational mega franchises like Candy Crush and Angry Birds.

PC Gaming had its own version of this innovation incubation in the form of modding communities. At the height of the modding era, innovative designers in modding communities like Warcraft and Arma rapidly prototyped the design innovations that went on to form mega franchises like League of Legends and Fortnite.

Over the years, these innovation hyper loops have broken one-by-one, unwound by growing development costs, longer development cycles, and the increasingly punishing consequences of failure. Innovation, by definition, requires risk taking, and risk taking, by definition, risks consequences. It is completely rational that harsher consequences have punished risk taking, and stifled innovation. It is likewise understandable that many new games are sequels that capitalize on previously introduced mechanics and well-understood product strategies. . 

Spending years running game platforms with tens of thousands of games and hundreds of millions of players, I've observed this same pattern at the platform level. As platforms mature, scopes increase and budgets go up. The tolerance for risk goes down and the number of developers willing to risk the future of their studio and teams goes down with it. Innovation stalls. Top game lists go stale. Nostalgia begs for a return of "the good ol days."

In the darkest of times, it starts to feel like gaming innovation is dead, killed by the ever-growing time and capital investments necessary to create successful products that can't afford to fail, or, as a consequence, rarely can afford to be truly exceptional.

I was starting to think this cynical view was turning true, until breakthroughs in generative AI hinted that another period of hyper innovation might be on the horizon. Inspired, I built a series of experimental tools that brought me back to those early days as an indie game developer when it was possible to build and release new games rapidly, driving industry-wide design and innovation. Those first few prototypes exceeded even my most optimistic expectations, so I recruited the founding team of Series AI (gaming & technology veterans from Google, Riot, Machine Zone, Zynga and Snap) to start building a game authoring engine that supercharges the creative process, and is designed, from the ground up, to build market-leading products with the power of AI.

Combining powerful generative AI models with an easy-to-use game editor, we are building a technology platform that eliminates much of the friction and slowness of a traditional game development process, dramatically shortening the time between having an idea and then being able to experience it. For a team of seasoned game devs that miss our indie roots, it has been liberating to work with this technology.

We now know that in the hands of expert game makers, purpose-built generative AI editors can rapidly architect, shape and build new games and game worlds. A mature toolset will allow our team to explore brand new game systems, themes and mechanics in almost the same amount of time that it would take to describe them. We ask ourselves... what becomes possible when deep, expansive and engaging games can be built in a matter of months, rather than years? What would you try to build if you could build it 10x faster than before? What about 100x?

That became the founding principle of Series AI: unleashing human creativity with the power of AI. Our team believes that the next hyper innovation cycle will come from human hands enabled by powerful generative AI tools. We are building the Rho Engine, a game authoring platform that is designed for innovation. In the hands of our expert game makers, we believe this technology will enable new category leading products without the compromises inherent in traditional game development.

If you’re interested in charting the future of game development, consider applying to our team. You can find open roles on our careers page.

We look forward to sharing more about our team and technology in the coming months.