Mother Games, an arts and media company based in Brooklyn, today announced its launch from stealth. In addition, it also announced it has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding for its first title, mobile game Le Zoo. The title is an RPG that fits with Mother’s self-described directive to create “transformative experiences designed to awaken players to their own mental programming and expand their inner worlds through play.”
Le Zoo is, as its creators describe it, a mobile RPG set in a “surreal and psychedelic world.” Players answer questions about themselves that put them into one of five houses, and then play games in a “multi-tiered theme park packed with diverse neighborhoods, park attractions and characters that challenge perception of reality.”
BoxGroup, Shine and Lerer Hippeau Ventures contributed to the funding. David Tisch, partner at BoxGroup, said in a statement, “Mother is breaking new ground in the gaming industry with its visionary understanding of how to change your mind and their commitment to creating deeply transformative experiences… With the state of the world we live in today, we’re proud to support MOTHER and eagerly anticipate the impact Le Zoo will have on players globally.”
What will Le Zoo be to its players?
GamesBeat spoke with two of Mother Games’ founders, Kelsey Falter and Raissa Chagas, about the developer’s mission and what players can expect when playing Le Zoo. Falter told GamesBeat that the idea of using a video game came about in early conversations about the project. “We were like, ‘We want to do something that has the ability to deliver a message.’ That’s where we started looking for a really good message-delivery system, and a game came to our purview.”
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Chagas and Falter showed a bit of the gameplay, including how users’ behavior in the game feeds into their house membership, which also opens up the class and skill system. Falter said, “On a high level, it’s essentially an open-world platform with a library of minigames… It’s a theme park, an ongoing theme park that is still under construction. Part of it is a metaphor for the game of life — we are constantly iterating over our own selves.”
Chagas added, “Our tagline is ‘The only way out is within.’ The game is bringing us to look within ourselves. When you’re in the game, you don’t see any similarity to this physical world that we’re in. In my experience, when I’m exploring and jumping around, it makes me feel inspired to explore this physical world in a different way.”
Falter said that Le Zoo is engineered around giving players different sensations than dopamine rushes which they normally feel while playing video games. “Part of what we’re trying to do is say, ‘If you experience a new way of being, like feeling like flying while you’re flying in Le Zoo — what does that feel like if you apply that way of seeing things in your day-to-day life?’ Not saying, ‘Only look at this,’ but instead saying, ‘What if you could experience something that allowed your mind to go like this? Take the gaming experience out of the game instead of taking all of yourself and trying to put everything that you are into the game.'”
