Operative Games, an AI-based interactive storytelling company, emerged today from stealth with backing from investors 1AM Gaming, Samsung Next, and LongJourney.vc.

The company is creating immersive games and experiences where players can converse with genuinely thoughtful, lifelike AI characters that forge lasting emotional connections in the context of solving problems and navigating intricate stories together.

Founded by Jon Snoddy, former head of Walt Disney research and development, and Jon Kraft, founding CEO of Pandora Media, along with game industry veteran Pegi Bryant, Operative Games combines decades of entertainment industry innovation with an entirely new application of artificial intelligence to create a unique category of interactive experiences.

“So we’re this collection of storytellers. They’re artists, writers, engineers, scientists, but the thing that kind of holds us all together is this love of story. And so we set about finding the stories we wanted to tell, and the StoryEngine is really our embodiment of that. It’s our technology, the embodiment of the thing we’re trying to do, which is to tell these stories that that have the emotional resonance, the emotional fidelity of stories you’re used to seeing in film and TV, that same level of emotional connection with characters.”

The company’s secret sauce lies in its proprietary StoryEngine, which enables game developers to imbue their characters with a built-in sense of narrative and the understanding of how to take players through that narrative while allowing for full player agency.

Players can call a game character’s phone number and talk, text or video chat with them on a standard phone. The StoryEngine is completely server-based, requiring no downloads. This allows for lifelike character experiences in interactive stories and games that leverage both Operative’s IP and the IP of partners.

“We’re not just making games – we’re creating relationships, and in some sense – real memories and shared experiences,” said Jon Snoddy, CEO of Operative Games. “Our technology enables characters who understand context and form genuine emotional bonds with players. This marks the beginning of truly personalized storytelling.”

The Operative

Los Angeles-based Operative Games debuted a small glimpse of its first story experience, The Operative, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. In this experience, players call a character named “Enya” who draws them into her world with a request for help.

What seems at first like a simple ask will ultimately unfold into a complex spy thriller in which the player has a pivotal role. Enya reacts to the players’ actions and will even show real human emotions – such as
annoyance – if she is contacted late at night (just like a real person would).

Initial projects in development span multiple genres and feature collaborations with renowned Hollywood writers, as well as major players in traditional and interactive entertainment. These experiences showcase the platform’s ability to deliver emotionally resonant storytelling that adapts to each player’s choices and personality, creating uniquely personal narratives that can unfold indefinitely.

“We’ve crossed a line here,” added Snoddy. “With the emerging ability to bring truly believable characters to life and hang out with them in story-driven worlds.”

“What sets Operative Games apart is their unique ability to create characters that feel genuinely alive,” said Gregory Milken, Managing Partner at 1AM Gaming. “The combination of their technological innovation and their demonstrated ability to turn complex emerging technologies into popular entertainment forms positions them to define an entirely new category of interactive entertainment.”

Origins

Snoddy worked at Disney for 15 years as head of R&D. He spent a lot of time thinking about telling stories with emerging technology.

“We have been working on technologies that would allow us to do something that feels like you’re in a story. And yet the players have an agency. The players are people who are in the story, are able to participate in the story, to be a character in the story,” Snoddy said. “How do you give people agency and yet have something that builds to a climax? There’s a crisis, it leads to that climax, and then a resolution that feels satisfying. And so we set about trying to trying to do that.”

When large language models (LLM) started to work with generative AI, the company saw the final piece in its platform click into place. They formally started their work in 2022, and are coming out of stealth today.

Along the way, they met with writers, game developers, technologists and investors to shape the company in the right way. The team has 20 people and it has developed what it calls the StoryEngine, a proprietary platform.

The StoryEngine details

Snoddy said, “The StoryEngine is really the pieces necessary to tell those stories. We work with the very top Hollywood screenwriters, people that have had their own series, have a long history of drawing and holding a giant audience. We take people like that and and they create the stories and the character. And the character.”

He added, “We’re artist driven. And so these screenwriters create these amazing characters and create these amazing scenarios, and then we have to take that linear story and those those characters and their histories and their their wants and deeds and hopes and fears, and turn that into instructions for AI to create the dialog and create those characters so that you can interact with them. So the story engine is the family of technologies that makes that possible.”

As a production tool, it takes the prompts, creates the story, and then the AI executes it as the story you want to tell at runtime.

“It monitors the player’s mood, their emotional level, how the story is progressing, where we need to get to next, to the milesstones of the story that we need to hit and and gently moves the story along that that storyline,” Snoddy said.

The game adapts to the player’s actions, whether they are aggressive or more passive, and moves the story along as needed.

The Operative details

The Operative is the first story on the platform. All the characters live in the world. They’re fairly ordinary people, and they may just contact you on your phone.

There’s no software to download. There’s no client to install. You just literally pick up your phone, dial their phone number, call them up, and they’ll talk to you, Snoddy said.

“You’re having a conversation with them, just like you and I might have a conversation. You can text them and they’ll text you back. You can schedule a zoom call, like we’re doing, and do a video conference with them, and so that is how the game is played,” Snoddy said. “It all lives on a server, and so you just live your life. You can be driving down the road and get a text from one of our characters, and the story progresses as you’re talking to them.”

The way the story works is that that you meet these characters, and you’re drawn into their lives. You become friends with them.

Snoddy said, “It’s amazing how storytelling works. You know Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear. You know he’s not real, and yet you feel real emotions for him. You celebrate his successes, you agonize over his failures and great storytellers are able to do that. They tell things in a way that draws us in. And similarly, these characters are interesting ‘people’ and you’re drawn into their lives. And you start talking to them about all sorts of things. They have a lot of wide ranging interests. You’ll likely find a lot of stuff in common with them that you’ll talk about. And as you get to know them and then you discover that problems are happening. Things are happening in their lives, and they need your help.”

As you’re drawn into the story, it starts as you become friends with people. But then you find something bad is happening, and you’re drawn in further as this character gets into trouble and she’s kidnapped. Then you have to find her before something terrible happens to her.

Another character winds up getting in trouble with the law and he winds up having to run. He contacts you with a burner phone and you need to follow a number quests to get the story to move forward. He helps you do things like analyze photos and you have to decode encrypted messages. It’s a kind of detective experience, and there are moments when you interrogate people.

“People that have information you need and they don’t want to give that information to you, and you have to find a way to break through,” Snoddy said. “And there’s a ticking clock where someone is in real trouble, and you need to get this information now before something bad happens to her. So it’s a whole new kind of storytelling.”

All of this comes from the LLM, which has been fed the backstory, history, and characters. It has to understand the world and then assemble the individual stories that will entertain players.

Asked about more to come, Snoddy said, “We have a second, more traditional game in production for which we are building game worlds. AI is definitely streamlining that process both in design and in production. In design we are able to explore environments at a much more complete level than we could in the past which leads to quicker, more confident decision making. In production we are finding lots of opportunities to move faster and expect that to continue to improve as technology matures.”

What it all means

In reminds me of Electronic Arts’ Majestic game, which also involved using phones and came out in 2001. One of the interesting byproducts of using phone conversations is that there won’t be as much need to create high-end 3D graphics for this kind of game. Generally speaking, AI is not so good at that now.

After talking to Snoddy, I had lots of questions but I presume the answers would give away some of the story experience. His team of writers has to create backstories and history, and the LLM has to know about all of that and understand the characters.

“Moving forward, our characters always feel alive. That’s that’s kind of who we are as humans. We’re always thinking about where we’re going in the future. And similarly, our characters live in this ‘reality’ that we’ve created that hopefully is complete enough that they’re believable and they make sense,” Snoddy said. “For us, it’s a balance between what the player brings to the table and what the writers have brought to the table. It’s a pretty magical, exciting time.”

He added, “One of the powers of our company is that everything we’re doing is in service of that thing, that storytelling thing. And so the we will do two things. We’re creating this StoryEngine that allows us to do the real thing we want to do, which is tell stories. And so the output of our company will be these games, these story games that that are already in production and are moving forward.”

Snoddy estimates it might take something like a month to do a single episode, and more for an entire series. Some collaborations with game companies are already under way, Snoddy said.

For the first ones, Operative Games will use its own intellectual property as it gives them the freedom to invent. But in the future, it could do this with IPs from other companies that fans already love.