Liminal Experiences, a new user-generated content gaming startup dedicated to using AI to assist human creativity, has raised $5.8 million in funding.
Liminal transforms creation into a game, making it possible for players to joyfully build their own RPG-style adventures, said Liminal Experiences CEO Brendan Mulligan, in an interview with GamesBeat. With powerful new AI tools players can craft their own immersive worlds, bring life to their original heroes, and collaborate with friends on epic adventures.
The investment comes from familiar games industry backers, including Bitkraft Ventures, Riot Games, and OTK Media Group, with participation from angel investor Marc Merrill, founder of Riot Games.
“AI in gaming is a sensitive topic, as many developers worry about being replaced, and players grapple with its ethical issues,” said Mulligan. “Wading into the debate is fraught, so most gaming companies avoid discussing AI while quietly exploring options internally.”
He added, “This leaves the public conversation to startups founded by tourists to the industry to pitch their vision of the future. There’s a real need for studios willing to stand for a positive vision of an AI-enabled future, which should come from developers focused on unleashing, not replacing, human creativity.”
Mulligan believes the future of gaming is millions of players discovering their creativity and telling their stories to a global audience. Liminal enables worldbuilding with magic, not with code, making creation possible for anyone. Inspired by the innate way children create entire universes through play, the platform puts players of all ages inside the world of their imaginations. Liminal invites players to design their own narratives as episodic content, bringing forth new possibilities for worldbuilding.
The Liminal platform also provides existing beloved IPs with a badly needed solution for reaching a generation that has grown up with games and want to be met where they are.
Mulligan said, “We hear the same thing again and again from the teams behind some of our favorite universes, ‘we need a gaming/UGC strategy, but the current solutions don’t make sense for our brand.’”
With official episodes that can be remixed and shared, Liminal brings fandoms together to connect over the most immersive interaction fanfiction possible, letting them wield their imagination to bring to life their favorite characters and insert themselves into the story.
Liminal’s key features include creation through play of 3D episodic adventure stories, no coding needed; full building, decorating, and character editing systems; easy quest creation and advanced gameplay editing; AI-powered storytelling assistance and game creation concierge; and seamless creation and sharing of adventures with one to four players.
“A positive vision of the future should recognize the power of AI to ignite the imaginations of players of all ages, letting everyone realize the fantasy of making their own game experiences,” said Mulligan. “At Liminal, we’re focused on centering humans in the creative process, ensuring that AI is a tool to create shared experiences that build communities, bringing players closer together.”
Liminal remains in development with a planned 2026 alpha. Liminal Experiences is a fully remote game development studio founded in 2022.
“What Liminal can do, because our content is episodic, is we can help you make 15 episodes several times a year to support your franchise and engage that player audience,” Mulligan said. “And then even when you’re done with that active engagement and that content is live, now the community takes ownership of it. They start telling their own stories in the universe. They’re sharing that with each other and now you stay engaged in that conversation with them all year long. And we think that that’s something that IPs are kind of desperately in need of and the more of these conversations I have with them, the more they tell me this is an amazing opportunity.”
Origins
Mulligan spent eight years at Riot Games variously leading investments and acquisitions, strategic business partnerships, League of Legends economy design, and more. He is joined by technical cofounder David Lieberman, previously group product lead at Riot Games and VP of Engineering at no-code game engine Buildbox, and a passionate team of developers obsessed with storytelling and joyful creation.
“The Liminal product is what we call a creativity game for storytelling. And the output of it that players create is episodic adventures in the format of a 3D RPG,” Mulligan said. “You can imagine it as Mario Maker and Zelda, where you’re sitting there with a computer, the first episode of your story, and share it with your friends. As we talk about what is the first experience a player would have, the AI is there to help.”
The company has 15 people, and the company is in the midst of raising more money. As for raising the announced round, Mulligan said it’s been a challenging time for lots of game startups.
“I’m very fortunate that we had a believer in Jasper Brand at Bitkraft Ventures. He has always seen the vision. He’s always believed in what this team is capable of, and he was there to back us from the very beginning. I also am very grateful for Riot Games, where I had worked for eight years prior. The day I quit to announce that I was starting Liminal, they called me and asked me about what I was up to, and they have been extremely supportive of us beyond just the financial support. I’m very lucky to have such strong backers.”
IP or no IP?
As for the types of games the company will support, it’s not aiming at first for UGC for existing games with current fan bases.
“We’re not here to support past games. That’s the difference between the next generation of games, which are really delightful and fun creative experiences for players, versus the existing, much more code and tool platforms,” Mulligan said. “And we’re thrilled at how many people are seeing this opportunity. There is room for many different shapes of this genre-specific UGC. Ultimately, we see ourselves in many ways as kind of the spiritual successors to what Maxis brought to the industry with The Sims, where it’s all about putting people in an environment where they can unlock that creative ability.”
The pace of AI innovation
Mulligan said he is very impressed with the cadence of AI improvement.
“The pace of progress in AI has been one of the most interesting things for the last several years. My perspective on it from so long ago, five years ago before ChatGPT, I have really had this close experience of watching it just get better and better and better.”
He added, “I’m fortunate that my original thesis for Liminal always took into consideration the idea that technologies grow exponentially and that you model them to get better and better and better. And that led me to think about from day one of starting Liminal, ‘What does it look like to build this game?’ I think there were a handful of people who were responding.”
The company is agnostic to the different types of AI models in the market. The company has a “concierge” with the ability to call different models for different purposes over time. That allows it to apply the best AI to the problem at hand when it’s ready.
The AI will be able to steer people through the storytelling or as they need it.
“We do think at the root of Liminal, we’re making it serve a real market need for an unmet player motivation around the game. Making high-quality, high-definition experiences as a standalone product is going to attract a huge audience of players,” Mulligan said. “But there’s no question that IP is a major opportunity for us to give players the ability to tell stories the way they do.”
But that has to be balanced against the notion that IP is expensive and it’s one of the things that is driving the cost of games to unprecedented levels. Still, some brands are likely to be interesting in engaging with fans of their IP and enabling them to be creative.
He added, “What I believe is we want to center human creativity. We want to use AI to enhance creativity rather than the process. And we want it to lead to a shared set of people who are engaging in stories that come up together and they’re building stories.”
I asked Mulligan why he thought that, in the recent Game Developers Conference survey, 30% of game developers were negative in their perceptions to AI, compared to just 18% a year earlier. Mulligan believes that’s related to a concern about replacing game developers with AI. But he believes AI can enhance human creativity and widen the number of people who can create games.
“I don’t think art is replaceable,” he said. “What we’re trying to build is something where we help people find the stories. And we give tools to deliver that story.”
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