I'm Thobes, founder of Lore Machine. I spent 17 years at VICE, where I founded Motherboard and ran digital publishing.
Lore Machine is Substack for World Builders. Build a story World with art, video and sound, serialize it, and get paid...no studio required.
And you bet there's a backstory:
After leaving VICE, I wrote a series of viral articles about an audio technology that can purportedly break your consciousness out of your body. It's a whole thing. The stories got optioned for a documentary adaptation. The problem was there was no video footage, and animation unit costs were unaffordable. The project got shelved. I was seeing the same roadblock all over LA. Amazing screenplays collecting dust because stories couldn't jump the gap into the visual realm.
So in 2022 - as diffusion models were getting usable - we built the first version of Lore Machine for screenwriters, turning scripts into storyboards.
Then - through no design of our own - South Korean creators started using Lore Machine to make serialized manga with recurring characters. So we stopped being a storyboarding tool and invented the LORE: text, art, video, sound and reader choice in one scrollable story object. It's basically an animated graphic novel you can play! Creators serialize LOREs inside a World with a shared cast, canon and narrative physics.
Today we're launching World Pass. Creators charge $5/month for their World, keep 90% of the revenue and own their IP outright. We just launched the first World Pass with Archive In Between and Marvel writer B. Earl. The teaser has already racked up 600k views here. The World is here.
TikTok, Instagram and YouTube taught a generation to love lore, then gave them nowhere to keep it. No canon, no persistent cast, no episode one, no way to charge for a World. Creators have been building universes inside platforms designed to splinter them. Now they have a home.
Every AI tool right now is optimized for making commodity content fast. We're betting on craftsmanship instead.
I'll be here all day. If you have a story World you've always wanted to bring to life, Let's get INTO it.
Product Hunt launch offer: 200 free visualization tokens if you sign up during our launch week!
Dive into Lore Machine here.
Huge thanks to Chris Messina for huntermanship 🙏
PH 用户
This is super interesting — and a compelling new format for creating interactive graphic-novelesque infinite worlds where creators and fans collaborate on what happens next.
I'm Thobes, founder of Lore Machine. I spent 17 years at VICE, where I founded Motherboard and ran digital publishing.
Lore Machine is Substack for World Builders. Build a story World with art, video and sound, serialize it, and get paid...no studio required.
And you bet there's a backstory:
After leaving VICE, I wrote a series of viral articles about an audio technology that can purportedly break your consciousness out of your body. It's a whole thing. The stories got optioned for a documentary adaptation. The problem was there was no video footage, and animation unit costs were unaffordable. The project got shelved. I was seeing the same roadblock all over LA. Amazing screenplays collecting dust because stories couldn't jump the gap into the visual realm.
So in 2022 - as diffusion models were getting usable - we built the first version of Lore Machine for screenwriters, turning scripts into storyboards.
Then - through no design of our own - South Korean creators started using Lore Machine to make serialized manga with recurring characters. So we stopped being a storyboarding tool and invented the LORE: text, art, video, sound and reader choice in one scrollable story object. It's basically an animated graphic novel you can play! Creators serialize LOREs inside a World with a shared cast, canon and narrative physics.
Today we're launching World Pass. Creators charge $5/month for their World, keep 90% of the revenue and own their IP outright. We just launched the first World Pass with Archive In Between and Marvel writer B. Earl. The teaser has already racked up 600k views here. The World is here.
TikTok, Instagram and YouTube taught a generation to love lore, then gave them nowhere to keep it. No canon, no persistent cast, no episode one, no way to charge for a World. Creators have been building universes inside platforms designed to splinter them. Now they have a home.
Every AI tool right now is optimized for making commodity content fast. We're betting on craftsmanship instead.
I'll be here all day. If you have a story World you've always wanted to bring to life, Let's get INTO it.
Product Hunt launch offer: 200 free visualization tokens if you sign up during our launch week!
Dive into Lore Machine here.
Huge thanks to Chris Messina for huntermanship 🙏
Think LOST but for the age of generative AI...!
Nice 😻 cameo!