Hello and welcome back to Equity, a Tech Ranch podcast about the business of startups

where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and

this is our interview show where we sit down with a guest, think about their work, and unpack the rest.

Today we are bringing you a very special mini episode led by Tech Crunch, Senior reporter,

and co-host of our sister podcast found Dominic Madori Davis.

Now during this year's disrupt, Dom caught up with Hillary Mason from Hidden Door

an AI-driven narrative game engine.

Dom and Hillary got into how generative AI is changing online gaming,

building a team of creatives, and fundraising in the gaming space.

Now, this is an intersection of technologies that I am personally very

excited about. I love games. I think AI is super cool and I'm very curious to know where AI

in the current context will find purchase inside of modern games.

So let's tune in.

Hi everyone, this is Dominic Madori Davis, one of the co-host of Bound and we are live as you can hear from Tech Crunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

I'm here today with Hillary Mason from Hidden Door. How are you? I'm great. How are you doing today? I'm doing good. You know, it's not bad.

SF weather, sunny. It's gorgeous. Talk to me about Hidden Door. So what we do at Hidden Door is take any work of fiction,

like a book, a TV show, or a movie,

and we make it a playable social role-playing game automatically.

So for players, if you're the kind of person who reads a book and you keep thinking about it or you watch a show and you want to yell at the TV, this is a way for you to come into those worlds and be able to direct your own stories in those worlds automatically.

So our players make their characters, they can play with their friends and family,

and they get to direct the kinds of stories they want to play.

And it is a game, it plays very much like a tabletop role-playing game with those sorts of dynamics

...