Liithos, a transmedia and game company led by former Sony game developer Michael Mumbauer, is launching a satirical game called Clickbait as part of its No One Is Safe franchise.
The game revolves around mischievous chatbot called RantCPU, and it focuses on the anxiety around AI and a world where humanity has destroyed itself. It’s a new transmedia property set to launch as a game on Steam, a comic book series from Scout, and trading cards.
It’s a far different plan than the original plan that Michael Mumbauer and Days Gone creative director John Garvin had to make Ashfall, a narrative-driven open world game for the PC based on Web3 tech. Mumbauer said the reality of the funding environment and changing market conditions force the company to pivot toward a game they could more easily ship. And so Liithos chose humor and satire.
“We’re launching our first interactive experience with this story featuring RantCPU,” Mumbauer said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We’ve been working on the IP, No One Is Safe, and RantCPU was birthed at almost the exact same time.”
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He added, “We were working on another big triple-A game, while the entire gaming market was kind of collapsing. And with the markets collapsing, we clearly needed to pivot into something a little bit more manageable. That was a little smaller title that we could get out to market. It was resonating and we thought it made more sense within the crazy market. AI just showed up and rocked everybody’s world. And this idea kind of hit me.”
The company is unveiling the Clilckbait title at San Diego Comic-Con to highlight its pivot from serious triple-A narratives to the Bananas style satirical view for No One Is Safe.
“We’re trying to take these two worlds where one is very scary, kind of apocalyptic. And the other one is just a very fun video game,” Mumbauer said.
Liithos was founded by game developer Mumbauer (The Last of Us, Uncharted) and his eclectic team of entertainment misfits including industry veterans and creative minds Adam Clegg (H1Z1), comedian Joe Machi (Last Comic Standing), former TMZ news personality Gary Trock, AI influencer Elliot Quartz, cartoonist and painter Court Jones, and writer Ken Kristensen (Echo, Todd the Ugliest Kid on Earth).
The chaos kicks off today with the launch of Clickbait, the world’s quirkiest clicking game, available on Steam. Clickbait, which pokes fun at similar viral games like Banana, a Steam game where you click on a banana.
“Clickbait is going to be a great way for people to see his humor and laugh and then be entertained by just watching a banana,” Mumbauer added. “And that’s why it’s so ridiculous. But now change the banana out with this character that has all this personality and makes you laugh.”
Clickbait game
At the center of Mumbauer’s satirical war on everything is RantCPU, a mischievous chatbot and the world’s first AI video game mascot. Through Rant’s childlike perspective, the Liithos team shifts the AI narrative from a menacing figure to a lovable, humorous character. It reminds me of ClapTrap, the quirky companion in Borderlands.
With Clickbait, the resemblance to Bananas is clear. You leave it up and you get a drop of assets in a certain period of time.
“Our game is based on community clicking. And so we have timers at the top. There’s one that’s a trillion. When that trillion number goes to zero, we’re going to get some special drop. But we also have another timer that’s more like in the millions. And so every six hours or so, every 18 hours, you get a drop,” he said. “Then maybe I go back to playing Hearthstone. It’s a second monitor game. It’s not anybody’s main game.”
During that time, playres will be exposed to RantCPU and hopefully fall in love with the character, he said.
As for the setting, it’s like after the Terminator has visited Earth, but more like the Jetsons version of the Terminator. RantCPU will likely have enormous power and a childlike view of using it.
“Rant is so kind of innocent and fun because he’s really just along for the ride. He doesn’t really understand all the things that are that are going on and makes mistakes by accident. So the perfect theory where you tasked the robot to make paperclips and he could accidentally destroy the world,” Mumbauer said. “If AI ends up replacing humans or blows up the world, I don’t know that it would be intentional. I think that we made it in our image, and we’re all flawed creatures.”
A reflection of its own limited understanding of the world, a world that it has never experienced firsthand, Rant gets a lot of things wrong. But, whether right or wrong, Rant is a force to be reckoned with. But it’s not artificial intelligence. It’s based on “artificial incompetence.”
“RantCPU embodies a blend of Clippy, Bart Simpson, and Mario—a wise-cracking, imaginative internet troll,” said Mumbauer. “With a focus on adaptability, we will leverage our expertise in AI, Web 3, and rapid content creation to stay ahead of trends. We firmly believe that humor, memes, and laughter are vital to engaging today’s gamers and creating a conversation around the gaming experience. When all is said and done, we hope to make RantCPU a cultural icon through humor and satire, offering a unique perspective on AI and gaming in an uncertain world.”
Dedicated to building a thriving community and seamlessly integrating popular gaming and social media platforms to deliver engaging interactive experiences, Liithos is launching the No One Is Safe franchise through a dynamic range of media, from retro games and viral TikTok videos to digital and physical trading cards, and comics. All these elements are interwoven through a meta-narrative crafted to bring humor to the AI-driven apocalypse.
The team will also see how well it can proceed with AI characters.
“One of the reasons we also put this game out was because it’s so important to understand how AI works within these pipelines to expedite the pipeline to get lower-cost games and get into market to see what’s working, what’s not working,” Mumbauer said. “This allows us to have AI characters.”
Clickbait is aimed at marketing and community building, while also featuring a unique set of No One Is Safe trading cards with parody versions of iconic celebrities, athletes, and politicians.
Separately, the popular RantCPU trading cards, which have already featured iconic athletes like Lionel Messi, Conor McGregor, and Mike Tyson, are currently distributed by sports card industry leader Leaf, while digital collectibles of the No One Is Safe cards originally launched on the highly efficient, low cost and sustainable Hedera Network and are also currently available on the Quidd marketplace.
Later this year, the RantCPU comic book, from publisher Scout Comics, is also expected to hit the shelves.
“Clickbait showcases Liithos’ nimbleness and commitment to delivering fresh, engaging content as well as its willingness to experiment as the gaming landscape evolves – all in an effort to create memorable experiences that resonate with today’s audience,” said Mumbauer.
Coming up with a narrative
The ideas revolved around the uncertainty with all the political change, where the jobs were going.
“I had this kind of strange epiphany. It felt a lot like growing up in the 90s in the Mad Magazine era. And, you know, No One Is Safe was birthed with this AI. But when we talk about AI, it’s not AI in the same sense. It’s ‘artificial incompetence,’” Mumbauer said.
Mumbauer said, “There’s this fascinating imagination that AI currently has right now. That’s very Monty Python. And so it felt like the world doesn’t feel real right now. And I think we need a little bit of absurdity. And so we’ve been building the IP for the last year, building a game called No One Is Safe and then trying to find the main character, which became RantCPU.”
He added, “By fate, I was introduced to Joe Machi on Netflix, the show called Bumping Mics, and when I saw Joe, when I heard him, I’m like, ‘This is unbelievable, like there’s just magic in that reminded me of [comedian] Paul Reubens. And that was kind of what I envisioned for this character. This kind of modern day Dennis the Menace.”
Ashfall on ice
Meanwhile, the Ashfall project moved into dormancy as IP development. It is being created first as a comic book. That’s because the idea of building $100 million or $200 million triple-A games is extremely hard to bring to the market now, Mumbauer said.
“Whether it’s in Web3, whether it’s traditional triple-A, it’s extremely hard to to bring a new game to market. And so that was part of the pivot,” he said. “This is not the time that we could bring it to market in the current climate. And so it we completed the story of the first arc of that game, and that’s pushed into comic books because we’ve always been very focused on transmedia. So those comics will arrive early next year so that we can still keep that IP moving. It has been renamed as Trace War.”
Adapting to Bananas
Garvin is involved in that and will be back on board when that comes back. For now, the company is focused entirely on No One Is Safe and RantCPU.
“The main thing for us is also just seeing the winds of change. I was completely shocked to hear this game Banana, which showed up on Steam [in April]. It’s still in the top three or four every single day. One of the biggest challenges we have is getting eyeballs on new IP. One of the key things that we’ve been doing with Joe was focusing on figuring out the character. Who is RantCPU. It’s a comedy-based IP, which is tricky enough. But also we wanted to do transmedia. We knew that from the start we wanted to build a world that has a deep story.”
He added, “So we started with comics and trading cards. And so the comics and trading cards connected. We had all these assets. And then this Banana thing showed up. It was part community building and part comedy building. What if we took that wave and jumped on it with a more sophisticated IP?”
Within three weeks, the team of a couple of dozen people — including a number of comedy writers — came up with Clickbait as a way to help us draw attention for the subsequent games that are coming in later.
“We’re doing something very different in the market,” Mumbauer said. “The bigger game No One Is Safe is going to be more like a live service comedy for player parties. Comedy is difficult. It’s a political season. You can say the wrong thing. So this is a pretty ballsy affair.”
The game is targeted at Steam on the PC, and it could move to other platforms later.
“All of the games that we’re making are very focused on being able to allow the comedy to have to breathe a little bit. Joe is the center of this entire universe, as RantCPU is” the central character.
“It’s a tough time for comedy,” Machi said in an interview. “When you’re doing comedy, there’s a lot of unwritten rules that you have to be aware of, if you want to be good at it. One is tragedy plus time equals comedy. Days after an assassination attempt on the president — not a great time to joke about it. You have to be thoughtful about it.”
Taking humor to a new level
Mumbauer spent a lot of time in the past trying to get games on the same level of entertainment as film, and that succeeded with games like The Last of Us.
“No pun intended. There’s an uncharted territory in the comedy area where I see this opportunity,” said Mumbauer. “We have yet to see The Simpsons” in games. And it’s hard to find successful Web3 games.
“I think the next the crazy movement in that in that genre will come from video games. And I think even more exciting is that it’s a live service game, something that can react, like South Park does, in a week to a topic, and then being extremely connected into pop culture,” Mumbauer said.
He wants the IP to be edgy like Mad magazine when he was growing up.
“I think that gamers honestly being are getting a little bored. When you see the same games coming out the same genres, the new gamers aren’t responding to them the way that they used to,” Mumbauer said.
Clegg, who was the game director of H1Z1, is on Mumbauer’s team and he believes Bananas is a success because it’s just an idle clicker game that’s allowing gamers to get drops of virtual items that they can trade and monetize in the background, while still playing Dota. If players could earn something from the time they’re putting into such games, Mumbauer thinks that could resonate as well.
“What perfect opportunity to take these communities, Web3 ideology, things that we’ve learned over the past few years. And speak more to the mainstream and all the work that we’ve done, and see if we can do something that makes them laugh,” he said.
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