London and Chengdu startup Anorak has raised $5M (about £3.8M) in a pre-seed round co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC.
At Hutch, the studio behind Top Drives and F1 Clash, car fans showed how deep one community's enthusiasm can run: they obsessed over detail and built communities around the games. Most interests never get that treatment. A conventionally made game is too expensive to justify for anglers, birdwatchers or sneakerheads, so those audiences go unserved.
Anorak's answer is interactive generative video, in which AI-generated footage responds to a player's choices in real time. The team is inventing play patterns from scratch and building a creator platform so communities can make playable content around their own pursuits. An AI lab in Chengdu, run by cofounder and Chief of AI Tak Fung, is developing proprietary inference technology to make that video faster, cheaper and more controllable. Rutland sums up the aim as to "make any pursuit playable".
The company spun out of a generative video research project and already has a team of 20. It posts new playable experiments to its blog each week. Rutland cofounded Hutch, which MTG bought for $375M in 2020, and Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Alpine was a founding employee there and held the same role.
Supercell and MTG joined the round, along with angel investors including Zynga cofounder Justin Waldron. The money will grow the London and Chengdu teams, bring Anorak's first playable formats to release and open the creator platform in early 2027.