A California-based entrepreneur and creative executive, Michael Mumbauer has spent more than two decades building worlds at the intersection of games, film, and emerging technology. Now, with Liithos, he is doing it without a studio floor.
There is a particular kind of knowledge that only comes from doing the thing for twenty years. Not reading about it. Not consulting on it. Actually doing it, from inside the machine, until the machine becomes familiar enough that you can see where it is going before it gets there.
Michael Mumbauer has that kind of knowledge about the intersection of games, film, and technology. He acquired it the hard way, across two decades of hands-on work at some of the most recognized studios and productions in both industries. And now, operating out of San Diego under the banner of his company Liithos, he is applying it to a question that no one has yet answered definitively: what does entertainment look like when generative AI becomes the production pipeline itself?
Where Worlds Are Made
Mumbauer grew up in Goshen, New York, and arrived in Manhattan to study Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts at the end of the 1990s, a moment when digital tools were first cracking open the production possibilities of entertainment. The timing was not accidental. He was drawn to the edge of what technology could do, and New York in the late 1990s was full of people trying to figure out what the internet and digital media would eventually become.
He moved through early roles that would look prescient in retrospect. At ClickRadio, he was working with 3D, 2D, and vector graphics at the start of the interactive web. At Acclaim Entertainment in Salt Lake City, he was building motion capture animation pipelines. These were not the glamour jobs of the industry. They were foundational work, the kind that teaches you how production actually functions rather than how it appears to function from the outside.
In 2003, he joined Sony Pictures Imageworks, where he worked alongside directors Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg on Beowulf and Monster House, two of the earliest feature films built on performance capture technology. The work was as much about solving problems as creating images. How do you translate a human performance into a digital body without losing what makes it human? That question would follow Mumbauer for the next two decades.
Inside the Franchise Machine
When Mumbauer joined PlayStation’s Visual Arts studio in November 2007, the team he inherited was small and underperforming relative to what Sony needed from it. Over the next thirteen years, he built it into something else entirely. By the time he left in 2020, the studio had grown to more than 300 developers and held an annual operating budget of $40 million.
The work the studio contributed to during that period sits at the top of any list of influential game franchises. The Last of Us. Uncharted. God of War. Spider-Man. These were not projects that succeeded by accident. They required a sustained commitment to craft, a willingness to borrow from film production methodology in ways that the games industry was still learning to accept, and the kind of organizational discipline that can hold a large team together under pressure.
Mumbauer also spearheaded the expansion of PlayStation’s San Diego motion capture stage into a full performance capture and scanning facility, integrating virtual production tools and working with partners including Academy Award-winning teams and AI researchers. He was also responsible for establishing PlayStation’s first internal co-development operation in Malaysia, a structural decision that expanded the company’s production capacity while reducing overhead.
The final project he contributed to before leaving PlayStation was The Last of Us Part II, which has been described as the most awarded game in video game history. It was a fitting endpoint for a chapter defined by the pursuit of cinematic credibility in interactive form.
The Founder’s Turn
In November 2020, Mumbauer co-founded That’s No Moon, a new AAA studio built around a single-player, narrative-driven game backed by Smilegate. The studio raised $100 million and scaled from zero to more than 70 developers in under six months, during a period when the rest of the world was still operating under pandemic restrictions. It was a demonstration of both the industry’s appetite for this kind of project and of Mumbauer’s ability to build organizations quickly.
He departed That’s No Moon in early 2022. In March of that year, he founded Liithos.
The shift is worth understanding. That’s No Moon was, in many respects, an extension of the model Mumbauer had spent thirteen years inside at PlayStation: large team, large budget, AAA ambition, traditional production infrastructure. Liithos is built around a different premise. The question it is exploring is whether you can build entertainment IP of comparable quality and scale without the infrastructure that has historically defined what that kind of production requires.
The Generative Hypothesis
Mumbauer has written and spoken publicly about his view of generative AI not as a replacement for authorship, but as a friction-removal system. The distinction matters to him. In the model he is building at Liithos, the technology does not decide what the story is or what the world looks like. It executes decisions that have already been made. The creative authority remains with the human directing the process.
This is the thesis behind The Watch, a micro-pilot Liithos produced to demonstrate what a fully generative AI, vertical-first production pipeline can deliver. The project was built without physical sets, locations, or cameras. It retained what Mumbauer describes as the familiar markers of premium storytelling: controlled performances, intentional staging, and dramatic pacing. The Watch was designed to prove a method as much as to tell a story.
Liithos is also developing Trace War, a transmedia universe created in collaboration with John Garvin, who was responsible for PlayStation’s Days Gone. The project is designed as a living digital world combining interactive gameplay with AI-driven narrative, built to evolve over time rather than deliver a fixed product.
The commercial context for all of this is the mobile and social platform space, particularly vertical storytelling formats that have emerged on TikTok and similar platforms. Mumbauer sees these not as constraints but as native languages, forms of storytelling that require their own production logic rather than adaptation from traditional formats. His background in game development, where iterative world-building and player-centric design are foundational, gives him a framework for thinking about interactive and social content that most film and television executives do not have.
Michael Mumbauer and What He Is Building Toward
Mumbauer holds two patents related to performance capture and virtual camera systems, both issued during his time at PlayStation. He has spoken at GDC, Gamescom Asia, and Level Up KL, among other industry events, consistently on the subjects of performance capture, virtual production, and the future of interactive storytelling.
He is based in San Diego, operating Liithos from California, and describes his work as sitting at the intersection of AAA game development, film production, startup leadership, and creative technology. The combination is not common. Most people in this industry live primarily on one side of the games-film divide. Mumbauer has spent his career building the bridge between them, which may be precisely why he is positioned to understand what comes next when the technology stops requiring that bridge to exist at all.
The work is early. The tools are still maturing. The market is still figuring out what it wants from AI-generated entertainment. But the person doing it has been in the room where these decisions get made for long enough to know which questions are the ones that actually matter.
