Studio news
Erato is now Montage: one app for Story Generators
Our interactive storytelling app has a new name. Erato and Muse are now one app called Montage, the story mode once called Montage is now Motif, and thousands of players on iOS and Android have one place to create and play.
From today, Erato is called Montage. Same team, same stories, same characters you have been writing with, under one name that describes what the app has become.
How we got here
For the past year two projects have been taking shape in the studio alongside Erato.
The first was Muse, built from the ground up as Erato’s successor: a new place to create characters, write, role-play and build universes with your own AI muse.
The second was a story engine called Montage. Our original plan was to open-source parts of it as a generative tool for AI storytellers, so that other writers and studios could build on it. Open-sourcing something of that size properly takes more than a small studio can manage alone, and we spent a good while in talks with a well-funded Silicon Valley tech start-up about doing it together. In the end those talks fell through.
That moment clarified things. As a truly independent studio, our best work comes from concentrating our efforts on our own proprietary systems, built for the people who already play with us and the new players arriving every week, and on giving them an amazing experience.
What changed
So we brought everything together. Erato and Muse are now one app, Montage, with two ways in:
- Muse, for creating: write, role-play and build universes with your own AI muse.
- Motif, for playing: step inside a world, solve its puzzles and unlock the story chapter by chapter.
If the names feel familiar but shuffled, that is because they are. The story engine that powers Motif is the one we once called Montage. When we brought everything together, that name was the right one for the whole platform, a montage being many scenes cut into one story, and the story mode took a new name of its own.
Why rebrand now
For an independent studio, development time is the scarcest resource we have. Every hour spent maintaining two names, two flows and the signposts between them is an hour not spent on the stories themselves.
Rebranding to Montage lets us focus our development on one thing: delivering a unified experience across iOS and Android. Classic character chat lives in Muse, new story modes arrive in Motif, and everything is built once, for every player, on both platforms. That focus is also what clears the way for the other features we have planned for the new year.
Support we are grateful for
We did not do this entirely alone. A major, established AI technology company has backed our work by granting us a serious amount of compute, and we are genuinely grateful for it. You will see some of the results of that compute in Montage over the coming months and into the new year.
Where it goes from here
Montage is our home for Story Generators: stories and characters performed live by AI, anchored in a canon written by people. One platform means we can build that future faster, with more worlds in Motif and more ways to create in Muse. We wrote about where we think the whole medium is heading in our manifesto, Story Generators: a new pillar of interactive entertainment.
Thank you to everyone who played Erato. Your stories brought us here.