Most people just getting into Passage don't know this project started almost 4 years ago... ⭐ Or that the first Passage events were with Amazon & Capitol Records ⭐ Or that our team worked with Warner Brothers, Marvel, Dallas Cowboys &more So here's a brief history.. 🧵

I founded our studio, @webuildworlds, in 2017. Over 7 years, we've worked with clients like Warner Brothers, Marvel, Red Bull, the Dallas Cowboys, Halsey, & more. We worked at the intersection of entertainment & technology, designing and building unique experiences.

Our work on @passageio began in 2020. Everyone had started using tools like Zoom and doing "virtual events" that were just a livestream and a chat... With our experience in physical events and virtual production, we knew we could do better. ( The first name was "Live3D" )

Our first pitches for this new experience were to our client Warner Brothers. We built in Three.js, but we were pushing the limits of what was possible for web graphics. The first Passage world was Central Perk from Friends for a proposed marathon event.

The next pitch was for DC & the Warner Brother's team. We built out the "bat cave" theater, and this was where we did all our demos for several months. People would always take a second to look around and then be like... "Wait... You're here too!" when they saw me on video.

Over the next year, we sold and launched Passage experiences as a service for 6-figure checks $$$ We launched worlds with Amazon, Capitol Records, American Girl, and more. This was hands-on market research and what funded the development of the product.

Through this process, we realized that what we had created was fundamentally different from anything else. It was more immersive, more accessible, and just more fun. We proceeded to make a metric butt ton of worlds, iterating, learning, pitching, and developing.

The next game-changer was moving to Unreal Engine. Our new home after the bat cave was "the gym." We did team meetings here and hundreds of pitch calls. No one had ever seen these kinds of graphics with NO downloads and NO load time. It was a new paradigm for events.

Then we entered the world of web3 in 2021. We started with something we thought would be accessible, a game called @thestrangeclan, built on @passageio. The NFT sale was a hit, breaking $2M in 2 hours. We went into this early Strange Clan world to celebrate in style.

In the last 3 years, we've refined the platform, developed partnerships in entertainment & AI, and launched a layer-1 chain on the @cosmos SDK. Our beta marketplace on the $PASG chain has done over $8M in volume with just a handful of exclusive collections. So what about 2024?

This is what's coming... ⭐ Q1 launch of our first product offering exclusively to our waitlist customers ⭐ Marketplace upgrades & open-source development ⭐ World builder, avatar customizations, and new world templates ⭐ New partnerships & new team recruits