There's a new creator in town: The World Builder. Armed with the most advanced visualization technology known to man, World Builders conjure multimedia universes one serialized story at a time. But Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube weren't built to hold them. On Lore Machine, World Builders turn text into scrollable multimedia adventures called LORE, then serialize LOREs into a World with solid state characters, canon and narrative physics. Today, they can sell tickets to their World.
I'm Thobes, founder of Lore Machine. I spent 17 years at VICE, where I founded Motherboard and ran digital publishing.
Lore Machine is Substack for World Builders. Build a story World with art, video and sound, serialize it, and get paid...no studio required.
And you bet there's a backstory:
After leaving VICE, I wrote a series of viral articles about an audio technology that can purportedly break your consciousness out of your body. It's a whole thing. The stories got optioned for a documentary adaptation. The problem was there was no video footage, and animation unit costs were unaffordable. The project got shelved. I was seeing the same roadblock all over LA. Amazing screenplays collecting dust because stories couldn't jump the gap into the visual realm.
So in 2022 - as diffusion models were getting usable - we built the first version of Lore Machine for screenwriters, turning scripts into storyboards.
Then - through no design of our own - South Korean creators started using Lore Machine to make serialized manga with recurring characters. So we stopped being a storyboarding tool and invented the LORE: text, art, video, sound and reader choice in one scrollable story object. It's basically an animated graphic novel you can play! Creators serialize LOREs inside a World with a shared cast, canon and narrative physics.
Today we're launching World Pass. Creators charge $5/month for their World, keep 90% of the revenue and own their IP outright. We just launched the first World Pass with Archive In Between and Marvel writer B. Earl. The teaser has already racked up 600k views here. The World is here.
TikTok, Instagram and YouTube taught a generation to love lore, then gave them nowhere to keep it. No canon, no persistent cast, no episode one, no way to charge for a World. Creators have been building universes inside platforms designed to splinter them. Now they have a home.
Every AI tool right now is optimized for making commodity content fast. We're betting on craftsmanship instead.
I'll be here all day. If you have a story World you've always wanted to bring to life, Let's get INTO it.
Product Hunt launch offer: 200 free visualization tokens if you sign up during our launch week!
Lore Machine launched on Product Hunt on August 26th, 2026 and earned 110 upvotes and 5 comments, placing #12 on the daily leaderboard. There's a new creator in town: The World Builder. Armed with the most advanced visualization technology known to man, World Builders conjure multimedia universes one serialized story at a time. But Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube weren't built to hold them. On Lore Machine, World Builders turn text into scrollable multimedia adventures called LORE, then serialize LOREs into a World with solid state characters, canon and narrative physics. Today, they can sell tickets to their World.
On the analytics side, Lore Machine competes within Comics & Graphic Novels, Artificial Intelligence and Games — topics that collectively have 580.5k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Lore Machine performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Lore Machine?
Lore Machine was hunted by Chris Messina. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of Lore Machine including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Chris Messina
Hey Product Hunt 🖖
I'm Thobes, founder of Lore Machine. I spent 17 years at VICE, where I founded Motherboard and ran digital publishing.
Lore Machine is Substack for World Builders. Build a story World with art, video and sound, serialize it, and get paid...no studio required.
And you bet there's a backstory:
After leaving VICE, I wrote a series of viral articles about an audio technology that can purportedly break your consciousness out of your body. It's a whole thing. The stories got optioned for a documentary adaptation. The problem was there was no video footage, and animation unit costs were unaffordable. The project got shelved. I was seeing the same roadblock all over LA. Amazing screenplays collecting dust because stories couldn't jump the gap into the visual realm.
So in 2022 - as diffusion models were getting usable - we built the first version of Lore Machine for screenwriters, turning scripts into storyboards.
Then - through no design of our own - South Korean creators started using Lore Machine to make serialized manga with recurring characters. So we stopped being a storyboarding tool and invented the LORE: text, art, video, sound and reader choice in one scrollable story object. It's basically an animated graphic novel you can play! Creators serialize LOREs inside a World with a shared cast, canon and narrative physics.
Today we're launching World Pass. Creators charge $5/month for their World, keep 90% of the revenue and own their IP outright. We just launched the first World Pass with Archive In Between and Marvel writer B. Earl. The teaser has already racked up 600k views here. The World is here.
TikTok, Instagram and YouTube taught a generation to love lore, then gave them nowhere to keep it. No canon, no persistent cast, no episode one, no way to charge for a World. Creators have been building universes inside platforms designed to splinter them. Now they have a home.
Every AI tool right now is optimized for making commodity content fast. We're betting on craftsmanship instead.
I'll be here all day. If you have a story World you've always wanted to bring to life, Let's get INTO it.
Product Hunt launch offer: 200 free visualization tokens if you sign up during our launch week!
Dive into Lore Machine here.
Huge thanks to Chris Messina for huntermanship 🙏