MotR Won’t Cheat the Fun Part

Andrew Weidenhammer has one warning for us before explaining where Millions of tiny Robots got its name: “This is going to sound very pretentious.”

“Yeah,” Jack Ehrbar quips. “That’s why I made him say it.”

The story begins with philosopher Daniel Dennett, who was asked whether humans have a soul. Andrew remembered his answer: “Yes, but it consists of millions of tiny robots.”

Then Andrew’s wife noticed that Millions of tiny Robots shortened to MotR. It clicked. That was their name. And in all honesty, Jack and Andrew are also robot nerds and sci-fi heads — Akira, Masamune Shirow, “the solid nerd stuff,” as Jack puts it — so the name made sense. When the animation studio where they met closed its doors, they started MotR with a third partner in 2005 and figured out the rest as they went.

Today, MotR is an Atlanta creative technology studio working across animation, real-time development, games, interactive experiences, VR/AR and virtual production. Over the past 21 years, Jack and Andrew built the kind of range that makes a company difficult to put neatly in a box. The proof is easier to show than to file: a multiplayer VR trip back in time to the creation of the Terracotta Army. Dora the Explorer performing live through real-time facial capture. A VR music video for Kygo that launched on PlayStation VR. A flight simulator that taught doctors the history of Thyroid Eye Disease. An F1 VIP racing simulator built from scratch for a private club at the Miami Grand Prix. The range was a much harder sell when they started.

In one early pitch, MotR proposed recreating Irving Penn’s Estée Lauder product photography in CG so labels, sizes, and variations could be changed within the files. Twenty-one years ago, advertising clients were wary of computer-generated images. Photographers were the industry standard.

“It was honestly a really hard sell back then,” Jack remembers. Andrew catches the story up to the present in three words: “Now it’s AI.”

Thankfully, the skepticism toward CG faded, and MotR’s work expanded with new tools and collaborators. “We formed originally, and we still exist, because we’re passionate storytellers,” Jack says. “Any way that we can use computers and technology to tell a story in an interesting way, that’s why we’re a company.”

Jack says the whole thing in one breath. Andrew does not dispute it.

Their disagreements are less related to their personalities than to their working styles. “When a project comes our way and I’m like, ‘No, that’s not going to work,’ [Jack will] find the thing that works, and vice versa,” Andrew says. Twenty-five years of close friendship have given the debates a shorthand. They’ve each watched the other be right often enough to know when to let something go.

Nevertheless, they still diverge on speed. Andrew is precise and deliberate. Jack describes himself as “slapdash,” quick to get 85 percent of something working and willing to solve the rest as things evolve.

“We think very differently, which is a huge advantage,” Andrew says. “Somewhere in the middle, we meet and find the right combination of things.”

The pattern holds after hours. The two agree on FromSoftware: the whole office chews through every Soulsborne release. Past that, the argument resumes. Andrew is deep in Mortal Shell 2 and will tell you Bloodborne is “just the best game ever made.” Jack is a Metroidvania devotee who just finished Metroid Dread. The office PS5, the 85-inch screen and the big speakers used to be theirs; these days their kids commandeer the lounge for Fortnite.

MotR’s current side project takes place inside a human body. Visually inspired by the 1987 film Innerspace, it involves flying around, searching, and shooting bad guys. Jack pitches it as “somewhere between a dungeon crawl and a space flying simulator and a shooter.”

The team is building a vertical slice to show publishers, something MotR can make with its core team and a few additional hands. “No offense to our agency friends and their clients. We love the work,” Jack says. “But I just want to make video games. I just want to tell stories.”

A playable pre-alpha already exists, and, according to Jack, “If you come by the office, we’ll let you play it.”

MotR’s partnership with Sageworx gave the idea its first real test. The two shops spent six months together designing producing a healthcare education game — a pancreatic enzyme lesson turned into a race, with MotR designing the gameplay inside the body. Jack gives the project “a little bit of credit” for the passion project: six months in that milieu convinced them that flying around a body, finding things, was something “people would get a big kick out of.” They kept the exploration and ditched the racing.

That race through the pancreas also started a run of more racing projects. "We did three racing games around the time that we did the Pharma project," Andrew says. "I thought that was an amazing coincidence. They just kept rolling in."

The first call came from a friend at an Omnicom agency: a client wanted a racing game where players answer quiz questions about their drug — and the client sponsors an actual NASCAR car. MotR carried over the quiz-timing structure worked out on the pharma game, put the sponsor’s car on the track, and rebuilt everything else around a simulator pod with a steering wheel and pedals. A racing game you steer with your thumbs, it turns out, is a very different machine from one with real torque, throttle and fishtailing to manage.

As the NASCAR game reached beta, another call: could MotR build a Formula One simulator for a VIP club at the Miami Grand Prix? The race was three weeks away. Three recent racing games meant the muscle memory was warm. The team evolved the driving physics from stock car to open-wheel and designed an original track inspired by Miami’s — one that echoes its twists and turns while showing off more of Florida’s Gold Coast skyline. Then MotR went to Miami in pit crew suits and ran the pods in front of a giant video wall for the VIP club’s guests and their kids.

For Andrew, fun determines whether anyone interacts with it long enough to take anything away from it. And the pancreas racing game project was proof of that.

“If it’s not fun to play, doctors aren’t going to want to play it,” he says. “Doctors like to play video games, too.”

Andrew and Jack have been on site for multiple events and have seen the difference fun makes. “Most of the other games there looked like they just were slapped together,” Jack says. “Nobody played them for more than a minute.” They were proud to see that both the Pharma and NASCAR booths drew a constant flow — and return players for both the MotR games.

One doctor played at least a dozen rounds during a conference. She held the top score for most of the day, but as soon as someone finally beat her, she returned and raced again. When she failed to retake first place, she declined to enter her initials. When Andrew asked her why, she told him, “If I’m not first, it doesn’t matter.”

Andrew describes the Sageworx collaboration as “amazingly frictionless,” uncommon after years of working across different agency structures.

What made it frictionless was that there were no handoffs. Sageworx founders Pat Conreaux and Marc Calamia were in the work from the first conversation to the final build — the strategy, the story, what the end customer needed to hear, and the review cycles that decide whether any of it ships. MotR brought the craft: where an idea can be pushed inside a budget and schedule, and which detail will become, in Jack’s words, ‘a long, grueling pain in the ass.’

Neither side waited on the other. Sageworx wasn’t a client hiring a studio and marking up the invoice; it was the other half of the same production, in the room for every creative call and every trade-off. Clear direction on the message, and clear ownership of the process around it, left the studio free to make the game. “We could start to prototype things that we think are a good idea and get responses like, ‘Oh wow, that is not what we thought, but it’s pretty damn cool.’”

The result, Jack says, was what agency production is supposed to look like and rarely does: a budget aligned with what MotR could make look great, a partner who could give feedback on the spot, and enough freedom to beat the brief rather than just meet it. “We were able to push it farther because we had more latitude. It was a better game.”

MotR uses AI for programming, project analysis and information. Jack is delighted that he may never need to remember another Linux command, but that’s about it. Andrew is fiercely protective of the finished work: “Let people do the creativity.”

For Jack, generative imagery would take away his favorite part.

“I make this stuff because it makes me emotionally fulfilled to create graphics and games,” he says. “There are a lot better ways to make money in this world than having a small computer graphics studio that does interactive experiences.”

Jack is often more inclined to accept a project because MotR hasn’t done it before. A few years ago, someone wanted kids to be able to Zoom-call Santa Claus — an LLM wired to a real-time MetaHuman. The funding never materialized, but Jack spent a week finding out whether it could be built. “Figuring that out over the past couple decades is what’s made us good at what we do.”

He worries that handing the figuring-out to AI will leave younger makers nowhere to develop. “The new kids coming in, they need to cut their teeth on something,” he explains. “If it’s generative prompt work, then I worry for what we’re all going to be able to do 21 years from now.”

AI “darkens every crease” and sharpens every line in a face or environment. Andrew can see it almost instantly: “‘Wow, they just really overdid it with the ambient occlusion.’”

Jack clocks the high-contrast, muddled color first. And the studio’s vocabulary gives the argument away: “AO passes are generally cheating,” he adds, thinking of it as a shortcut to realism.

Then Jack reduces the whole argument to a few short words:

Jack is not against cheating everywhere. He hasn’t played Grand Theft Auto since GTA 3, “and that was just for the cheat codes, you know, so you could drop a tank in the middle of the city.” Cheating in the game is fine. Cheating yourself out of the making of the game is the part he won’t do.

That distinction leaves plenty of room for new technology, as long as it gives the makers more work they actually enjoy. Andrew is eager to dig deeper into Gaussian splatting, the point-cloud capture technique the studio tested on a current feature film: a standard 3D scan of a practical tram-car set locks its reflections in place, while the splat’s highlights move with your point of view. “And you can do it with your iPhone,” Jack says.

Jack, meanwhile, is testing how close Unreal Engine can get to final 4K film plates. A photoreal city scene rendered straight from the engine — a 20-second shot, one GPU — came close enough that the director put it in a recent test screening, in front of an audience Jack fully expects to ask, “Is that really New York?”

Real-time rendering has cost them one old pleasure: MotR used to start a render and play video games for half an hour while it finished. “Those damn GPUs,” Andrew says. “They’ve ruined everything.”

For a company named after a philosopher’s answer about the soul, MotR is suspicious of a grand purpose. Put the name, the inner-space game, and the rendering experiments side by side and ask if it was planned, and you get the same look from both of them.

“I wish I could tell you that it’s all planned out and we know everything,” Andrew says. “But we don’t.”

Jack’s own requirement for whatever’s next is simple: “My stated purpose is to work in the toy department as long as I can.”

Follow MotR on LinkedIn or visit motr.net. Or to engage our team to create something for you, connect with Sageworx.

MotR is an Atlanta-based creative technology studio founded in 2005. Led by Jack Ehrbar and Andrew Weidenhammer, the studio works across animation, real-time development, games, interactive experiences, VR/AR and virtual production.