From Mythical Games to JOA
Why I’m Betting on AI to Transform Sports Fandom
People still find me through Mythical Games, so let me pick up the story where that chapter left off and share what I’m building now.
I co-founded Mythical Games in 2018 with the belief that players should have a real stake in the games they love. We helped pioneer web3 gaming, built one of the industry’s earliest unicorns, raised nearly $300 million, and launched hit products including NFL Rivals. Before that, I spent more than 15 years building games people came back to every day, from Call of Duty and World of Warcraft to Disney’s Club Penguin and multiple #1 mobile titles.
The products were different, but the challenge was always the same: building experiences people wanted to come back to for years.
How do you create something people don’t just use once, but choose to come back to every day? How do you keep millions of people connected to an experience long after launch?
Looking back, I realized I wasn’t just building games. I was learning how to build systems that keep communities engaged over time.
That’s the hardest problem in interactive entertainment.
The opportunity hiding in plain sight
Sports has something every entertainment company wants: deeply loyal communities. Fans don’t stop caring when the match ends. They follow every roster move, argue about every decision, consume highlights, create memes, and stay emotionally invested all year long.
The challenge isn’t generating passion.
It’s giving millions of fans meaningful ways to participate in that passion every day.
Gaming solved this problem years ago.
The industry shifted from shipping products to operating live services: persistent experiences that evolve continuously through new content, live events, community engagement, and constant iteration. Instead of asking players to come back for the next release, we built systems and experiences that gave them reasons to come back every day.
I don’t think sports needs to become more like games. But I do think it can learn from how games learned to serve their communities.
The challenge is that this operating model is expensive.
Keeping an experience alive requires a costly cross-functional team of developers, designers, analysts, community managers, and product managers working every day to understand what fans care about and respond in real time. That investment makes sense when you’re operating at massive scale, whether it’s a global game, or a large, established league like the NFL.
It becomes much harder to justify for an individual team, athlete, brand, or sponsor.
That’s beginning to change. In its 2026 Global Sports Industry Outlook, Deloitte argued that AI could make sophisticated fan engagement capabilities accessible to organizations that previously couldn’t afford them. I believe the real opportunity is making the live-service operating model practical for every sports organization.
That’s the opportunity I am most excited about.
What we’re building at JOA
JOA is building an agentic operating system for sports engagement.
At its core, it’s a network of specialized AI agents, each designed to perform a specific role within a modern live-service organization.
Each agent has its own objectives, memory, context, and specialized tools. Some understand fan culture and identify emerging narratives. Others design experiences, generate creative assets, operate live features, measure performance, or adapt engagement strategies as fan behavior evolves.
Together, they analyze, propose, create, launch, and continuously operate fan experiences in real time.
AI changes the economics entirely.
Every team, league, athlete, and brand should be able to deliver rich, always-on engagement without building a massive live operations organization.
Proving the model
One of our earliest proving grounds has been ONE Championship. Working with live fan conversations across five languages has helped us refine how the system understands narratives, adapts to changing moments, and creates localized engagement around events.
In March 2026, we acquired GreenPark Sports. They spent years and tens of millions of dollars exploring what participatory fan engagement could look like. We believe AI fundamentally changes the economics of those ideas, making experiences that were once prohibitively expensive, practical for every organization.
The throughline
People often ask what I took away from my time at Mythical Games.
For me, the answer is simple.
What matters most about emerging technology is what it enables, or how it challenges our assumptions.
Every major technology shift unlocks new ways for people to participate. That’s what excited me about online games. It’s what excited me about mobile. It’s what excited me about web3. And it’s exactly what excites me about AI.
Now we get to rethink what fan engagement can look like when the constraints that shaped the last twenty years no longer apply.
Looking ahead
There are countless organizations orbiting sports, all trying to build deeper relationships with fans. Teams. Leagues. Athletes. Brands. Sponsors. Broadcasters.
I believe every one of them will eventually operate an always-on AI engagement layer.
Not because AI is the story.
Because fan expectations have changed.
The next generation doesn’t separate watching, talking, sharing, predicting, and participating. They expect all of those things to be part of a single, continuous experience.
The future of digital fan engagement won’t be built around isolated activations. It will be built around persistent systems that evolve continuously, create new rituals, and give fans reasons to come back every day.
For the first time, AI makes that operating model practical for every organization, not just the largest publishers and leagues.
That’s the future we’re building at JOA.
Continue with The GreenPark Series, starting with Part 1: Acquiring $55 Million of Sports Fan Engagement R&D.
Written by Rudy Koch, co-founder of Mythical Games and co-founder & CEO of JOA. More: Homepage · Writing · Mythical Games · Media.