By the time Avron Pasag, Zakaria Drebi, and Sharoz Javaid launched Motions v1, they'd already accumulated something most startups would envy: 30,000 people actively waiting to use a product that didn't yet exist. Within five days of going live, that theoretical demand became actual usage—a platform where users could supposedly build camera-controlled games through simple prompts and watch them spread across social feeds.
No ad budget. No splashy PR launch. Just a Discord server, an Instagram presence, and a bet that the camera might eventually replace the keyboard as our primary input device.
It's an audacious premise, perhaps more so because the founders had already tested the theory—on themselves.
Three Games That Validated a Hunch
Motions didn't begin as a platform. It began as three discrete experiments. 67 Speed, an arm-pumping challenge that tracks motion through your webcam, accumulated 17 million plays. Shadowbox, which turns your computer's camera into a boxing referee, hit half a million plays in its first week. Pose Off, a silhouette-matching game, pulled in 60,000 plays over a single weekend.
The team built these games to test a hypothesis: that people would actually use their cameras as game controllers, and more importantly, that the format itself would generate organic virality. Every play session becomes inherently shareable—you're performing for your camera, after all. The leap from gameplay to content is shorter.
"The world is moving toward the camera as the primary interface," the company's LinkedIn declares with the kind of certainty that either looks prescient or naive depending on what happens next. "We're starting with camera-based games and expanding into every category where the camera replaces the keyboard, mouse, or controller."
Every category is a lot of categories.
Building Demand Before Building the Thing
About a month before launch, Pasag mentioned having roughly 5,000 beta testers and 15,000 people on a waitlist. A week later, the waitlist had stretched to 16,000. Over the next three weeks before they flipped the switch, it climbed to 30,000.
That growth wasn't purchased. It emerged from people playing 67 Speed, realizing the creators were building something larger, and wanting access to the creation tools themselves. Drebi and Pasag had already taken 67 Speed from 4 million users to 16 million by refining the viral mechanics—pose tracking via MediaPipe, timed challenges, anti-cheat systems designed to keep the leaderboards honest.
By the time they launched Motions as a platform, they weren't exactly starting from zero. They were converting an audience that already understood what camera-based play felt like, and apparently wanted to make their own versions.
Four Prompts, 25 Minutes, One Complete Game
The platform's central pitch revolves around speed. Pasag claims to have won a Red Bull x OpenAI x MindStudio hackathon by building a complete game "in under 4 prompts and 25 minutes" using Motions. Other founder posts reference creating games with a single prompt—positioning the tool somewhere between no-code game builders and the latest wave of generative AI platforms.
The underlying tech is computer vision, specifically pose tracking and body landmark detection. An explainer for 67 Speed references MediaPipe Pose for motion tracking, which suggests Motions abstracts away the complexity of implementing CV libraries and lets creators focus on game mechanics instead of camera input pipelines. You describe what you want; the system handles pose detection, scoring logic, the messy parts.
This matters because traditional game development—even with no-code tools—still requires understanding game loops, collision systems, state management. Motions appears to bundle that complexity behind a conversational interface.
Whether it scales beyond simple motion-tracking games remains an open question. But the early hits demonstrate it works well enough to generate millions of plays, which in the consumer app world is often all the validation you need to raise the next round.
The San Francisco Bet
Motions secured pre-seed funding from Afore Capital and joined the firm's Founders-in-Residence program in San Francisco. The exact figure wasn't disclosed, though Afore's FIR program has been reported to typically provide at least $100,000 alongside eight weeks of structured support for idea-stage founders.
Sharoz Javaid left his position as employee number seven at EyePop.ai to relocate to San Francisco and work on Motions full-time. The team has since grown to seven people, according to LinkedIn, operating out of the Bay Area with a live product and a community that's already creating.
Afore's investment thesis aligns neatly with what Motions is attempting. The firm backs consumer and creator tools early, betting on founders who can demonstrate traction before raising larger rounds. A 30,000-person waitlist and games registering millions of plays certainly qualifies as traction—at least the early-stage variety.
The Harder Part Comes Now
The catalog on motions.games shows Motions Originals alongside a "Featured from the community" section, implying user-generated content is already appearing. Newer titles like Move It and Push-Up Maxxing sit in a "New" category without play counters displayed yet, suggesting the platform is expanding beyond the initial three viral hits.
But here's where the model gets tested. The challenge for any user-generated content platform is transitioning from founder-created content to community-created content that maintains quality and virality. Roblox spent years—and considerable capital—building moderation, discovery algorithms, and monetization systems before it became a sustainable ecosystem. Astrocade just raised $56 million to build AI-powered game creation tools. The space Motions is entering features dropping barriers to creation but stubbornly high barriers to building a sustainable platform.
Motions does have one advantage: specificity. It's not trying to become a general-purpose game engine competing with Unity or Unreal. It's betting that camera-based interaction represents a distinct category with different viral mechanics, different content formats, different player behaviors than traditional gaming.
Whether that bet proves correct depends on whether the community can create games that spread as effectively as 67 Speed did. The waitlist converted. The play counts are real. But converting a waitlist into a platform, and then converting a platform into a business—those are different challenges entirely.
Now comes the part where they find out if anyone besides the founders can build the next viral camera game. Or if viral camera games, as a category, have enough depth to sustain a platform at all.
