Today, a small but dedicated community on Reddit (r/ARShroomsArchive) and the Lost Media Wiki forums works to recover what remains. Their efforts have yielded small victories:
However, the majority of the lost catalog—estimated at 60-70% of his pre-2020 output—remains unrecovered. The hunt is complicated by Motazedi’s own silence; he has not publicly addressed the archival efforts since 2023.
From a philosophical or psychological perspective, the exploration of love, reality, and consciousness through technology and substances can lead to insights into the human condition. It raises questions about the nature of reality, the depth of human emotion, and the limits of technology.
If you're exploring these topics from a more personal or creative standpoint, consider the potential for both positive and negative impacts on individuals and society. The key might lie in balance, consent, and a deep understanding of the technologies and substances being used.
Is there a specific aspect of these topics you'd like to explore further or a particular angle you're considering?
So, what happened? Why is AR Shrooms considered "lost entertainment"?
Unlike a ROM of Super Mario Bros. that can be dumped and emulated in perpetuity, AR Shrooms was a victim of the "Server-Reliant Generation." In late 2020, Glitch Forest Labs failed to secure a Series A funding round. The founder, in a now-deleted Medium post, cited "inability to monetize ambient tranquility" and "Apple’s aggressive privacy changes that broke our spatial mapping."
The studio shuttered on December 15, 2020. Because the 3D assets, shader models, and fungal growth algorithms were too large to store locally (most phones in 2020 had limited storage), the app acted as a thin client. The actual "brains" of the shrooms—their textures, their animation loops, the AI that determined how they grew—were streamed from Glitch Forest’s AWS buckets.
When the studio stopped paying the cloud bill, the buckets were deleted. The app remained on users’ phones for a few weeks, a ghost in the machine. When you opened it, you would see your camera feed, but the world remained stubbornly, depressingly sterile. No fungi grew. The app would simply spin a loading wheel endlessly before crashing.
Today, you cannot download AR Shrooms. The binary is gone from the App Store. There is no APK floating around on archive.org, because even if you installed the APK, the app cannot phone home to retrieve the assets. It is a key without a lock.
Unlike mainstream productions with studio backups, AR Shrooms’ content was quintessentially indie—often hosted on unlisted YouTube links, private Vimeo channels, Patreon-exclusive posts, and ephemeral social media stories. The "lost" material generally falls into three categories:
