Blockchain for Gaming Gets Mythical
The collective vision of a 4-person team attending the ETHWaterloo hackathon in Ontario, Canada back in October 2017 recognized the huge potential of unifying blockchain technology with gaming. This set the ball rolling and began to drive real interest in blockchain-based games. That game became known as CryptoKitties and now symbolizes one of the earliest successful attempts to ‘gamify’ blockchain technology.
The Los Angeles and Seattle-based Mythical Games team has taken that concept and effectively expanded it, in order to bring about a new generation of games with a strong belief that ownership of assets, new player economies, user-generated content, and other blockchain technology benefits will bring the players, game developers, and content creators closer and the players increasingly engaged with the games that they love.
Mythical recently announced that they have raised a huge sum of $16 million in funding by its Series-A round, led by Galaxy Digital’s EOS VC Fund which will certainly aid in the company realizing their ambition of developing and co-producing high-quality blockchain-based game titles for PC, console, and later, mobile platforms.
“We created Mythical Games to bring new gaming economics to mainstream players. We believe that player-owned economies will come to dominate gaming in the future,” said Mythical Games’ co-Founder and CEO, John Linden. “Our recent Series-A funding shows investor confidence in our team and our plan to bring this technology to market, starting with ‘Blankos: Block Party’, our first project in 2019. We are very excited to show more of our vision for next year!”
In addition to developing their own games and co-producing with external top development teams, Mythical Games hopes to enable further innovation by providing their proprietary, Mythical platform to other developers to help them to build player-owned economies of their own on prominent blockchains, starting on EOSIO’s scalable, decentralized infrastructure. Further down the road, new tools are planned for development which will enable content creators and even brands to tailor-make and implement their own game assets.
John added: “To us, blockchain is an amazing technology, not necessarily a way of life. With that in mind, we want to focus our attention on the best ways to use the technology to bring our concepts to the mass market gamer. Currently, we believe EOS is hands down the best opportunity from a technology perspective to be able to do this. Its ability to not only perform at transaction volumes and speeds that can support a mass market game, but also the ability to stake on behalf of players keeping the technology behind the scenes - will allow Mythical to achieve our first phase of player-owned economics.”
The founding members of Mythical Games come from within the gaming industry, with the combined experience spanning many decades. Both John Linden, CEO, and Jamie Jackson, CCO, are former veterans of Activision, with Linden also being the president of another LA-based, studio - Seismic Games who have recently been acquired by Niantic (known for their notably popular augmented reality game, Pokémon GO!) Senior Producer at Blizzard, Rudy Koch is Head of Blockchain and Stephan Cunningham, formerly Director, Global Product Management at Yahoo! is named as CPO.
Michael Novogratz, CEO, and Founder of Galaxy Digital said, “We believe that gaming - and specifically players’ interaction with in-game economies and virtual goods – will play a key role in how the masses first discover the true potential of the blockchain. Mythical’s experience building rich and immersive game worlds will be invaluable to this mission.”
Mythical Games are set to launch their first blockchain-based game in 2019 named ‘Blankos: Block Party’ (which premiered on the CBS 2018 Gamers’ Choice Awards Preview Show), developed in partnership with UK-based Third Kind Games initially for PC and Mac. With this in mind, will this usher in a surge of blockchain technology adoption in other industries?
To find out more about Mythical Games and future studio developments, you can visit their official site at Mythical Games or follow them on Twitter - @playmythical
More information on Blankos: Block Party can be found at Blankos.com or on Twitter - @playblankos
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Edited by Ken Briodagh
