While there are many of us normal humans who don’t participate in a wildly speculative and volatile market powered by FOMO, art theft, environmental damage, and pyramid scheme-style con-artistry, there are still people who are trying to squeeze blood from the stone that is NFTs and crypto. Enter Yuga Labs’ infamous Bored Ape Yacht Club and the reveal of its upcoming “skill-based mint” NFT-generating title Dookey Dash.
A pretty NSFW trailer released earlier this week sets the game’s scene where a character literally takes a trans-dimensional crap and gets a mystical key stuck in his ass (no seriously). As for the game itself, it looks like an auto-runner mobile game where players travel through a tunnel, avoiding obstacles and collecting items along the way for as long as possible to achieve a high score.
Both the trailer and an associated FAQ further outline Dookey Dash’s mechanics: Playing the game requires a Sewer Pass, which was only handed out to BAYC members of certain tiers, and access to the game is open only between now and February 8th, at which point the game will be closed, scores will be tabulated, and Sewer Passes will be traded for an NFT known as a Power Source during an event known as the Summoning on January 15th. After that, “the story continues” according to the game’s schedule of events, while the trailer explains that earned Power Sources will “evolve through a sequence of various ApeCoin-powered minigames.”
The artificially limited number of Sewer Passes and the potential rarity of the Power Sources they generate has seen a secondary seller’s market erupt. The OpenSea exchange currently shows the floor price for a pass is 2.055 ETH, or almost $3,200 USD at current value; previous trading saw 8,394 ETH (or around $12.8 million) in Sewer Pass transactions. So yes, people are willing to spend three grand on the potential of a Sewer Pass’ worth. Clearly, crypto is not quite excised yet.
Perfect Ten: MMOs that have fallen to the dark side of cryptocurrency
Lawful Neutral: How is an NFT MMO even supposed to work?
Vague Patch Notes: NFTs in gaming are a bad, dumb idea
Vague Patch Notes: Why play-to-earn is a garbage idea
Vague Patch Notes: The metaverse doesn’t exist and isn’t a good idea either
GDC 2022: Control, revenue, scarcity, ethics, and the human challenges of the gaming ‘metaverse’
Vague Patch Notes: No, Little Orbit has not solved the MMO blockchain problem
