'Blankos Block Party' is an NFT Trojan Horse for the video game industry

Mythical Games is proud of Blankos Block Party, sure. Co-founders John Linden and Rudy Koch are happy it’s found a substantial audience, and they’re pleased to partner with brands like Burberry and Deadmau5. They were super happy to receive an additional $75 million from investors this month, bringing their funding total to $120 million. But really, Blankos Block Party is more of a side hustle for Mythical Games. What Linden and Koch are actually selling is an ecosystem of NFT-driven gameplay and development.

Problem is, to the majority of Mythical’s audience, that sounds boring as hell. It’s much easier to sell Blankos, a colorful online world filled with user-created toys and cartoon vibes, than it is to push blockchain economics on a playerbase of kids and mainstream brands.

“Blankos is obviously the proving ground,” Linden told Engadget. “We control all the levers in Blankos, which is great, so we can do a lot of testing and really see what's hitting with the community. But the idea behind that is to tune it so that other games can use the same concepts.”