A Retrospective on An Early Crypto Game

In May of 2017, I posted the following video on Vimeo:

The video demos a proof-of-concept WebGL game I built in Unity, with the intention of someday potentially integrating it with the Ethereum blockchain. It was my playful take on what a user-friendly crypto decentralized application (“DAPP”) might look and feel like at a time when user experiences for almost all DAPPs were terrible.

Watching the video through the lens of 2023 gave me a few thoughts:

• ETH was so cheap! 5 ETH chips made sense in Spring 2017 when ETH was between less than $100, but at today’s prices I would definitely be making 1 ETH the highest chip.
• I still long for more immersive crypto experiences in 2023. Integrating a gambling transaction with a 3D experience remains more “fun” than clicking a button on a website (for example, have you minted a Babby?) I don’t gamble with crypto, but I think there is more work to be done in this area. Could you imagine visiting a virtual OpenSea store in the metaverse? Or minting your next Art Blocks piece in a 3D gallery?
• Unity WebGL applications were pretty great in 2017!

I remember designing and building the proof-of-concept game in the evenings, between browsing upcoming ICO’s. This was a time when the crypto world was in search of finding its most important use-cases. It turns out, probably for the better, that crypto has proven to be more suited for things such as investing, creating, and community building, instead of for gambling.

What would have happened if I had created this game to its completion? I guess we will never know! But I am glad I got it to a point where I posted a video of it and can reflect on it as a relic of my early blockchain developer experience 🙂