Pixelmon

 From familiarity to ignominy. 

Many moons ago I remember a brief period when the name of 'Pixelmon' stood for promise. A smashing together of Pokemon and Minecraft in a fairly well-developed crossover mod that I can only assume was darting just our of sight from those notoriously litigious Nintendo lawyers, because it lasted for a very long time. But all good things must come to an end, controversy about malware hidden in the mod files started to come out and the project was drug through the mud. So total was the disgrace, that even with a successor Pixelmon Minecraft mod out today, there are still many, myself included, who can't bring themselves to take the risk of plunging in. Even when a Minecraft-Pokemon experience sounds like the coolest thing ever. But what does all of this have to do with the topic of today? Absolutely nothing. And that in itself is pretty interesting right off the bat considering I am, in fact, talking about 'Pixelmon'.

I can't say I would have been so bold as to abscond with the name of a publicly, and memorably, disgraced Minecraft mod so that I can use it to my own ends, but then I'm not Martin Blerk, aspiring Minecraft Twitch Streamer and founder of the multimillion dollar Pixelmon NFT project, all at the age of twenty. And yes, I said this was a story about NFTs, but stick around because this one has a surprise at the end of the rainbow, or rather at the end of the hatching. You see, Martin probably grew up watching the same sort of entertainment shows that I did, (I'm a bit older than him but we'd be considered part of the same generational divide) falling for Pokemon and then for Minecraft and tripping over himself over the idea of Pixelmon. The only difference is that Martin wanted to make something, but Pokemon had already been made, so he decided to just make it again; Nintendo lawsuit be damned! To be fair, he's not actually infringing on designs like the Minecraft mod continues to do to this day, but with the name similarities he could absolutely still be pursued by Nintendo if they were feeling particularly vindictive. 

In the vein of all NFT projects, Martin started off by promising entirely too much to be feasible by any sensible person, but then pitched it to the Crypto-bro audience and so naturally scored $70 million for his troubles. (What a terrible place this is that we call our world.) He wanted to create the biggest project that this space has ever seen, because that's literally what they all say, it was going to be an NFT based video game that played exactly like Pokemon except... except that the Pokemon are NFTs. Which, obviously, directly contrasts with the concept of Pokemon where you capture your own version of a type of Pokemon and train it in a specific fashion so that it may overcome others, even those of the same breed. But we already know that nobody in the NFT headset as a flying clue what on earth the NFT concept can do to further any of their wild ideas, but they shove it in anyway because that's how you attract the financial whales.

But Pixelmon was different over all the other promised crypto-scam 'game changer' projects for a couple of reasons. For one, Martin invoked the name and memory of an established and familiar franchise and said "That- but Crypto." which made for an easier to follow selling point than the typical whisy-washy nothing talk of: "We're going to build a social/economical/spiritual integration-platform/game/metaverse with liquidity/transcendence options baked into the main interface." Secondly, and this bit helps a lot for more traditional Kickstarter scams too, the thing had small gameplay demo. The demo in question featured no actual Pixelmon in it, and had since been accused of just being a copy and paste job of another little interactive project that our man copied without permission, but who has time for the little things like securing permissions when you're trying to revolutionise the crypto landscape!

Games are expensive to make, of course, and the purpose of Pixelmon was to make money, not waste it. As such our mastermind devised a plan, a way to turn the promise of a game in the distant future into profits today. Thus began the Pixelmon NFT eggs, each of which would cost the buyers anywhere around a neat $9000 to acquire, and each would contain a unique Pixelmon of a certain rarity. Of course, early investors would get all the best ones, and then they could sell it onwards to the latecomers for obscene profits once this project takes off and becomes the most valuable digital asset in the world. You might think I'm missing a step in that plan, but when you spend enough time dipped in the world of Crypto, every other scheme is founded and fuelled on the expectation of success and profit from the word go. It's part of the whole persona, giddy over confidence and callous hostility to any who dare raise even the slightest doubt. Their community have even devised dismissive vernacular within their little circles designed to ward off nay-sayers and bolster that cloistered herd mentality. Terms like 'To the Moon' (The stock price is going to rise so high it will figuratively reach the moon), 'Not Gonna Make it' (X is incapable of adapting to the imminent Web3 future and thus will soon be obsolete) and FUD. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Basically anyone who doesn't nod along to whatever you say like a good mindless puppy.)

These eggs were the only tangible part of this Pixelmon project, (even if they were, by-definition, digital, and thus intangible- you know what I mean.) and so their mystery and allure could be reasonably equated to the state of the soul of this entire brand. Martin swooped up tens of millions from this early egg initiative alone, and there was every reason to believe that once these eggs hatched, another event that was scheduled to predate the creation of this supposed game by several years, that rush in profits would seep into the early buyers. (Trickledown economics baby; when has that ever not worked out?) Heck, in their eyes 9k was just the floor, big profits were abound. (Because remember; talk as much as you want about big games and plans to revolutionise tech, at the end of the day all anybody is using this tech for is as another route to riches.) And then the eggs hatched, and pandemonium ensued. 

You see, the great conceit with NFT's, with Pixelmon being the poster child for this, is that everyone sees the huge amounts of money being thrown back and forth and just naturally assumes, as we are all hardwired to do, that this must be the work of a professional outfit. When so many of these NFT ideas are, in reality, just side projects from young programmers who don't really know what they're doing but can at least snap together a convincing presentation or two. You look at the scale of Pixelmon, and read the very pointed comments our Martin was making indicating how there was an established team of developers already hard at work on this game, and you expect an image of quality and professionalism. And then we see out first 'original' assets, being the Pixelmon themselves straight out of the egg hatching, and that mask was shattered to pieces for everybody.

That's because these Pixelmon looked bad. And not Bored Ape Yacht Club, intentionally ugly; I'm talking rudimentary, I slept through a 3D design class, you wouldn't even put these assets on a college portfolio, bad. Bug egged and garish, phallic and bulbous, utterly missing altogether; I tend to go here a lot, but I honestly mean it when I say that you could spend a couple of weeks training an AI to generate pixel models and you'd probably get better results. (They'd be unique, at least.) What was presented was... shocking. And all that confidence which Pixelmon had fostered, that spur of momentum, slipped into the abyss in a second. The market tanked, these $10 000 dollar NFTs became worthless and unsellable in the same swoop, and the dream that was Pixelmon popped out of existence before our very eyes.

It has been a hectic few days since that moment of destruction and everything has devolved so quickly. Our protagonist willingly doxxed himself, which is why we now know him to be a twenty-year old college kid with no experience doing anything to his name, it has come out how he did not have a team working on these NFTs and was just flipping assets from the Unity store or commissioning low-grade tweaks without disclosing their NFT purpose, and everyone who was led off a cliff has decided in one voice that the Pixelmon trend is over. That, in a messy nutshell, is the story of Pixelmon, which I arranged in as comprehensive of a cliff-notes summary as I could for people not as tuned into the NFT space as some others. I have a feeling that this will be a story with many updates, and given the game which is apparently still being made and with a real developer being hired on to make it, (after the NFT sales raised the funds to do so, obviously) I'm curious to follow up on whatever comes out of this PR massacre. Hopefully you'll be as curious as I am to hear about it.