No book on blockchain gaming would be complete without a little history; however, this would be a full timeline of events but rather a summary of the main projects. It is also worth distinguishing between gaming and gambling. There has been a lot of gambling games in the blockchain space and while some of them were attempts to do something fully decentralised, they are not the focus of this book.
The very first attempt to build a blockchain game was a poker game the Satoshi included in the original Bitcoin client. Apparently, he was quickly persuaded to remove it. As reported, the code never made it into the public, but an old private version of the client included an IRC client, a peer-to-peer marketplace, and virtual poker.
Most of the earliest attempts at “blockchain gaming” were gambling games that incorporate bitcoin as the main form of money. One of the first examples of this was a pseudo-anonymous poker tournament advertised on the bitcointalk forum by user BitcoinFX.
In both cases it seems the games are fairly independent of the respective blockchains, so neither are actual blockchain games. Several more games came along that tried to incorporate bitcoin, or other coins, as a form of payment but most didn’t try to use a blockchain to build a decentralised game.
Perhaps the first clear attempt at a decentralised game using blockchain technology is Huntercoin. It was forked from the Namecoin codebase and was launched in February 2014. Player moves were stored on-chain and the underlying cryptocurrency could be collected in-game. The game is still running but the team behind Huntercoin are now known as Xaya and are actively working on new games.
Shortly after Huntercoin, a game called Motocoin was launched in May 2014. Described as a “2D motorbike simulation game” with the claim of a novel mining method called “Proof-of-play”. The coins could only be mined via gameplay and not from running mining equipment as in Bitcoin.
In April 2015, EverdreamSoft did a token sale on CounterParty to raise money to build a trading card game called Spells of Genesis. The official launch date of the game, according to the developer website, was in 2017. In recent years, tokens were also deployed to Ethereum.
A boom for decentralised gaming came in 2017. Prices of cryptocurrencies hit all-time-highs and November saw the release of the popular game CryptoKitties. The game involves breeding cats with the option of trading them. Each cat is represented on the Ethereum blockchain as a non-fungible token (NFT) following the ERC-721 token standard. This standard is now synonymous with blockchain gaming.
The popularity of the game was so high that Ethereum hit it’s scaling limits and caused the network to be congested in December 2017. As such, it is the most famous blockchain game to date. It is worth noting that the game is not fully decentralised. The art is held on the developer’s servers and licensed to players for special usage.
The team behind CryptoKitties are now working on a new blockchain that’s entirely dedicated to blockchain gaming. Earlier in 2017, there was a token sale for the game Decentraland. Initially, the game raised money by doing a token sale on Ethereum.
This game is worth a mention as it has become a fully decentralised game. That includes the game assets and the governance of development. Currently, assets are presented on Ethereum as tokens, while the assets themselves will be hosted on a decentralised-hosting technology.
From the project’s blog:
“With the public launch of the world on February 20th, we birthed the reference client for the first-ever decentralized virtual world, with all of its infrastructure run by a distributed network of nodes.”
“The Decentraland DAO is an on-chain organization that controls all the core smart contracts, and is therefore in charge of any future protocol updates.”
Arguably, it isn’t the first given that Huntercoin already exists but probably the first game to be governed by a DAO. It also seems that Decentraland has greater complexity than Huntercoin too.
One game that’s still in development is Taurion, which is a decentralised MMO RTS. The game can host many players simultaneously with all moves being stored on-chain. This is the latest game from the Xaya team who developed the Huntercoin game mentioned previously. Release of the game is scheduled for later in 2020.
The full history of NFTs is beyond the scope of this book. They are an important piece of blockchain gaming, but their history is well-covered elsewhere. The NFT came to prominence with the ERC-721 standard, however it can be argued that Namecoin provided the first example of a non-fungile asset. Domain names listed on Namecoin are tradeable but clearly each domain is unique.
Satoshi's poker game
Pseudo-anonymous poker tournament
- "The Worlds First Sudo-Anonymous Poker Tournament ?" - bitcointalk
- Bitcoin History Part 14: The 1,000 BTC Poker Game - Bitcoin.com
Huntercoin
- Huntercoin
- Huntercoin - bitcointalk
- Blockchain Gaming Part II: Successes and Failures of First-Generation Games - The Block
Motocoin
Spells of Genesis
- CounterParty
- Spells of Genesis
- Tokenized Mobile Gaming: Spells of Genesis & BitCrystals - cointelegraph
- Blockchain-Based Game 'Spells of Genesis' Launches Globally - bitcoin.com
CryptoKitties
Decentraland
- Decentraland
- Decentraland: Next Steps for 2020
- Blockchain Gaming Part III: Protocol-led second-generation games - The Block
Taurion
NFT History