Crypto: The Game

This month, much of our ecosystem was transfixed by Crypto: The Game, the viral sensation built by Dylan Abruscato. Dylan leveraged his experience working on HQ Trivia and a decade-long obsession with Survivor to create something we rarely see: a live, multi-player “moment” that could not be missed.

Each of the 410 contestants paid up 0.1 ETH to play and were subsequently assigned a tribe, competing for a $100k+ prize pool. Every day for ten days, tribes faced an “immunity challenge,” some of which were digital games like PacMan, and others even had IRL components. Winning the challenge granted that team immunity from getting voted out for the night.

I sat down with Dylan to learn more about what made Crypto: The Game click, what he learned that can be useful to other builders, and how he sees the game evolving in the future 👇

The Product–And Fun–Comes First

“I'm a firm believer that in consumer crypto, there needs to be a great idea first, and then you figure out if crypto can make it better or worse,” Dylan said. “I don't think this game would have done well if I sat down at a whiteboard and said ‘okay, I want to build a crypto game.’”

Dylan didn’t set out to create a fun crypto experience, he set out to create the most fun experience he could for the audience – period. The results speak for themselves.

Players talked strategy in Discord rooms at night and canceled work meetings during the day in order to gain an advantage. While the game wasn’t designed to be a 24/7, always-on experience, it organically became that way as bonds formed, enemies were made, and the stakes got higher.

Dylan took inspiration from Rick Rubin and his recent book on creativity: “Rick Rubin says, ‘make it for yourself.’ I made the game I wanted to play, and that’s what allowed me to move with conviction.”

Launch With The Right Audience

As with any other product, games also need product-market fit. Games are designed with specific audiences in mind, and crypto-natives are certainly a unique one.

While the game wasn’t designed to require users to be crypto-native, it was certainly built with wallet holders in mind.

For Dylan, the reasons to build for a crypto-native audience were threefold. First, given that they are early adopters of new technologies and are accustomed to spending money on digital assets, crypto felt like a “ripe” market for a digital-native Survivor-style game with a buy-in. Second was more practical – payment rails. The team at HQ Trivia struggled to pay out players through PayPal, which often led to long delays and constant issues. Dylan saw these problems firsthand when he led partnerships for HQ, and being able to send and receive funds through crypto wallets seemed like a no-brainer.

Most importantly, though, “crypto just makes things more fun.”

Build Space and Let Users Make It Their Own

The winner of this season of Crypto: The Game was a player from rural Japan that was competing in an entirely different time zone from the bulk of his team and didn’t speak English. Instead, he used Google Translate to write poems every morning and send memes to other contestants.

While Survivor is known for being cut-throat, Dylan said the mechanics manifested differently with CTG. “Playing a wholesome game was the winning strategy,” he said. “There were tribes that wanted to abstain from voting. That behavior was the biggest surprise to me.”

Rather than playing the role of instigator, the team instead chose to watch the dynamics play out organically. This was clearly the right decision, as not only did it lead to a unique type of winner, but it made the game much more enjoyable and unique to each tribe.