In May 2022, Alex Taub and his co-founders saw an opportunity, and in just 10 days, they launched Goblintown, an NFT project that broke all the rules in the NFT field at the time.
As one of the three founders of Truth Labs (now Truth Arts), Taub and his co-founders built a completely counter-cultural platform with no roadmap, no utility, no Discord, free-for-all, and anonymous creators at the time.
Subverting the standard NFT model and reaping huge rewards, Goblintown was minted in just 45 minutes and quickly became popular, known for its unique goblin art and unique Web3 narrative.
Today, Goblintown is expanding beyond its Web3 roots, and they are preparing to release on PC and Steam (Goblintown: The Ultimate Driving Game).
For Taub and his team, Goblintown is more than just an NFT project; it’s the foundation of their hopes to build an iconic brand with the cultural staying power of (Star Wars) or (Pokémon).
Note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
OpenSea: First, I’d like to talk about your background. What inspired you to co-found Truth Arts and Goblintown? What is the vision of the company and project?
Alex Taub: I’m one of the three founders of Truth Labs, which is an interesting, but complicated mechanism, and I founded it with a guy named Process Grey, who is our artist and chief creative officer, and Cesar Kuriyama, who was the founder of 1 Second Every Day and a friend of mine for over 15 years, and then we founded Goblintown through Truth Labs.
We ended up merging with a company called Upstream, which I co-founded with my friend and CTO Michael Schonfeld, and now, we're called Truth Arts, the four of us are co-founders, and we originally did a mint called the Illuminati NFT, and we thought it would be fun to do a little secret society on the blockchain, and what's better than the Illuminati NFT? We launched this mint in January of 2022.
We want to be a little secret society on the blockchain, but we also want to be like MSCHF in Brooklyn, who do a lot of crazy and fun things. They did the Big Red Boots, Everybody Has a Car with Mr. Beast, Jesus Shoes, and Satan Shoes, where they put a vial of blood in a Nike shoe and got sued by Nike. They did a lot of crazy stunts, and we want to be the Web3 version of MSCHF, doing fun and crazy things.
As it happens, the first idea we came up with was "Goblintown," and we never looked back. Goblintown was born out of the market crash in May 2022, and everyone was saying, "When you lose all your money, go to Goblintown," which comes from the song (Goblintown) in (The Hobbit).
One day I went to Cesar and Grey’s shop and thought, wouldn’t it be fun if during a bear market everyone had to change their PFP from Ape or Punk to Goblin? We then spent the next few hours teasing each other and finally Grey said he could do a very simple PFP project.
Later, because everyone was frustrated, Cesar suggested doing a free casting, we would do it anonymously so no one knew who we were, and we wanted everyone to focus on the casting itself, and interestingly, everyone obviously focused on the goblins, but they also indulged in guessing who was in the team, guessing they were the founders of Bored Apes, Beeple, Snoop Dogg, and many other websites.
So, in a way, that part was a little counterproductive, the mechanics of free minting, no utility, no Discord, no roadmap, we were a little bit at odds with each other, and then we pulled the larger team in and everyone started contributing something to it, and from idea to minting, I think it took about 10 days, because we wanted it to be anonymous and free, so we were worried that minting would never come out because people would be worried about their wallets being empty.
I ended up going to my friend Mike Dudas, co-founder of The Block, and I said, "Hey, Mike, we're working on something that we think could be really successful, could we ask you to publicly back this project so it can get some publicity?" It was a big ask, and he said yes, and he played the role perfectly.
We launched it late on a Friday afternoon, and I've done a lot of things in my life, but this project took off like nothing I've ever seen, I think it took off within 45 minutes of being online, and it just kept gaining momentum from there.
OpenSea: Yeah, I remember everything that was going on, people were sending me projects and they were asking me, "Have you seen this project?" I was thinking, "Oh my god, this is so iconic." But I also remember that you guys didn't have a roadmap when you launched the project, and there were a lot of memes and jokes about how this project didn't have a roadmap, what led you to do that?
Alex Taub: So the way we look at this - and this is all thanks to Cesar and Grey - is that we want to be a counterculture and be against everything, so anything that anybody does in the NFT space, we want to be the exact opposite of it.
We took some very standard things like utility, roadmap, Discord, metadata, and tried to turn it on its head, like, everyone has a roadmap, so we won’t have a roadmap, everyone has utility, we won’t have utility, everyone has Discord, we won’t have Discord.
And then everybody treated metadata as something that couldn’t be touched, so we said, “Okay, we’re going to pick five NFTs from the collection and update the metadata every two days to tell a story.” Those five NFTs started out as just some Easter eggs, and a month and a half later, when you get to the end, you realize it tells the origin story of the bad guy from Goblin Town, our very own Darth Vader, and it’s so unique and so different and so against the grain that you can’t touch the metadata, it’s simply blasphemy.
So we think this goes against common sense and goes against almost everything, but when we say we don't have a roadmap, it doesn't mean we're not doing anything. We find it a bit silly to publish a roadmap because, first of all, publishing a roadmap is not a prerequisite for launching a project. Whether it makes sense to publish a roadmap depends on whether the team needs to make a decision.
We know that in the Web3 space, if you publish a roadmap and say you’re going to do these five things, and then you realize internally that one of those things shouldn’t be done and you still have to do it, we felt like that was silly to publish a roadmap, especially because we want to be nimble and we want to be able to do things that actually make sense, rather than just telling people we’re going to do something because we thought that was the right thing to do six months ago.
OpenSea: Okay, I know we talked a little bit about the lore of Goblintown and the very recognizable artwork behind it, what is its visual style and characteristics?
Alex Taub: This is totally Grey’s style, he is the co-founder and chief creative officer of Truth Arts, he is like our Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and George Lucas, rolled into one, in fact, he and our knowledge master Bruce are our core, together, they are our superpower.
Our goblins are not the goblins in (The Lord of the Rings) or (The Hobbit), nor are they the goblins in (Harry Potter). Historically, goblins are cunning and usually bad, while our goblins are humorous and mischievous. Although they are ugly, they have a kind of cuteness that makes people fall in love with them at first sight, a bit like French bulldogs. Our goblins are very different from other goblins in history, which makes them unique. The art style is colorful. When you see it, you know that it was created by Grey and us.
OpenSea: Is the brand voice something you created? I like the way you guys communicate with people, and it’s always interesting to see Goblintown posts pop up on my timeline, and I’m curious to see how it progresses.
Alex Taub: So I think it was a collective effort, the brand was created by Grey and Bruce, and there was an amazing person on the team called Sydney who was a big part of goblin language, and it just kind of happened that we started these Twitter spaces and people started talking about goblin language, and I remember the first person to do that was a guy called Cold XBT, who was the first goblin voice I ever heard, I don't know if he was the first one in history.
But people would come up and talk about goblins, and hundreds of people would come and listen, and then it became a big thing, but the protagonist of this voice and Twitter space was undoubtedly Sydney, and she was the most important driving force behind it, and everyone on the team contributed their own efforts, Scott was responsible for these wonderful website experiences, Jonah and Alex were responsible for development, Bruce was responsible for the background settings, Grey was responsible for the art design, so everyone contributed something unique, the right team, the right timing, everything fell into place.
OpenSea: In February of this year, you announced “Goblintown: The Hard Driving Game”. Can we talk about what’s coming next?
Alex Taub: Yes! It’s coming out at the end of April, it’s awesome, I want to give a special shout out to Matt and Nicky on the team, they are the driving force behind the game (pun intended), they really deserve all the credit, it’s not a Web3 game, it’s a Steam game, it’s a Web2 game in every sense of the word, it has no wallet connection, no tokens or anything like that.
At the core is our IP and our brand, which obviously comes from Web3, but that's it, when we look at a game like Pokémon, you don't just look at it as a Game Boy game, you look at it as a brand, some people think of it as Pokémon GO, some people think of it as a Pokémon movie, some people think of it as a card game or collectibles.
So for us, our roots are Web3 and will always be Web3, that’s where we started, but we have big ambitions and we think we have an opportunity to build a real brand, not just a saying.
Our ambitions are more like (Star Wars) and (Lord of the Rings), we know they're very ambitious and we've got a long way to go, and then in terms of games, we want to make a really fun game first, which is kind of like the first introduction to our universe, our crazy characters and IP, and we want to make a really fun, really difficult game.
OpenSea: What can people expect from the gameplay?
Alex Taub: I don't want to say it's like a frustrating game, but you could break your computer or your controller, and it's really fun, and we see it as the protagonist of Goblintown, it's a place where anything can happen, just like (Fortnite) is the protagonist of this island.
For us here, with Goblin Town, what's happening initially happens to be a very exciting gaming experience, and for us, we're a small team and we're only going to introduce one experience in Goblin Town, and as we grow we can push it in whatever direction we want. Maybe we'll decide to introduce new experiences or seasons in Goblin Town and keep going until we've unlocked as much content in Goblin Town as possible.
I think we had as much of an opportunity as anyone to make this a high-streaming game, and we were heavily involved in the promotion of (Only Up) in 2023, so we went down this game-centric path, and we found out that this game was just getting started, and it felt a bit like Goblintown, and we contacted the developer, and he added our art and all our own design content to the game, and (Only Up) became a hit and became a sensational indie game, and we thought at the time, have we seized a cross-era IP opportunity, and all this happened in the summer of 2023.
What led to (Goblin Town: Extreme Driving Game) was that we actually had an almost complete game developed, but it wasn't a game we were going to release. We started testing it, but ended up putting it on hold and maybe releasing it later. It was called (Goblin Crash) and it was kind of like a twisted metal game like (Rocket League). It was multiplayer and it was super fun, but it's really hard to release a multiplayer game as your first game. We decided to make a single-player game first, so (Goblin Crash) ended up being put on hold.
There's a lot of exciting features in [Goblin Town: Extreme Driving Game], and you can try out some gameplay that you've never seen before, for example: we have something called "Goblin Mode Audio," which actually goes back to our roots of screaming and talking like a goblin, and it's a little bit inspired by the bullet time in the [Matrix] movie and an original game called [Max Payne].
If you stagger or fall during a vertical death run, you can scream into the microphone or computer like a goblin and you can slow down and then work your way back onto the track, and in playtesting the most fun part of it was people screaming at the screen.
We think we have a real potential for success, and it will be available first on PC and Steam Deck, and then we'll gradually expand to several other consoles.
OpenSea: Is there anything else you want to talk about Goblintown or other upcoming content from Truth Arts?
Alex Taub: Yeah, I mean, we're doing a lot of things, we have three main aspects of our company, we do Web2 stuff, which is to say, we're working on a graphic novel, an animated series, and a series of different video games. "Goblintown: Really Tough Driving Game" is just the first one, and we're also going to launch a survival game later.
And then on the Web3 side, we're working on a number of things that I can't reveal right now, one of which I think a lot of people are going to be excited about is we're working on an AI Web3 video game that's more like [Dungeons & Dragons], it's in the early stages of the concept phase, and because it's in the early stages, if it loses momentum internally it could be shelved, but the initial stages of the development process are always the most exciting.
Then, we have a third part of the company, which is mainly engaged in meme technology-related work. We developed something called Meme Depot, which people like very much. It provides a convenient way to manage memes online. It is a bit like Giphy, but imagine that you can have pictures, videos and GIFs in the cloud. You don’t have to create a meme folder on your phone anymore, but directly in the cloud, easily managed.
We’re going to be launching a project on Abstract soon called Meme Groups, which will allow you to make memes with your friends. We feel that memes and meme technology are really important, and we have a lot of projects in the pipeline, so we’re very busy.
OpenSea: Yes, that’s great! I’m really looking forward to the game and want to try it out! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us.
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