Irreverent Labs has raised $40 million to further boost its efforts to create MechaFightClub, a robot cockfighting game that uses non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Created by Voodoo PC founder Rahul Sood, the Seattle-based blockchain gaming company recently introduced its first game: MechaFightClub. The characters are mechanical-looking roosters reminiscent of cockfighting, but Sood thinks of them as hilarious figures in a cruelty-free combat sport.
The financing was disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. No other details were provided. We will have more information on this later.
Meanwhile, Irreverent Labs previously told us that the MechaFightClub chickens are NFT-powered mechabots, using the blockchain to verify each chicken’s uniqueness. The title is a “play to win” game, where players can own the characters they buy and benefit from them if they can resell them to someone else once they have leveled up.
The game is set in a dystopian future dominated by alien mechabots. When a global resistance hacks into the remaining 41,000 chicken-like mechanical robots, these weapons of war are redistributed to the public as “weapons of mass entertainment.”
It takes place in 2065 after the aliens make their first contact with Earthy. They considered that humanity was finally worthy to join the interstellar races of the galaxy. And then the aliens realized that they seriously overestimated humanity. They left and left Earth. But they left some technology for humans to figure out.
“It’s kind of like Free Guy where it’s non-player characters (NPCs) with artificial intelligence,” Sood said in a previous interview.
Sood thinks of MechaFightClub as Mortal Kombat meets Gundam Wing with a dash of irreverent South Park sensibility.
MFC players will collect, train and battle combat robots in a futuristic mixed martial arts-inspired experience. Each mechabot develops unique fighting styles, abilities and preferences throughout its life, using machine learning to give each NFT a realistic personality on and off the battlefield, Sood said.
“For me, creating artificially intelligent entertainment is super interesting,” he said. “I think this is where the games go. And no one else has done this yet. We will be the first to do so.”
It’s a bit of a crazy idea. But the company has 20 people, including a small design team in Seattle and developers in the Ukraine. Irreverent Labs had previously raised $5 million.
“There’s a reason we’re called Irreverent Labs,” Sood said. “We don’t want people to take us seriously and be offended by what we’re doing. We want people to have a sense of humor.”
The combination of advanced AI personalities, spectator options, and kaiju-inspired 3D art will make MechaFightClub the biggest fight club in the metaverse, Sood said.
It’s an interesting change for Sood, the creator of Microsoft Ventures, founder of Voodoo PC (acquired by HP) and esports game firm Unikrn (acquired by Entain).
Sood said that the game is based on the blockchain because, at its core, it is a collection game. The game resembles Warhammer or Heroclix, where the main way to interact with the game’s economy is by collecting and customizing a fighter (or mechabot).
However, unlike traditional collectible games, each collectible in MFC is completely unique. They are totally unique not only because of the content of their models and related metadata, but also because each mechabot has an individual AI that harbors millions of personal experiences unique to that mechabot, and the mechabot has learned from each of those unique experiences. experiences. They also have their own simulated genetic code.
The NFT is intended to mean that no two versions of those tokens are the same. These can uniquely identify characters. That’s important because MFC’s mechabots will be so artificially intelligent, so genetically rich, so individualistic that they’ll be more like living, breathing creatures, Sood said.
Blockchain means players can trust that the company is creating what it says it is, and allows them to individually take ownership of their mechabot and use it however they want, including selling, staking, or even using it in other blockchain applications. the blockchain, Sood said.
Irreverent Labs is working with the Solana blockchain, which has an ecosystem that is popular with gaming and processes transactions faster.
The co-founder is David Raskino, who worked with Sood at Microsoft Ventures. Raskino brought some AI experience in a field called agent simulation. That is the basis of the AI brains of the chicken-like creatures. The game is being built in 3D in Unity. The game brings together breeding, arena fighting, AI, and leveling mechanics.
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