[Dive #32] Down, Down to Goblintown
Next Stop: ₐₐₐₐₐₐₐᵤᵤᵤᵤᵤGGGₕₕₕₕₕ gₒbbₗᵢₙₛ GₒBₗᵢₙₙₙₙₙₙₙₙₙₛ
🚨🚨WARNING🚨🚨: This dive contains pictures of ugly goblins and link to tweets with goblin noises. You may be offended (probably more confused), but I promiseeeee, this is safe for work 😂
I’ll be honest with you guys. I’m past the honeymoon phase of writing for this newsletter. In the first month of NFTs with TPan, writing every weekday was a joy regardless of the topic. However, these days it’s a bit more of a slog. But when I get into my Writer’s Room (aka my local Philz Coffee), I get in the zone and when I click ‘Publish’ I am reminded of why I do this every day.
That said, every week there is at least one topic that I get excited to write about. And usually these topics come out of left field considering how quickly the space moves. Goblintown is one of these topics. Fresh from yesterday night, they’ve leapfrogged the long list of topics I want to write about.
Ok thanks for the preface TPan. What is Goblintown?
It’s this.
HOLY SHIT. *Deletes e-mail and unsubscribes from newsletter*
Still there? I warned ya. There will be more of these ugly creatures. If the show Fear Factor was revived, I think Goblintown would be frontrunner for the mascot. But let’s take a step back...
WTF is Goblintown?
It actually took me a while to understand what this meme meant, but I quickly understood the context in which Goblintown was always mentioned: The Bear Market.
Over the past month I came across tweets referencing the meme like so:
Fun incorporation of Goblintown as an address. Why 1700? This is a reference to the falling price of Ethereum, which has been on a downward trend lately, similar to the rest of the market.
Good times? Memes. Bad times? Memes. One of the posterchild memes of the bad times? Goblintown.
Thanks TPan. I get Goblintown as a meme in Crypto Twitter, but what IS Goblintown?
Great question. I actually had to look it up. From what I can tell, Goblintown seems to be a reference to the song from J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit soundtrack, “Down, Down to Goblin Town.
Here’s part of the lyrics:
Crush, smack! Whip crack!
Smash, grab! Pinch, nab!
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad!
The black crack! the black crack!
The black crack! the black crack!
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad!
WTF is Goblintown.wtf?
Ok great, we all had a crash course about goblins and I don’t blame you for wishing you had that Men In Black pen to erase the past 5 minutes from your memory.
The market has been rough recently — Stocks, crypto, gas prices, everything. Can you guess which is the NASDAQ index and which is Bitcoin? If you guess correctly I’ll send you a picture of a goblin.
And suddenly over the weekend, Goblintown.wtf (yes, that’s the website URL) popped up. No advance notice, no Discord server, no Twitter account, anonymous team.
Even as an experienced person in the space, I approached this project with caution. I was enticed by the free mint (aka a free roll), but everything about it was a little sketchy. Cool concept, but no other info. Unfortunately, it sold out before I could mint and it was off to the races on the secondary market, which I chose to ignore.
When you’re evaluating projects like these with little to no info, you have to make split-second decisions because speed is critical to get in on a hot project that may turn a profit, especially if it’s a free mint.
But as more information on the project was pieced together by the community, I took time to look back on the website. I encourage you to do the same if you’re able to tolerate it.
The initial landing page gets you in the mood of Goblintown. It’s ugly. It’s scary. It’s uncomfortable. That’s exactly what the proverbial Goblintown in crypto feels like when your portfolio is down 50%.
Family? Yikes. Despite the scarce amount of information from a traditional NFT project POV, the story-telling and lore is rich.
Rude…but very Goblin-like.
Once you enter, the necessary information is there but with a distinct take.
Twitter, Opensea, and Volume icons are illustrated in Goblintown style.
Turn on your volume, listen to the music. Sure sounds like a Goblintown. Click on the volume button to put it into mute. This attention to detail is not done by a team from Fivver, that’s for sure.
FAQ? Nope. The Goblintown team is creating a story through a scenario that would typically happen in the real world. Take note of the language and spelling too, we’ll get to that later.
Did you noticed this little Goblin? If you click on it…
The family portrait turns into a team portrait, which reveals a new member of the team every day.
What does this all remind me of? Remember my Dive on Azuki and breakdown of their website? This is the exact same thing. This website makes you feel something. Feeling repulsed means the project was successful. 😂
The Art
It’s ugly.
But is it well done? I didn’t think about it in detail until I came across this thread from someone with an artistic background, which made me look at these ugly creatures in a different light.
TLDR:
The consistency of the style and artistic tone is top-notch. The proportions are distorted and exaggerated, but do not break the rules of this style.
The tone of the project is amplified with the earth tones in the color palette
The consistency is shown through other parts of the ecosystem beyond the NFTs, such as the website.
The art is distinct. All of the top projects have traits and a style that anyone in the space can immediately recognize. This is true with Goblintown as well.
It’s REALLY hard to make ‘ugly’ broadly appealing especially for Western cultures. Disney and other cartoons have trained Western cultures to view ugly/grotesque shapes as evil or for villains.
There are few examples of ugly art that have become beloved. Tim Burton is an example of this, and Goblintown seems to be on a path to do the same for NFTs.
Makes you look at these Goblins a little differently, eh?
The Spaces
Goblintown spaces are…hard to describe. As a primer, it may be worth a few minutes to read my piece on Goop meditation. Goblintown spaces followed this line of thinking (maybe they were inspired by it?) but took it to a whole different level.
Listen to them. I promise there are takeaways from this LOL 😂
What’s fascinating here was that Goblintown spaces kept character and brought others into it their world.
In the first example, the speaker was curious about the roadmap. Most projects lay out some sort of roadmap for its prospective holders to evaluate hopefully provide more conviction as a result. Instead, Goblintown mocked the speaker and effectively shut him up. “Wen roadmap?” Goblintown isn’t about roadmaps, it’s an experience.
In the second example, a speaker was curious about tokenomics. “Were you guys thinking about dropping a token?” The answer was a chorus of babbles.
As the lore of Goblintown grows, there is less pressure on the core Goblintown team to uphold the ethos and culture of the project. The holders and broader community begin to understand the norms and rules of Goblintown and uphold it as well. Is it rude? Yes. Is it part of Goblintown culture? Absolutely. Unsavory for most, but fun if you participate and understand what the cultural norms of this community are.
However, I knew I had to write about Goblintown after the Twitter Spaces I joined yesterday evening.
This 3.5 hour Twitter Spaces consistently had over 2,000 concurrent listeners, and in total had 44k+ unique listeners. And what was discussed over those 210 minutes?
Goblin noises, and broken goblin sentences like:
“burger goblin burger ape burger”
“Roadmap burger”
“Burn blue chip, green chip only”
"do kwon burger with butt hair"
“gary p burger with gary p sauce”
“gary p sauce on your face”
"don’t sweep the floor, keep it dirty. dirty floor good"
"fire egg fire egg"
“baby goblin burger”
"welcome to goblintown may i take your order? would you like to order a #2 or a #2?"
"i will airdrop you off the cliff human. we will use you for our staking utility. human staking utility. someone put him on a stake quick"
The Goblintown community also joined in, adding to the conversation in their respective goblin voices as well. Again, the community understood the cultural norms and enriched the space.
TPan, you’re crazy. I don’t blame you dear reader.
So what happened after this spaces abruptly concluded?
Talk about Goblintown of course. Everyone went on Twitter, Discord, and other Twitter Spaces to talk about…the only thing worth talking about.
These are from accounts that have hundreds of thousands of followers. LooksRare is an Opensea competitor and tweeting about Goblintown lol. You can’t pay for this type of reaction. This is viral marketing folks.
Sure, if we were to talk about sheer numbers, this is relatively small compared to a McDonald’s or Nike campaign. However, these are strategies and tactics that Fortune 500 companies would pay a pretty penny for. Oh wait…maybe this got some more attention than I initially thought.
The Attention to Detail and Culture
Now that we’ve all lost several IQ points…Dude there’s more? I really am going to unsubscribe. 😭
The last piece I want focus on is the level of detail and sub-cultural understanding from the team. This isn’t work from a Web2 brand or some marketing agency. This is a ‘for us, by us’ type of project.
If this was the first NFT experience you came across, you would immediately write off NFTs as bad. I would too. However, this is a project that truly understands its audience, which is why it has taken the NFT community by storm.
Goblintown created their own ‘language’ through superscripts and subscripts. Here’s a fun generator to play around with. This further enriched the Goblintown lore through something that was comprehendible yet intriguingly foreign at the same time. Additionally, the community could participate as well!
References to NFT culture: Gary P = Gary Vee, a huge name in the space. Steve Aoki, a large name in the space as well, is one of the 1/1’s. McDonald’s is a prominent meme in the space, and is one of the traits in Goblintown. The team understands what gets the people going.
Twitter first, Twitter only: The team focused social media efforts on Twitter to counter the constraints of not building a community for months before launch. Risky move, but when done well the returns are tremendous and the singular channel becomes a megaphone. Below is Goblintown’s first tweet on May 23rd, 3 days ago. Since then, the Twitter account has 1,500+ tweets (including retweets) and over 31k followers. Not bad.
A discord is coming soon as more details surrounding the project are revealed. But for now, the gambit has paid off handsomely.
If this is your first time reading one of my posts, thank you for joining me down this weird rabbit hole. I promise, 90% of my posts are more ‘normal’ 😉.
And for my seasoned readers, I’d appreciate a share to a Marketer in your life. I strongly believe that Web3 is out for Web2 Marketing’s lunch and there is much to learn from this space.
ˢᵉᵉ ʸᵒᵘ ᵗᵒᵐᵒʳʳᵒʷ :⁾ ₐₐₐₐₐₐₐᵤᵤᵤᵤᵤGGGₕₕₕₕₕ