Meet Kevin: How a $70 Million NFT Game Became Crypto's Favourite Joke

Every big game has a moment when the curtain comes up and players see what they paid for. For Pixelmon, that moment came in late February 2022, and it went about as badly as a reveal can go.

Weeks earlier, the project had raised about $70 million by selling NFT creatures to fans of a promised open-world monster-catching game. When the actual art was revealed on the OpenSea marketplace, buyers found clumsy, oddly shaped models that looked nothing like a premium game. One of them, a blocky green creature with a vacant stare, was quickly nicknamed Kevin. Kevin became a meme, and in a strange way, the most valuable thing Pixelmon ever made.

The $70 million mint

Pixelmon's pitch was ambitious. Its founder, known only as Syber, said the goal was "to create the first AAA NFT game": an open-world RPG in which players would explore, catch creatures and own them as NFTs. Think Pokémon, on the blockchain.

The first collection went on sale on 7 February 2022 through a Dutch auction, in which the price starts high and drops over time until buyers step in. Prices started at 3 ETH, then worth roughly $8,000 to $9,000. The collection sold out in less than a day, raising about $70 million.

These first NFTs were billed as "playable genesis collectibles", creatures that could not be caught in the game and would come with an airdrop of Pixelmon land. Buyers were paying, in effect, for a front-row seat to a game that did not yet exist.

The reveal

When the creatures were revealed, the reaction was brutal. Social media filled with screenshots of awkward models, mismatched proportions and textures that looked unfinished. Some called it comical, some called it broken, and some called it a scam. Twitch streamer Brycent pointed out that a 3 ETH price tag meant the project needed to deliver $70 million of value to justify itself.

Kevin, described by many as looking like an ugly zombie Squirtle, became the face of the fiasco.

Syber apologised in a Discord session, calling the reveal "unacceptable" and "a horrible mistake". He said the NFTs could be updated and would be improved, that the money raised would pay for better models and the game itself, and that some Unity stock assets had been used in an early prototype but were never meant for the final game. He promised an alpha before the end of 2022.

By the following Monday, the collection's floor price on OpenSea had fallen to about 0.4 ETH, roughly $1,100, against the 3 ETH that early buyers had paid.

Kevin's afterlife

Kevin refused to go away. He inspired fan accounts, a memecoin and endless jokes. On-chain investigator ZachXBT went further than most critics and labelled the whole project a rug pull. Syber later deleted his Twitter account.

In September 2022, a startup called LiquidX acquired a majority stake in the Pixelmon IP and took over development. The new team redesigned most of the creatures but made a telling choice: Kevin kept his original look. In April 2023, an original Kevin NFT sold for 4.2 ETH, then over $7,200, while ordinary Pixelmon NFTs were trading around 0.3 ETH.

Then, in summer 2023, Kevin went mainstream. Coinbase relaunched him as a $2 collectible in beach attire to celebrate the launch of its Base network, as part of its "Onchain Summer" campaign. The bundle included a raffle for an in-game egg, perks for a planned mini-game, and the option to buy a physical Kevin building-block set.

WGC's take

Pixelmon is a story about money arriving before the work. Raising $70 million in a day for a game that had not been built put the team in an impossible position: whatever they revealed next would be judged against a AAA price tag. Collectors effectively paid for a finished blockbuster and received a prototype.

Kevin's strange success says something too. In the NFT market, attention can be worth more than quality. That is fun when the attention is a joke everyone is in on. It is less fun for the buyers who paid 3 ETH for a game that, by mid-2023, still had no public release date. For more on how the 2021-22 boom turned into a bust, see our editorial on the lessons of blockchain gaming's crashes.