Blankos Block Party Interview: Mythical Games Discusses the Open Beta, Digital Ownership, and More

Origins

ComicBook.com: First of all, congratulations on Blankos Block Party! What was the genesis for the game's development?

Jamie Jackson: The genesis is, I've been obsessed with vinyl toys. I'm surrounded by my toys. It was something that's meant a lot to me. And as I got into video games and became a developer, I was like, "I'm older now. I don't play with toys like I used to," which is like Luke Skywalker fighting a G.I. Joe or something like that. It was more about, "I want to play with these toys on my shelf, so how do I do that?" And I love video games. I always wanted to make a game using vinyl toys and bringing that true vinyl toy culture to life, not just bringing in children's toys, but bringing in adult attitudes. That was something that just stuck in my head a long time ago. And then we created Mythical and we started to look into digital ownership. People go buy someone like James' toy and then someone else goes and pays three times more for it whenever they want to get it. And just exists. It's not like we're making it up; that's real. And I think that's incredible, but I also love the fact that it played into what we were creating around having the ownership and being able, for [artists like] James, to make a profit when it gets sold the second time, as well. That ownership is really interesting. And then the game has to be great as well, right? The game's got to be amazing fun. So, in a way, it all just from a love of everything, it came together through that.

Inspiration

What impact did games like Disney Infinity or LEGO Dimensions have on the development process?

Jackson: Honestly, it didn't. We didn't even think about it. It didn't have any influence on it to be honest, 'cause it wasn't about us creating real-world toys and bringing them into the game. It was about taking that beautiful culture around vinyl toys and the artists and just making a game around that. And the idea really was, "Where do vinyl toys go when we leave the room?" So, imagine James gets up and he goes to the bathroom, or I leave here, where would all these toys suddenly go to, to have these great, beautiful existences that they would have? Because that was really the key for the imagination.

How It Works

How are the Blankos vinyl toys going to work with the game itself?

Jackson: Everything's just digital. That's the key thing. And when you come into the game, the game is a free-to-play game. I think that's really important. People can just come and play a game. When a player comes into the game, we're going to loan them a pretty plain Blanko. You can do some fun stuff with it. What we've got is a shop you can go to and you can buy a Blanko, whether it's created by someone on my team or whether it's created by James or any of the amazing artists that we teamed up with in front of the season, you can just go and purchase that Blanko.

We get to do all this great stuff with people like James and bring these amazing designs to life. But then we get to do our game side of things. So you get a Blanko and it's at level zero, and you can train it up and you can pick a training path so it can have different skills.

Free-to-Play

Do players have to purchase one of these Blankos to play? You said it's free-to-play, but how does that work, exactly?

Jackson: They don't have to purchase one to play. When you get in there, you get a loan, it's a red Blanko. It's quite a simple design. As you play through the game, you can still level up that Blanko to a point. You won't be able to level that up super far, but you'll be able to play the whole game. We've got cosmetic attachments and we've got functional attachments, cool stuff like jet packs and things like that. James has done a very cool design for our Founder's Pack. If you want to really level up a Blanko, start collecting them, that's what you need to purchase.

And the cool thing about what we're doing is that it's yours, and I think this is really interesting, 'cause most people in games, they think they own everything in the game, but they don't, which is where we see these gray markets existing on eBay and whatnot. If you want to sell your Blanko, we're going to facilitate that in the game and make that really easy. Everything is going to be sold on a limited basis. They'll be very limited. Those things are going to become quite rare so we can see a lot of people buying them and selling them later on as they go up in price, which is really interesting and that's all completely legitimate. What's also cool is that, no matter where you buy it, you'll be able to play with anyone.

I don't think we've ever seen a developer encourage that secondary market.

Jackson: It's never been done before because there's never really been a technology to legitimize it the way we're using it, and I think that's really important. I think it's a big game-changer. We see it as a big chance for just the industry in general.

DJ Hero

Jamie, you've had a lot of success bringing concepts like DJ Hero to life and selling audiences on peripherals that might seem a little bit strange at first. Did that have any impact on Blankos Block Party?

Jackson: That's a good question. I mean, it's only in the sense of, I think a lot of my career has been around doing something a little bit outside of the box, and I've never been scared of it. Maybe just in the sense of this is a gut feeling of, "Does this feel like a cool thing?" Because we're not building any toys. I think if anything, because I've been through that whole ...I spent a good 10 years in the peripheral world with DJ Hero and then Guitar Hero. I was like, "We don't make any real toy," etc. One day maybe we'll make a [Blanko] toy, I dunno, but it was never going to be about bringing toys to life. It was like, "Let's focus on a game and let's really try to innovate within that space." Because I feel like that's what we did with DJ Hero.

From Toys to Games

James, you have a lot of experience in the toy industry, designing figures for different lines. What attracted you to this sort of project?

James Groman: Well, I worked for probably every major toy company as a freelancer, but I haven't done a lot of things for the video game industry, so it was a chance to work in a totally different genre than I was used to. But still, it was bridging that gap between toys and video games, bringing a little bit of what makes toys collectible and what makes them appealing and bringing that into a video game space. I'm also a teacher and I teach at a local college here. I teach students character design and I teach them professional skills and how to make a living as an artist. And they're all video gamers and they all want to work in video games. One of the other things that attracted me was, now I got some street cred as far as designing for video games. And I know enough about it because I researched it. I'm not a gamer myself, but I know all the artists that work in games and all the designers that have worked on games, because the design work has been brought to a different level in the last few years. Some of the best design work on the planet is being done for video games. Now I can speak to it more as someone that actually has worked in that space, which is a major plus, and it was an educational need too.

I could paint a toy prototype. I could design one, but to actually design something for a video game, you have to think a little bit differently, and I'm always open to re-educating myself and learning a new way of doing things. It's all about variety. As a designer, you want to work on projects that are all varied and different in nature because it just makes life more interesting. Being able to design for a video game and the constraints I had to adhere to, to make sure my character was playable was a challenge. But that's what makes it interesting. I think it was just like, "Create it and we can make it work in this game." I thought that was amazing too. That's an artist's dream.

Limitations

That's actually really interesting because there are real-world constraints when you're looking at an actual action figure or a toy. Did Mythical impose any limitations to make it something that would work in the real world or were you given free reign to let your imagination fly?

Groman: I think the major constraints were working with a Blanko. We were given the Blanko forms, that platform toy that was already designed. I actually liked the fact that you're given the shape and you have to make it as magnetic and as different as you possibly can, while also thinking about how I would play with him in the game differently than I would play with someone else's character. Like, Boss Dino is a dinosaur that is a mob boss that's all about money. It's right there, you have this feeling of a character that, as the designers are designing the game, they have something to hang their creativity on. It's like, "Well, these are the constraints, the character, this is the direction we can take him." I would have to think that any of these other artists probably felt the same way I did.

Jackson: So, I meet with James and everybody else and it was the easiest because I'm like, "Thank you for working with us. I'm a huge fan. Do whatever you want." That was it. Whereas when I was making DJ Hero and we were designing characters, there was a little more vision and holding people to it. But for this, I was like, "James, you do whatever you want. Just try and keep it clean." That's it. And it was great fun for me to watch a lot of these people that are huge fans of create this stuff.

Groman: When you guys first approached me, I think I did probably like 16 designs for you. And we all went through them and tried to figure out which ones were the most appropriate and which ones people would respond to, which is really important. And it just makes me think, "Man, I would love to see some of the other designs that you had to sift through from some of these other artists," because they had to be amazing because, for whatever reason, some of them fell by the wayside, but other ones, it is all on us. Even in the toy industry, you're going to find that some sit on the shelf a little bit longer than others because people respond to certain characters.

Stories

Are the artists basically telling the story through the character designs or will these characters actually have some background?

Jackson: It's more letting the artist tell the story. You create your own personality. That way, all of us could have the same toy, but in our own heads, we create our own personality of that toy. It boils back to when we were children and we were in the sandpit playing or whatever. That's important to me. I can train Boss Dino to be something that maybe isn't what James had in mind for the story, but it's because it's my Boss Dino that I know. This is mine. I own it. I'm creating my own narrative around it. It's like, Flint from G.I. Joe was still Flint, but my Flint was different from yours. So, that's super important. When you buy the toy you'll see little backstories, we'll drop these hints of what they are just like when you go and buy a toy from a store. But this is yours to do what you want to. So you should create your own narrative around it and you should train it to do things you want it to do. Even though it has this beautiful, rich narrative that comes from the originator. If people are playing this game, if they're not necessarily creative, this game does offer them the ability to feel creative because they can literally come in and take it in whatever direction they want.

I think that helps someone feel some type of ownership or that they are part of this amazing world. And that ownership is really important because it's yours and you can do something with it. But also on the other side, it means a lot to me that James is going to get paid every single time a toy is sold, right? I know he's getting his dues and that's all handled by a blockchain-powered backend. But not just the first time, the second, third, fourth, and fifth time, James is going to get his dues. And so like, I spent 21 years in video games to be able to deliver something that honors that code and to be able to bring that to a digital world is really important to me. I'm very proud of what we've done. It's very unique for the industry. It's never been done before. I like doing stuff that's never been done before. It's exciting.

Groman: And I've said this before, but it's any designer's dream. That's what we all really strive for. Whether we realize it or not. It's like, I worked on Star Wars. I worked on Transformers. I've worked on so many different properties. They're all owned by someone else. But being able to benefit from something you've designed on a long-term basis, actually, that's what I want in the later part of my career. I've been doing it for a long time. My ultimate goal is to do more and more stuff. That is, it's something I create and I can benefit beyond just selling the design. That that design can continue to generate income for me, I think that's wonderful. It's gratifying.

Platforms

Are you guys looking at any other specific platforms?

Jackson: Yeah. Right now we focused on PC. We'll talk more about console a little later.

Jamie, where do you see Blankos Block Party a year from now?

Jackson: I see us with a huge install base of people really making it their own. I see us with a really thriving community. And I see us being continually blown away by what players build, and I see them building things we didn't expect.

Final Notes

If there's one note that you guys could leave on, to get people excited for this game, what would it be?

Jackson: Oh, man, one note that's hard. If you want to get in early, go get yourself a Founder's Pack. They're going to go fast. They're going to be rare. You're going to have some crazy lessons about what digital value suddenly means. And come and join our world. Just come and be part of it because you can just participate by coming to play, but you can also contribute by making cool stuff.

Groman: Jamie actually said it earlier, but I think it's just plain fun. If you buy a gun, it's a piggy bank that shoots coins out of his mouth. I think that's awesome. I have grandkids and stuff and it's great having a game that's not about shooting and blowing things up and hacking somebody with a sword. It's just plain fun and everything is built around that. I think that's one of the major appeals of the game.

*****

Blankos Block Party's open beta begins December 10th. For more information on the game, you can check out the game's website, which can be found right here.

Do you plan on checking out the open beta for Blankos Block Party? What do you think of the game so far? Let us know in the comments or share your thoughts directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk all things gaming!