The year was 1990 and I, 8 year old Phil Ranta, was going through my regular Friday night routine at Blockbuster of renting a Nintendo game that I could play non-stop until school on Monday, or at least as much as possible before my brother booted me off of the system so he could play Tecmo Super Bowl.

Now when you’re 8, decision-making tactics are a bit different. I knew I liked Mega Man. I knew Mega Man games had a frame around the box with a red Capcom logo at the top. So when I saw a box with the same logo, I assumed it had to be decent. That game: Yo! Noid, the game based on Domino Pizza’s mascot.

It was….fine. I probably went out and played with the neighbor kids. Sadly.

But Domino’s knew what they were doing. Kids were playing Nintendo all day every day. Kids eat a lot of pizza. Get them to play a branded game and maybe they’ll spend more time telling their parents to order Domino’s despite the Ninja Turtles Pizza Hut relationship.

And now we have the metaverse, where the promise is the dynamism and real-time interaction of social media with the stickiness of gaming. So much like Domino’s in 1990, the brands want to stay in front of this trend.

We’ve seen Taco Bell drop an NFT collection, we’ve seen Nike sell virtual shoes, and Samsung building stores in Decentraland. I wanted to figure out how you even start to talk to a brand about this. Is it all about the press? Do they goal against it like other digital marketing? And who actually builds this stuff?

Our guest Christopher Neff, that’s who. As the VP of Creative Technology and Innovation at the community, he guided Samsung 837X, a Decentraland experience with games, NFTs, and a lot of buzz. Avoid the Noid, but don’t miss this conversation.

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