In May 2022, Alex Taub and his co-founders saw an opportunity. Within just 10 days, they launched Goblintown, an NFT project that broke all the rules of the NFT space at that time.

As one of the three original founders of Truth Labs (now Truth Arts), Taub worked alongside his co-founders to create something completely counter-cultural. No roadmap, no utility, no Discord, free minting, and, at the time, anonymous creators. They flipped the standard NFT playbook on its head, and it paid off. Goblintown minted out in just 45 minutes and quickly became a viral sensation, known for its distinctive goblin artwork and unique web3 storytelling. 

Today, Goblintown is expanding beyond its web3 origins. They’re preparing to release Goblintown: Really Hard Driving Game on PC and Steam. For Taub and his team, Goblintown isn't just an NFT project—it's the foundation of what they hope will become an iconic brand with the cultural staying power of Star Wars or Pokémon.

‍Note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

OpenSea: First, I would love to talk about your background. What inspired you to co-found Truth Arts and Goblintown, and what was the vision for the company and the project?

Alex Taub: So, I am one of the three founders of something called Truth Labs. The founders are interesting, but the setup is complex. I founded it with someone who goes by the name Process Grey, our artist and chief creative officer, and Cesar Kuriyama, who is the founder of 1 Second Every Day and a friend of mine for 15-plus years. And then we created Goblintown through Truth Labs.

Eventually, we ended up merging with a company called Upstream, which I founded with my friend and Chief Technology Officer, Michael Schonfeld. Now, we’re Truth Arts, and we're all four co-founders. We originally did a mint called Illuminati NFT. We thought it'd be fun to have a little secret society on the blockchain, and what better than the Illuminati? We launched that in January 2022. 

We wanted to be a little secret society on the blockchain, but we also wanted to be like the company MSCHF in Brooklyn. They do all these crazy, funny things. They did the Big Red Boot,  Everyone Gets a Car with Mr. Beast, the Jesus shoes, and the Satan shoes, where they took a vial of blood and put it in the Nike shoes, and got sued by Nike. They've done a bunch of crazy stunts. And we wanted to be the web3 version of MSCHF and do fun, crazy stuff.

It just happened [that] the first idea we had was Goblintown, and we never looked back. The reason why Goblintown started was because of the May 2022 market crash. Everyone was saying, “You go to Goblintown when you lose all your money," which was from The Hobbit song, “Down Down to Goblin Town.” One day, I went to Cesar and Grey, and I was like, wouldn't it be funny if everyone had to change their PFP from an ape or a punk to a goblin during the bear market? Then we all riffed on each other for the next few hours, and Grey said he could make a really simple PFP project. 

Then Cesar suggested a free mint since everyone was down bad. We did it anonymously, so nobody knew it was us, and we wanted people to focus on what the thing is. Funny enough, people obviously did focus on the goblins, but they also obsessed over trying to figure out who's on the team, speculating that it was the founders of Bored Apes, Beeple, Snoop Dogg, and many others. So, in a way, that part backfired a little bit. The mechanics of the free mint, no utility, no discord, no roadmap, we sort of rifted on for a bit, and then we looped in the larger team, and everyone started to contribute something to it. It went from an idea to the mint in I think about 10 days. Because we wanted it to be anonymous and we wanted it to be free, we were afraid that we would never mint out because people would be afraid of wallet draining. I ended up going to my friend, Mike Dudas, co-founder of The Block, and was like, "Hey, Mike, we're working on this thing, and we think it could be big. Can we use your good name by having you publicly bless the project?" That was the big ask, and he did it, and he played his role perfectly. 

We launched it late afternoon on a Friday. I've been involved with many things in my life, but this thing blew up like nothing I had ever seen before. I think it minted out in 45 minutes, then it just started catching a lot of momentum.

‍OpenSea: Yeah, I remember all of this happening, and people were sending it to me. They were like, "Have you checked out this project?" And at the time, I was like, "Oh my god, this is iconic." But I also remember you launched without a roadmap, and there were many memes and jokes about how there was no roadmap for this project. What led to that approach?

Alex Taub: So the way we looked at it, and this credit all goes to Cesar and Grey, is we wanted to be the counterculture, like anti-everything, so anything anyone did in the NFT world, we wanted to be the opposite of it. We took a few things that were pretty standard, like utility, roadmap, Discord, metadata, and we just tried to flip it on its head. For example, everyone would have a roadmap, so we're not going to have a roadmap. Everyone has utility, we're not going to have utility. Everyone has a Discord, we're not going to have a Discord.

And then everyone looks at metadata as something you can't touch, so we're like, "Okay, we're gonna take five of the NFTs in the collection and we're going to update the metadata every two days and tell a story." Those 5 NFTs started as eggs, and a month and a half later, when you got to the end, you discovered it was the origin story for the bad guy in Goblintown. Our little own Darth Vader. It was just very different and unique, and it was just totally against what was normal. You couldn't touch the metadata. That was blasphemous.

So we looked at it as going against the grain and going against sort of everything. But when we say no roadmap, it doesn't mean we're not doing anything. We found that giving a roadmap is sort of a stupid thing. And the reason why is that, first of all, releasing a roadmap is not a requirement to put out a project. It's a decision a team needs to make if a public roadmap makes sense. We knew that in the web3 space, if you put out a roadmap and you say you’re going to do these five things and then you realize internally you shouldn't be doing one of those things, you sort of still have to do that thing. We felt like it was a silly thing to put one out, especially because we wanted to be flexible. We wanted to be able to do the thing that made sense and not the thing that we told people we were going to do because we thought that was the right thing 6 months ago.

‍OpenSea: Right. I know we talked a little bit about the lore of Goblintown and the very recognizable artwork behind it. What was the visual style and identity behind that? 

Alex Taub: That's completely Grey, the co-founder and chief creative officer of Truth Arts. He's sort of like our Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, George Lucas, all melded into one human. It's really him, and Bruce, our lore master. Together, they are just our superpower. Our goblins are not Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit goblins. They're not Harry Potter goblins. Historically, goblins are sort of schemy and usually bad. And our goblins are funny, fun, mischievous, and while very ugly, there is an immediate lovable piece to them. Sort of like a French Bulldog. Our goblins are definitely different than other historical goblins, which also makes them unique. The art style is very colorful, and when you see it, you know it’s Grey and us. 

OpenSea: Was it you who created the brand voice? I love how you guys communicate with people. I think it's always very funny to see Goblintown posts on the timeline, and I would just love to know the development of it.

Alex Taub: So I would say it was a group effort at the time, with the brand developed by Grey and Bruce. There was an awesome person on the team named Sydney, and she was a really big component of the goblin speak. It also sort of happened naturally; we opened up these Twitter spaces, and then people came up and just started talking goblin. I think the first person to do it was a guy named Cold XBT. He was the first goblin voice I heard. I don't know if he was historically the first one. But people would just go up and talk about goblins, and hundreds or thousands of people would come and listen, and it became this big thing. But the voice and Twitter Spaces were definitely Sydney, and she was the big driver of that. Everyone on the team brought something to the table. There was Scott, who did these incredible website experiences, Jonah and Alex, who did the dev stuff, Bruce did the lore, Grey did the art, so everyone brought something unique to the table. It was the right team and the right moment, and everything came together.

‍OpenSea: Back in February, you announced the “Goblintown: Really Hard Driving Game.” Are we able to chat about what’s to come with that? 

Alex Taub: Yeah! It's coming out at the end of April, and it is awesome. I need to give a big shout-out to Matt and Nicky on the team for being the driving (pun intended) force behind the game. They really deserve all the flowers for the game. It is not a web3 game, it's a Steam game. It's really a web2 game for all intents and purposes. There's no wallet connection, no tokens or anything like that. The main piece is our IP and brand, which obviously has web3 origins, but that's where it ends for this. When we look at something like Pokémon, you don't think of Pokémon as just a Game Boy game. You think of them as a brand now. Some people think of them as Pokémon GO, some think of them as the Pokémon movies, some think of the card game, or the collectibles. 

And so for us, our origins are web3; they will always be web3. That's where we started, but we have big aspirations. We think we have an opportunity to build a real brand that is not just explained in one way. Our aspirations are more like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, which we know are quite lofty, and we have a very, very long way to go. And then in terms of the game, we just wanted to make a really fun game first and foremost. It's sort of like the first introduction to our universe and our crazy characters and IP. We wanted to make a really fun and really hard game.

OpenSea: What can people expect from the gameplay? 

Alex Taub: I don't want to say it's like a rage-inducing game, but you may break a computer or controller. It’s really fun. The way we look at it is like Goblintown is the main character, it's a place, and anything could happen. In the same way that Fortnite is the main character of the island. It happens to be that the first thing happening in our place, Goblintown, is a driving game experience. For us, we're a small team and we're gonna introduce one experience in Goblintown, and as we grow, we can take it in any direction we want. Maybe we decide to introduce new experiences or seasons in Goblintown and continue until we unlock as much of Goblintown as possible. 

I think we have as good a chance as any for this to be a highly streamed game. We were very involved in the popularization of Only Up in 2023, and that’s why we went down this gaming-focused path. We discovered this game that was just getting started, and it felt like it was a Goblintown-ish type of game. We reached out to the developer, and he added our art and all our stuff inside the game. Only Up, blew up and became an indie game sensation, and we wondered if we were sitting on a generational IP opportunity. And that was summer 2023. 

The quick origin behind getting to Goblintown: Really Hard Driving Game is that we had actually built an almost full game that is not the game we are releasing. We began playtesting for it, but put a pin on it. Maybe we'll release it down the road. It was called Goblin Crash. It's like a twisted, metal Rocket League type of game. It's multiplayer and super fun, but it's really hard to launch a multiplayer game as your first game. We decided to do a single-player game first, so we ended up putting Goblin Crash on the shelf for now. 

There are a bunch of things in [Goblintown: Really Hard Driving Game] that are exciting in terms of types of things you could do that you haven't really seen before. I'll give one example: we have this thing called Goblin Mode Audio, and it actually goes back to our roots of screaming and talking like a goblin. It's a bit inspired by Bullet Time in the Matrix movie and an OG game called Max Payne. If you're teetering or falling off a vertical death run, you can scream into your mic or at your computer like a goblin, you can slow the thing down, and finagle yourself back onto the track. And in the play test, it's the funniest stuff, like people just screaming at their screens. 

We think we have something that could really take off. It's going to be on PC and Steam Deck to start, and then we'll eventually add it to a few other consoles.

OpenSea: Is there anything else for Goblintown or Truth Arts that's coming out that you want to chat about?

Alex Taub: Yeah, I mean, we're working on a ton of stuff. We have the company in three buckets. We have web2 stuff. So, we have a graphic novel we're working on, an animation show we're working on, and a bunch of different video games. [Goblintown: Really Hard Driving Game] is just the first one; we also have a survivor game that's going to come after. Then we have the web3 side, we're working on a bunch of things I actually can't talk about yet. One of them, I think, a lot of people will be excited about. Also, we're working on an AI web3 video game that's more like Dungeons and Dragons, and it's still very early at the end of the concept phase. Being so early, it may fall to the side if it loses momentum internally, but the earliest stage of building is always the most exciting.

Then we have a third part of the company, which is more meme tech stuff. We built this thing called Meme Depot that people really like. It's just an easy way to manage your memes online. It's sort of like Giphy, but imagine you could have images, videos, and GIFs in a cloud. Instead of having a folder of memes on your phone, you just have it in the cloud and can easily manage it. We're launching something on Abstract soon called Meme Groups, which allows you to make memes with friends. We just think memes and meme technology matter a lot. We've got a bunch of stuff cooking, and we're busy.

OpenSea: Yeah. That's awesome. I'm really excited for the game and to test it out! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us.