Ultra Rare is a games, digital collectibles and app development company based in the northeast of England, perhaps best-known for its 2021 collection The Horrors. That NFT set, which immortalised monsters from literature, cinema and folklore, went on to generate over a million dollars in sales and announced the company as one unwilling to simply follow the herd.
With Galactic Hubs having sponsored a recent event organised by Ultra Rare, one that featured a Trilium prize pool, founders John and Richie have been sharing the company’s origin story, philosophy, and hopes for the future.
From The Horrors to Dropping NFTs on Alien Worlds
“We’ve probably known each other for 15 years,” says Richie, who was a professional poker player prior to starting Ultra Rare. “John worked as a social worker originally with my wife, that’s how we got to know each other. Years ago, we were having a few drinks and I was talking about Bitcoin which he didn’t understand. Later, I mentioned NFTs as a concept and this time he got more interested.”
“I guess it was quite a few years before NFTs were really, like, a serious thing,” adds John. “It was the Garbage Pail Kids (GPK) release on WAX that really brought us in; Richie had started collecting them, and I’ve been a huge Garbage Pail Kids collector since I was a child. So I was really excited. We came in as collectors and got pretty excited about the possibilities.”
From there, momentum built quickly as the pair set about creating their very own NFT collection. John, an experienced writer whose work spanned film, TV, theatre, comics and novels, picks up the story: “As a creator, I saw a really unique opportunity to tell stories in a medium that was just completely new and fascinating. The creative side really excited me and we weaved that into our work as we developed.”
“Obviously at that time Garbage Pail Kids was the main thing, but there was a lot of parody and bright colours,” explains Richie. “We fancied doing something a bit different. There was a big gap in the market, there was nothing black and white and a bit sinister. So we went that route to start with, and that was where Ultra Rare began, with large collectible sets.”
The high-quality artwork was not the only aspect that set Ultra Rare apart at the time: The Horrors marked the first time a hybrid pack opening system had been used, with 50% of packs mint-on-demand and 50% preminted. “You didn’t know what you were getting until you opened them,” explains Richie. “That was just the start. We did massive collectors’ rewards, too. So if you went to the effort of collecting one of our large sets, you would get a lot of new NFTs and rarer characters for it.”
With The Horrors having proved a major hit with the WAX community, which snapped up 60k cards in just two hours, John and Richie, assisted by a talented team of artists and illustrators, continued to plot a singular course. Their next NFT set, Cryptids, saw the company airdrop rare cards to Alien Worlds Explorers mining on Ultra Rare land. As one of the first projects to drop NFTs on Alien Worlds, Ultra Rare dispensed a whopping 12,000 NFTs.
“A few NFTs had already been dropped by others on the land, but we dropped a full collectible set and we had larger sets after that,” says Richie. “People went wild for it, there was trading and collecting, it was really good. It probably was a bit of a gamble at the time buying all of those eight pieces of land up – but we still own them!”
Between GPK, The Horrors and Alien Worlds, Ultra Rare had established itself as an active and creative contributor to the growing WAX ecosystem, and it was soon collaborating with a diverse range of projects from Atomikings and Cryptowriter to Nefty Blocks and Fightlands. So, why WAX?
“WAX is very cheap to mint on,” Richie says simply. “We were doing 60,000 NFTs our first set, you’re not doing that on Ethereum or wherever else. Even now you’re not minting those numbers, so four years ago, you 100% weren’t!”
Digital Comics and Collectibles
As well as NFTs, John and Richie are extremely passionate about games and comics. So it’s little wonder they’ve produced both. Eight months after The Horrors collection dropped, they introduced Ultra Comix, designed to bring the worlds of digital collectibles and comics together.
Their first title was Beasts and Butchers, with illustrations by renowned comic book artist Kev Hopgood, whose credits include Spider-Man and Judge Dredd. Rather than being a simple digital comic book interface, Ultra Comix enabled comics to be both read and customised, with users switching out panels they’d purchased in packs.
“Comics are obviously collectible anyway, but making the panels within them collectible is the evolution and innovation we tried to add,” says John. “It’s an ongoing project for us and something we’re trying to perfect.”
Ultra Comix recently hosted a comic set in Alien Worlds, one that is linked to Ultra Rare’s free-to-play game Meta Battler. “The comic uses as a baseline the Alien Worlds lore handbook, which lays out the different races and technology,” John explains. “And it uses that as the parameters to create a little taster story of something we hope will be much larger. A few reference points in terms of influences are The Mandalorian and Shadow of the Colossus which is an iconic PlayStation game.”
“I’m personally very excited to collect the comic,” adds Richie. “I think people are gonna be very pleased with the way the story goes, but also just with the collecting experience, how it all looks.”
Meta Battler, meanwhile, is a rogue-like deck builder game in the vein of Slay the Spire and Balatro; John cites Mortal Kombat as an influence, as well as “a really obscure handheld system called Barcode Battler that was released in the UK, where you’d scan a barcode and it would give stats to a character in the game.” Uniquely, players can sync any of their existing NFTs across to Meta Battler, making them playable assets; the minimum number of NFTs required to play is 30.
“It’s been a long time in the making, nigh on two years to develop,” says Richie. “We always wanted to build a game, but that seemed far-fetched five years ago when we started. Everybody wants utility for NFTs, so we thought we’d add utility for every NFT on WAX! Over 1,000 different collections have had NFTs synced, I think we’re over three quarters of a million NFTs synced into the game from different collections. Not every NFT is equal, though: when you sync them they generate stats, and Meta Battler NFTs have a higher chance of getting good stats than others. Then we’ve got collaborators and featured collections – Alien Worlds is a featured collection, meaning you get much higher-rated cards and can build a better deck and power through the game a lot quicker.”
So, how does the Alien Worlds comic feed into Meta Battler the game?
“You win NFT pages by competing on a new Alien Worlds tower completely inspired by your themes and art,” Richie explains. “If you play on the tower, you’re entered into an hourly competition, every hour we give away five. The comic is 10 pages in length, we give them away one page at a time and give away thousands of packs. Over time, you’ll be collecting them, getting duplicates and trading with our community.”
In addition to the dedicated Alien Worlds tower, there are also Horrors and Meta Battler towers: the number of levels you progress through determine the likelihood of receiving comic prizes which are dropped directly into the player’s wallet. As with previous Ultra Rare collections, users get to ‘crack’ their pack and see what they got. “That’s the comic viewing experience; the second part was the event, which lasted for 28 days (October 9 until Nov 5) and had four weekly leaderboards,” says Richie. “That’s when TLM came into it, you could win prizes for how high you climbed. The amount of bosses you beat over those seven days determined your rank. The higher you were, obviously the more TLM you earned.”
View of the Future: More Games, Comics Collections
Richie and John make an inspired team: there’s a compelling infectiousness about their love of collecting and technology. While Richie describes himself as a “numbers geek, a statistician who likes leaderboards and mint numbers,” John is largely inspired by the art.
As far as mint numbers are concerned, Richie mentions a new tool recently added to Meta Battler that means low mint numbers achieve a high leaderboard score. “I’d love to add something similar to the comic experience as well. Obviously, you get graded comics and collectibles; we feel like we can do that with mint numbers and add a bit of competitiveness to it.”
So what does the future look like for Ultra Rare?
“With Meta Battler, we want to make a game that can stand on its own and isn’t sort of a web3 game – it could exist outside this space and be played and enjoyed by traditional gamers,” says John. “A game that is really good, well-developed, fun. That is where it will go. It will take us a couple of years to get there but that’s where I want us to be, I want us to keep having fun and innovating, trying new things and being brave.”
“We’ll keep creating, we love creating collectible sets – it’s what we did from the start,” adds Richie. “We’ve got quite a way to go with the comic platform, we’ll keep developing that as we’ve got so many comics lined up that we could drop. Obviously we’re very excited by Meta Battler and have a few big updates planned for the next six months. But it’s funny, we really do not like selling things – we never have, it’s not enjoyable to us! We like creating things.
“One of the brilliant things about Meta Battler and Alien Worlds the comic is the fact that we’ve got a way of distributing them in a fun way, where everybody can get involved and we’re not having to shill our product and hawk them out there and what have you. I think we’ll just keep trying to be innovative, create new fun stuff that people like. And take Meta Battler to the next level.”