For this episode’s sponsored Hot Topic, Loren Roosendaal of Galactic Entertainment explain show they are creating the world’s first cinematic multiverse through Planet Quest, a digital planet sale. Bringing together an all-star team of Hollywood and games industry talent, Loren is creating the world's first cinematic multiverse built from the ground up with its community in mind. Tune in to learn more about this next Marvel or Star Wars franchise based on blockchain technology!
Listen to the podcast here
Hot Topic Feature: Loren Roosendaal Of Galactic Entertainment & PlanetQuest - Immersive Multiverses Of Discovery, Exploration, And Ownership
This sponsored Hot Topic features Loren Roosendaal, Founder and Chairman at Galactic Entertainment. He is the Founder at Planet Quest where he also brings together an all-star team of Hollywood and games industry talent to create the world's first cinematic multiverse built from the ground up with its community in mind. The goal, creating the next Marvel or Star Wars franchise based on blockchain technology. Loren, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Thank you, Ethan. It’s great to be here.
Loren, we get excited about entertainment industry applications of Web3 technology. It sounds like what you're building falls in that category. You've launched the first community friendly NFT planet sale. Can you walk us through the details?
Let me rewind that intothe concept of even selling planets, which I'm sure as we delve deeper into Planet Quest and its concept, we’ll look more into.
I've been buying planets for a long time, but for those at home, let's rewind a little bit.
It's like buying an island. It's similar.
If you look at it in a big picture, we started growing this idea of Planet Quest and the notion of a cinematic multiverse and taking that into the sci-fi realm, which we are excited about. Lots of background there. We have great people from the movie industry that have worked on Star Wars and Blade Runner and all these awesome sci-fi franchises.
Our natural thought went too well. If we want to maximize the potential of true digital ownership, which is something we happen to do via NFTs, what would be the coolest thing that you could possibly own in amazing sci-fi multiverse? Obviously, you think StarWars. What would you give to own half or one of these planets that's been the playground of these amazing epic adventures?
That idea started early on. We went into stealth mode and spent quite some time building this cool tech called the Genesis Engine, which essentially allows us to procedurally while still using some level of Hollywood art direction, generate entire planets from orbit in 3D. Indeed, we launched our community-friendly planet sale where people were able to write essentially a motivation letter and apply to buy a planet. People did in quite some large numbers. We created a top ranking. We let go of the first roughly 1,000 and something planets into the community.
I don't know why, when I hear the term community-friendly planet sale, I imagine a farmer's market. I have no idea why those two things are coming together. What do you mean when you say community-friendly? How do you make it community friendly?
The thing is when you are selling digital assets like this, people realize there's a lot of value to be had. There's only a limited amount. A lot of the time what tends to happen is some technically savvy people will set up a bot. A lot of these sales tend to be first comfort serve. Five seconds after the button has been pushed and the sale is live, all the planets are gone. It's like ticket scalpers. They're selling them secondhand on the market for twice the price, three times the price, four times the price. We wanted to avoid that.
For that reason, we essentially had people write applications. we could also compare their history with the project Had they been part of our community for a longer time, had they participated in it, had they been part of the storyline, had they brought their friends along with their motivation, which allowed us to be much more selective when it came to ranking and then letting these people in. Rather than being some a bang, let's go, first come first serve, it was based on merit.
That does make a lot of sense. That is much appreciated. I also appreciate that at my farmer's market. There's not some bot that's grabbing all the incredible heirloom tomatoes and then I have to go.
We got the best one in the morning. It's 7:00. Now that you're here, we have them at our own stand. These are the only legendary heirloom tomatoes.
Raised over $60 million in commitments during your first planet sale. Not shabby at all. In fact, that's pretty epic. What do these planets look like? What did people buy?
Even as we launched the sale, we opened up the live 3D previews of these planets. In fact, if you go to PlanetQuest.io right now, you can see examples of literally every planet class and every tier of planet. Even when people were buying, they were buying was literally a planet which you can see from orbit in full 3D in your browser in a few seconds. You've got this amazing cinematic looking planet from orbit, which obviously when they initially bought them, they didn't quite know what their specific one would look like. That's part of the excitement.
People started picking upon all these traits and figuring out like, “Who has the coolest planet?” More so, we already announced obviously at that point, “These are not just planets from orbit. Soon enough, you'll be able to see what they look like on the surface as well.” In fact, a few months ago we released a first surface preview, which was like giving the community the opportunity to fly essentially an exploration drone over one of our desert planets as part of the larger cinematic storyline that we have where for the first time they could see the surface. In due time, every one of these planets is going to have its own unique semi procedurally generated surface where gameplay experiences will take place.
It's literally like creating the universe from scratch.
It's one of the things that excites us a lot.
From my days decades ago, first discovering Carl Sagan and the Pale Blue Dot and thinking about space exploration, one thing that I always appreciated about it was the sense of wonder that you get thinking about things on the planetary scale and also the way that it brings you a little bit away from your own little world of whatever silly things are going on that rub you the wrong way. That's cool. Galactic Entertainment is predicted to become one of the largest regional players in the metaverse. From what Josh mentioned, that makes sense based on everything you've been able to accomplish. It’s pretty exciting. What's next on your roadmap here?
On the Planet Quest end, obviously Galactic as a whole has this bigger mission of building the secinematic multiverses. On the one hand, like on the meta scope, we're in talks with even major Hollywood players and such to potentially bring even some already well-established on the movie end of things or on the series end of things, franchises into Web3 multiverses. When you look at Planet Quest in particular, which obviously we're super excited about our own debut IP, the next step is gameplay previews. What you have to imagine is the community of Planet Quest has been on this journey. When we opened the gates on the 15th of December 2021, we did a single press release, 137,000 people flocked in a week, breaking Discord and leading to some funny Twitter exchanges with the Discord team.
They have been going through this massively interactive storyline where they went through a whole season of the story. As part of that story, we're progressing to where the game begins. All of this ties into the storyline. That probe going through the wormhole, discovering what's on the other side, that was part of the story. What's coming up next is they've created a model of this planet that was now explored. We're doing an X-Men Danger Room-Esque gameplay preview on that planet environment where you have the planet environment and you play a character and the enemies are like holographic imagery.
You get to try out some of the first rough gameplay previews. We're going to advance that along with the community. They get to try different angles that we're taking as we're also still figuring out the 30 seconds of fun, and 10 minutes of fun ourselves, and try and get as much community feedback into that as possible.
It's fascinating to me as well as you talk your way through it, all the amazing like technologies that have evolved over the past decades that come together to create something like this. I studied biology and the evolution of natural systems officially. There's a lot that had to be learned along the way about how to create a system artificially with a few equations or algorithms of this.
To give you an idea, when we look at planet generation, and we've shown some select people these videos, even in our tuning environment where we're tuning one class of planets, and we have six. We've got volcanic planets and desert planets. This one here behind me, this is concept art by the great John McCoy who worked on multiple Star Wars movies, Marvel movies, and our director. When we're generating these planets, we're talking literally hundreds of variables that are entirely or largely machine tuned based on the artist's signature. Based on literally sometimes hundreds of input images that are also handcrafted sometimes by our director himself to make sure that it all backs together into that vision we have for that particular type of planet.
You got some great partners, investors like Immutable X, who we had on the show. Robbie's great. We’re generally excited about everything to come for your planetary adventures. We appreciate you coming by.
Make sure before you runoff also, where can people go to find out more social handles to follow our websites to visit before we take off.
PlanetQuest.io is the main website. Join the community there. You'll go through Discord registration. You'll get to pick a faction, 1 of the 3 main factions in our universe. You'll get to have some nice beef on our discord with the other factions, and participate in the storyline where we literally have live votes every week on what's coming up next in this season of the story. We literally are in talks right now on publishing the first book, which is based on season one. Join via that route. Other than that, you can find us on Twitter, @JoinPlanetQuest. The website will generally lead you where you want to go.
Loren, thanks for joining us. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.
Likewise. It's a pleasure to speak to you both.
Important Links
- Galactic Entertainment
- PlanetQuest.io
- Pale Blue Dot
- Immutable X
- @JoinPlanetQuest on Twitter
.png)
.png)
.svg)
