After a couple of years of success selling ugly doodles of silly apes at obscene prices to people with too much money, Bored Ape Yacht Club parent company Yuga Labs is getting into game development. And it does exactly what you’d expect: Dookey Dash (opens in a new tab) is a game about swimming through a sewer in search of magical monkey poo.
Here’s the premise, because we might as well embrace all this ridiculousness: Jimmy, one of the boring monkeys, “took a shit so atomic he tore a goddamn hole in the space-time continuum.” Out of that hole rose a monkey from another universe, who gave a box and key to another Bored Monkey named Curtis. A party ensued, where Jimmy – recovering from his earlier gastrointestinal issues, I guess – swallowed the key, leading to even more quality time on the throne.
This is where you come in. The key has gone out of Jimmy’s way into the sewers and it’s up to you to step up in the hunt, avoiding all the debris you may (or may not) find on a journey through municipal plumbing while collecting powerful fragments left behind by the transdimensional the rift. The longer you survive and the more you collect, the better your score – simple, right?
Not quite so simple. Access to Dookey Dash is limited to people with a “sewer pass”, which can only be claimed by owners of a Bored Ape or Mutant Ape NFT. But anyone with a pass can play, even if they don’t own one of the monkey NFTs, and you can certainly see where this is going: Sewer passes are being offered for sale for absolutely absurd amounts of money.
The floor price for a sewer pass at Opensea (opens in a new tab)– that is, the lowest auction price – is now at more than 2 ETH, which is currently equivalent to almost $3,100 in real money. That price is rising fast: The floor price yesterday, as noted by Ars Technica (opens in a new tab)was 1.49 ETH.
And if you think that these price tags will scare people, I have news: the total volume of sewer card sales on Opensea is currently 13,329 ETH, which is almost 21 million dollars; the highest price paid for a single pass so far is 6.2 ETH ($9,700) for a Level 4 pass – because of course there are levels to these things too.
The point of all this is… well, frankly, it’s unclear to me. Dookey Dash is actually billed as a “skill-based coin”: Players have until February 8 to accumulate the highest possible score, when anyone with a sewer pass who has played the game at least once becomes eligible for “The Summoning.”
The top score among all players gets the key that opens the box; everyone else will get a “Power Source”, which is apparently another NFT, with varying properties based on their high score.
“Your power source will be able to progress through a sequence of different ApeCoin-powered mini-games as the story progresses,” the video explainer says. “These power sources are the key to what comes next.”
Okay, but what coming next? What’s in the box? What are these power sources supposed to drive? I do not know. Frequently asked questions on yuga.com (opens in a new tab) isn’t very helpful on that front either, saying only that summoned power sources “can be used in future minigame sets to reach the Evo 2 stage and beyond.”
But as Ars pointed out, the utility of the power sources (which might somehow be connected to the awful Otherside metaverse platform (opens in a new tab)) is almost irrelevant. It’s all about throwing money: the number of sewer passes is limited, and high-scoring power sources will be even rarer, and in the NFT world, that gives them the impression of value. (Players who want to sink even more money into this can also buy powerups to help them on their journeys through the sewers.) So far, based on the action at Opensea, it looks like Dookey Dash is doing exactly what it was intended to do to: Turning baseless hype into money-sucking speculation.
