Tron producer Donald Kushner creates Web3-inspired Cryptosaurs NFT collection

It’s been 40 years since the classic sci-fi adventure film Throne hit movie screens around the world. Produced by Donald Kushner and published by Walt Disney Productions, the highly original futuristic concept made history by revolutionizing the use of computer animation in film while introducing audiences to one of the earliest interpretations of a digital metaverse.

Reflecting on the film’s success, Donald Kushner sat down with Cointelegraph reporter Sean Moore to discuss the success of the film, his new non-fungible token project Cryptosaurs, and his thoughts on the future of the metaverse.

Cointelegraph: How do current metaverse implementations compare to what you might have envisioned during the creation of the original Tron movie?

Donald Kushner: This is exactly what we envisioned – that the personal computer would take over from the mainframe. Games and intellectual property would become engines of wealth in a global creative community, and we would see a battle between centralized and decentralized control of intellectual property, between an ownership economy and a creative economy.

But Kushner has also stayed abreast of navigating the next wave of the digital revolution. “My colleague Mike Bonifer and I invested in crypto in 2018 as a learning experiment. It was his idea. Mike is a quantum storyteller who started as a publicist at Throne and wrote the book The Art of Tron.”

As told by Kushner, Bonifer believed that movies and streaming content could be funded by crypto and “pre-collectible NFTs.” Then in 2021, Kushner and Bonifer, along with industry veteran John Scheele, came together to form Gumbotron – a Web3 studio dedicated to Metaverse storytelling.

The company’s latest NFT project Cryptosaurs, developed in collaboration with Forj and Animoca Brands, features collectable digital dinosaur NFT characters, starting with an egg drop in autumn 2022. Each egg is a mystery box containing a line of code. A “gene randomizer” determines a sequence of “freeze-or-hatch” events in early 2023, where owners of the eggs will be assigned a specific species of Cryptosaur with different uses in the Metaverse. The production team’s goal is for holders of the Cryptosaur characters to eventually showcase their NFTs in games to earn money, art, feature films, virtual reality exhibits, as Metaverse avatars, and in other forms of media.

The idea for Cryptosaurs came from the childhood experiences of co-founder John Scheele, who also worked with Throne as a visual effects artist. Scheele’s father was director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for 40 years, and family vacations consisted of dinosaur digs. And so, co-founder Mike Bonifer pointed out, “If we can get John to remember the wonder he had as a kid at these dino digs, we’ll have a story.”

Tying it all back to the cyber world envisioned ThroneKushner says the film’s influential legacy can still be seen in many areas of the gaming and entertainment space:

“It is no coincidence that Hal Finney [the first recipient of Bitcoin and one of the alleged creators of the digital asset itself] worked on Tron’s Atari games. Yat Siu, the founder of Animoca and a huge Tron fan, also worked at Atari when he was 13. And then there are people like William Gibson, who pioneered the cyberpunk genre of science fiction. He was also influenced by Tron.”