NFT Game History Timeline: Eleven Years Told Through the Records
Blockchain gaming is eleven years old — older than most people assume, and stranger than the “Axie, then everything died” version. The NFTVideoGames registry now holds dated, evidence-backed records for 165 games whose playable dates span 2017 to this month — asset-tokenization history reaching back to 2015: the games that invented the genre’s mechanics, the ones that took it mainstream, and the ones still finding new ways to end. This is that history, told through the games rather than the hype cycle.
2015: the first token — Spells of Genesis#
The earliest record in the registry is also the earliest documented NFT game anywhere: Spells of Genesis, a card battler from Swiss studio EverdreamSoft that tokenized its cards on Bitcoin’s Counterparty layer in 2015 — two years before ERC-721 existed. Development was officially halted in 2019, yet the game was never formally closed: it sits in the registry’s `unknown` state to this day, a first-of-kind record in a first-of-kind limbo.
2017: the accidental standard#
Two launches in late 2017 defined the next decade. CryptoKitties shipped in November and effectively created the ERC-721 standard — then congested Ethereum so severely it forced the scaling debate that produced an entire generation of sidechains and L2s. Etheremon, a monster battler launched the same month, became the era’s cautionary footnote: funding ran out in 2019, the stores closed, and the domain itself was eventually abandoned to squatters. The registry’s first birth and its first quiet death happened weeks apart.
2018–2019: the quiet builders#
Between the hype bursts, durable games appeared. My Crypto Heroes launched in Japan in November 2018 and became the world’s highest-volume blockchain game — it ran for eight years before announcing its end-of-service and a Polygon rebuild this month. Lost Relics began as Forgotten Artifacts on the Enjin platform in May 2019 and is still shipping content seven years on — the registry’s longest continuous development streak. Somnium Space auctioned its first virtual land in October 2019 and survives today, retooling for Steam after being caught in Valve’s 2021 crypto purge. And Neon District quietly incubated the ending that would later have a name — Blockade Games shuttered it in 2023 to build AI tools, the registry’s first pivot-to-AI.
2020: the mainstream breakthrough#
NBA Top Shot did what no blockchain game had done: it went properly mainstream — roughly a billion dollars of peak marketplace volume in early 2021, driven by a custodial design that never asked buyers to think about wallets. It is still operating five years on, and it remains the registry’s proof that distribution beats ideology.
2021: the year that named the model#
Play-to-earn minted its name and its biggest cohort — thirty-nine of the registry’s records first opened that year. The survivors are instructive: Pixels, STEPN, MIR4, Thetan Arena, DeFi Kingdoms, Aavegotchi and Skyweaver all still run — thirteen of the thirty-nine living — the small 2019–20 launch years hold a higher living-share (six of nine, four of seven), but no hype-era year produced more survivors. The same year produced Plant vs Undead and CryptoBlades, the boom-bust archetypes whose token collapses became the era’s shorthand. What happened to play-to-earn has the full cohort analysis.
2022: the bust cohort#
Games that launched into the tail of the hype died fastest: twenty-three records, nine already non-living. F1 Delta Time produced the era’s cleanest case study — a licensed game dead within days when Animoca couldn’t renew the Formula 1 license, its assets absorbed into the REVV ecosystem. The cohort also seeded the registry’s unknowns: Crypto Unicorns, Pegaxy, Walken, Benji Bananas — games whose silence outlived their statements.
2023–2024: the builders’ winter#
The froth cleared and the ships that survived got strange. Star Atlas and Big Time stayed in perpetual early access and kept building. ICE Poker produced the first governance-voted sunset — its community ended the earn loop by ballot in April 2024, folding wearables into a successor product. And the migration era began in earnest: Sorare split itself across three chains, Aavegotchi completed a full ecosystem move to Base, and Crypto Unicorns executed the largest single-game migration yet documented — roughly 250 contracts to Xai. And in 2024 distribution briefly inverted: the Telegram tap-to-earn wave — Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, Catizen, X Empire — claimed audiences in the hundreds of millions and ended four different ways inside eighteen months; the cohort postmortem measures all four.
2025–2026: the consolidation era#
The newest records end in ways the taxonomy hadn’t named before. The Treasure DAO collapse triggered the registry’s first forced migrations. BLOCKLORDS spent seven years and ~$15M, shipped on Steam in March 2026, then closed five months later to become an AI canvas. Symbiogenesis delivered gaming’s first completed-story finale — Square Enix’s NFT project ended exactly as designed, with a caveat that its IPFS art may die with the operator. Honeyland invented the de-NFT — assets migrating off chain entirely. Doctor Who: Worlds Apart survived one studio’s liquidation only to die with its successor. And My Crypto Heroes closed an eight-year service last week to rebuild on Polygon — the end-of-life chain rebuild. How blockchain games actually end catalogs all thirty-five mechanisms.
What eleven years actually shows#
Two honest conclusions survive the timeline. First, survival tracks intent, not age: the games still running — from Lost Relics’ seven years to the survivors of the 2021 cohort — treated tokens as game plumbing, while the dead treated the token as the business model. Second, the endings keep evolving: 2019’s funding exhaustion became 2023’s pivot-to-AI became 2026’s de-NFTs and governance sunsets. The registry records them as they happen — see the index for the full set and how we verify for the method.
Verified September 24, 2026 · Registry: 165 tracked games · Sources: registry records linked above, each carrying its own dated evidence · how we verify
Common questions#
What was the first NFT game?
Spells of Genesis — a card battler from Swiss studio EverdreamSoft that tokenized its cards on Bitcoin's Counterparty layer in 2015, two years before the ERC-721 standard existed. It is the earliest record in this site's registry.
How many NFT games have there been?
The NFTVideoGames registry holds 165 dated, evidence-backed game records whose playable dates span 2015 to the present — counting every verified title with tokenized assets, not just the headline games.
When did blockchain games go mainstream?
Late 2017 — CryptoKitties shipped and congested Ethereum within weeks, the accidental launch that proved asset ownership could drive gameplay demand. Axie Infinity's play-to-earn wave then took the genre mainstream in 2021.
Are the oldest NFT games still playable?
A few are. Others sit in limbo — Spells of Genesis' development was officially halted in 2019 yet the game was never formally closed; it remains in the registry's 'unknown' state. Many titles from each era have since shut down.
What killed so many NFT games?
The common pattern in the records: token-model collapse (play-to-earn economies that needed constant new buyers), post-bubble funding dries up, and operator pivots — the ends differ per game but cluster around the 2022 and 2025 market breaks.