Before we get to roadmap, founders and opportunity, the defining characteristic of Creepz – and always the word I revert to when describing it to friends – is mischief.

There are many others too – but joyously subversive fun is really the core of the Creepz experience, in my honest opinion.

Which isn’t to deride the fact that this project is absolutely stacked in terms of commercial acumen, experience, a love for the disruptive opportunities created by web3 and the vision to be a leader in the space. In fact the marriage of this silliness, subversion and fun with a sense of a tangible output is the true reason why an incredible proportion of holders are absolute diamond handed monsters, having never sold or even listed their assets.

The project has gone through a bunch of phases and iterations, so let’s start there.

Back in Jan ’22, Joe Carnell & Dom Smith launched the Creepz mint. Preceding this, the discord started late ’21 and their white-glove handholding approach to curating a community sowed the seeds for much of the core of the crew that remains to this day. Partnering with brands such as the superb Floor app to offer users additional spots on the Allow List, the project minted out – and through a series of events that are probably best left alone at this point (but centred around a community-created liquidity pool for an in game token that spiked massively in value and allowed holders to briefly earn disgraceful amounts of passive income), the NFTs ripped up to 10eth or thereabouts. This was all before my time. (NB – the highest a green sold for is 10.5 ETH on Jan 25, 2022. Purples went to 13.69 ETH. Thanks Brian.)

When I joined in March ‘22, the floor had reduced by around two thirds from those heady early days and I caught the very tail end of season one, with the now-iconic first Creepz site, featuring Reptile Armouries, Rango’s Saloon and, presciently, a Portal, amongst other fun bits and pieces. Functionality included the ability to use the token to rename Creepz NFTs, with different values given to specific titles (God of xxx being the most expensive, iirc). These given names perpetuate to this day – just ask God Zero the Hero.

I do recall, the week I joined, that Seth Green had posted about joining the Creepz, that two holders had randomly met on a beach in the Maldives (or possibly Mauritius?) and that Callum, the then Community Manager, had arranged and posted images on a London meet up for holders. I felt an immense draw and, having experienced pretty much exclusively rug pulls in web3 up to that point, sold everything I had, including the one piece of any value (Adidas; Into The Metaverse), to pull the trigger on my first Creepz at 3.3eth on a Saturday night. I was more than a little excited. It was then, and remains now, an absurd amount of money to spend on a jpeg. But I bloody love that yellow lizard. He was first in – and I’m certain that if I ever let any of my lizards go, he’d be the last out. Legendary artist Psychrome has even done a line drawing of #4355 for me. He’s a keeper and represents the turning point in my personal web3 adventure.

Creepz season 2 saw the launch of Lamex, a second token – but critically, this time, one solely usable inside the eco-system – and promised a look into the future via yet another Portal. This season allowed holders to yield points that would allow them to firstly build either one or two Interdimensional Lizards, before then opening trading card style packs to find and choose traits to adhere to these IDLs. These are a couple of mine.

A few years on, this activity has undoubtedly taken a back seat – but we’re assured it’s still coming. I suspect it’ll be related to one of the many deliverables around product and media that we’re anticipating.

Probably the next major milestone was another moment that I remember vividly – the launch of the Overlord site, coinciding with the rebrand from Creepz to Overlord. The parent company has since been unveiled as SuperDuper, removing the argument that Overlord is kinda the parent brand – so there remains some duality and indeed confusion around whether the project brand is Creepz or Overlord to this day. For me, they are somewhat interchangeable, peer-level terms – Overlord is clearly a name that’s intended for wider consumption as a brand – but the name Creepz stuck for holders, not least in describing the collective. I remember exactly where I was when I first saw that site – I looked again the other day and, particularly with audio on, it still gives a decent buzz. In that moment it certainly felt like the project was growing up. If memory serves, the floor ripped again too, as more people wanted to get onboard.

Jumping on a little, mid ’23 will forever be the summer of lost sleep for me, as the Creepz embarked on a Galactic Adventure, through ‘questing’ (button clicking every few minutes/hours) to earn various resources that would later be used to craft tiered runes, which have since been attached to specific wallets, utilising a clever but deeply frustrating mechanic which means that the lowest level rune moves from a wallet with the sale (or transfer) of any Creepz. Brilliant, but annoying as hell for anyone trading assets. You can check to see if a Creepz has a rune via the cycle icon at the top right of the NFT on marketplaces.

The Creepz contract was upgraded just prior to the creation of these runes, to allow for this rune adhesion to happen – a point when Jo3 used words like Composability and Interoperability a good deal. Secondary sales were also limited to Magic Eden – a move which has since changed as OpenSea revised its stance on enforced royalties. For this reason , it’s still not possible to trade Creepz on Blur, although it’s fairly common to see sales via X2Y2, a site that’s notorious for sidestepping royalties.

Into ’24, the team unveiled a high end streetwear line – with the explicit yet slightly incredulous tagline “fashion not merch”. To be honest, as someone with more web3 project hoodies, socks and other nonsense than it’s reasonable for one person to own, this drop really was a cut above. There was a marketing takeover of leading streetwear store End Clothing, with a full wrap of the Soho store – and the standout products were the initial limited Blackout line and three variants of the jackets, made by Settlemeirs of Portland, who were responsible for the Nike x Tiffany collab that Lebron has been seen wearing. The box itself was a work of art, featuring a sidescrolling front panel – so these are undoubtedly going to be collector’s items. However I wear and, to be honest, probably abuse mine a little. These things are meant to be enjoyed imho. (Sidenote – Ben looks better in his purple jacket than I do in mine. Also at launch, my mate Rigo created the single best piece of internet marketing for any product line, ever. Feast your eyes on this beauty.).

In March ’24, the team took over twitter with a social campaign to promote $portalcoin, before token generation shortly thereafter. A separate project within the SuperDuper stable, $portal is basically an inter-chain payment solution which is yielded by staked Creepz and has been adopted by an ever growing list of partners. It was finally revealed that the highly anticipated real world AR creature battler, Somo is another SuperDuper brand. Finally, Creepz rolled out another new site, with the taglines: “Rebirth 2024” & “Dumb.Shit.Only.”, which promises not just an initial rolling $portal claim for staked creepz, but a second season of $portal drops, $odyssey (the Creepz layer 2 blockchain, which apparently is being rebranded and remains imminent), $DMT and $redacted. It’s believed that $DMT will be an in game currency for one of the Creepz gaming titles (see below), whereas $redacted – not to be confused with the $redacted coin – refers to $somo, also now imminent in Q4 ’24.

The launch of $Portal and the associated social marketing campaign really merits a stand alone piece. It’s both part of Creepz history and also very much its own entity, as will be the case with Somo – and indeed Odyssey/newL2 and $DMT in due course. One for another day perhaps.

Which brings me to the community. Bearing in mind that early ’22 to mid ’24 has been broadly characterised as a pretty grim crypto Bear, it’s fair to say that circumstances bonded people together. I attempted to tag a heap of friends from the project the other day and, to quote Michael Bluth, immediately realised that I’d made a huge mistake, given inclusion was an impossibly unrealistic task. But what this highlights is the extent to which we, the Creepz, have bonded together through the roughest of market conditions.

I’ve travelled to Berlin with two mates to see Wynt, travelled to NFT Paris with Callum, Ben & Bailey for an insane few days of mayhem and hung out with Virmeh in London, on his travels. I speak to one tight-knit group of Creepz friends almost every day and these folks and many others are just incredibly supportive of one another in a truly authentic way. As with any project, there has been some degree of adversity and timing let downs on the journey – but the ability to dance in the rain marks the Creepz out as a special group of maniacs. And I love them for it.

I’ve not yet met Dom, but have spent some time with Joe on the phone and in person – and he’s excitably energetic, highly convincing and articulate (pls don’t tell him I said that). I firmly believe that people buy people and it was my meeting with Joe that really gave me the confidence to swing for the fences and fill out my Creepz bag, in late ‘23. These lizards are staked and have remained untouched for some time

As a long-standing business founder and owner myself, I can relate to a lot of the challenges the founders experience around scaling, product, marketing, finding the right people and managing those people. Web3 expectations are broadly unreasonable and whilst timeframes are often longer than anyone would like, I actually think these issues reflect that this is a real business – which might just be a unicorn – and that it’s simply not possible to build something substantial and sustainable without going through these challenges.

The really exciting part about Creepz is what lies ahead. Not a huge amount is known about some of these but, in addition to the bits and pieces mentioned above (IDLs etc), we’re still anticipating:

Multiple AAA games & token

A Creepz Layer2 & token

Creepz products

Creepz TV/transmedia show

More Fashion, not merch

Somo

3D Lizards?

Teasers have been teased featuring playstation logos. The Hollywood writer’s strike did not help the cause of any web3 project trying to go into production so this is pending, but still inbound.

Rather than re-cover this ground around the big picture deliverables pending, here’s a pair of excellent threads about what’s coming from my buddies Chesus and Kenny Powerz. And one on tokens from Cheese.

I’m as excited about what is to come in Q4 ’24 and ’25 as I was back in ’22. On top of which, the community is solid and steadfast, my walls are covered in lizard pictures and the journey has helped me into parts of web3 that I would not have dreamed of back in early ‘22. To quote the team, it turns out that, Creepz are indeed King.

I’ve steered away from any attempt to induce FOMO, but it’s hard to ignore that 30-odd are listed out of an 11k+ collection at the time of writing. Do with that, what you will.

In closing, I have to defer to another mate: Kyle. “Just don’t forget the part about the British accents.  It doesn’t seem like a big deal to you but its magical to us ‘Muricans.” Fair enough, whatever butters your parsnips ser.

If you’ve got this far, thank you. I hope it’s helped and/or entertained. Or at least annoyed you, just a little bit.

It feels only right and proper to reward you with a Creepz classic: WEN ANYTHING.

IYKYK, right Zurc?

Moon//Out.