Twitch's New Favorite Game 'Only Up' Is Loaded With Goblintown NFT Art

There's a new wacky indie game pulling serious views on video streaming platform Twitch.

The platform is typically dominated by the usual suspects, like League of Legends and Valorant, but over the last day it's a new game called "Only Up" drawing crowds… and the game features loads of artwork from a notable NFT project.

Only Up—not “Up Only,” a common crypto degen phrase and the name of a popular podcast—is a PC game developed by little-known indie developer SCKR Games.

It’s a 3D platform-hopping game inspired by the classic “Jack and the Beanstalk” story that challenges players to continuously climb upward. And they’ll do so through environments filled with oddball sights, including floating orange and avocado halves, as well as Shiba Inu dogs.

Player reviews on leading PC marketplace Steam are broadly mixed, with plenty of negative critiques calling out the clumsy controls and awkward player physics. But that wonky vibe is exactly why Only Up has quickly become a favorite of Twitch streamers, who are captivating tens of thousands of viewers with their tortured ascents through the world.

On Wednesday night, Only Up set a new peak with over 109,000 total viewers on Twitch, including a pair of popular streamers—Agent00 and Mizkif—with around 20,000 viewers apiece. Earlier this afternoon, Only Up had nearly 97,000 total viewers, again making it one of the top 10 most-viewed games on the platform.

And those viewers with knowledge of the Web3 world might spot something surprising along the way: a significant amount of Goblintown artwork and logos plastered throughout the world. There’s even a Goblintown creature face on the back of the character’s clothes, and a logo from the project on his t-shirt.

Goblintown, an Ethereum profile picture (PFP) project, launched as a free mint in 2022 as the NFT market started losing steam.

The project—which inspired an embrace of toilet humor and strange moaning across Twitter Spaces—fueled a brief trend of nihilistic NFT projects as creators and collectors alike endured falling prices and dampened vibes. After the free mint, Goblintown went on to generate over $101 million worth of secondary trading volume, per data from CryptoSlam.

It’s unclear whether Truth Labs, the creator of Goblintown, collaborated with SCKR Games to put project artwork in the game. Because Goblintown was released under an open-source, Creative Commons 0 (CC0) license, anyone can use the artwork as they please for commercial projects—even those who don’t own any of the NFTs.

The official Goblintown Twitter account tweeted a couple times about the project, including a tweet with multiple screenshots that also included the glitchy, mangled text, “Tenk u SCKR Games for putin goblins in ur game Only Up.” The account has also shared numerous community tweets about the game and its recent rise in prominence.

Decrypt reached out to Truth Labs and SCKR Games to inquire whether the teams had worked together, but did not immediately hear back from either side.