Ethereum metaverse game The Sandbox is kicking off its fifth season with a new in-game Jurassic World experience created in collaboration with Universal and Ambling Entertainment, allowing the player to become an employee of a dinosaur park.
The high-profile launch of Jurassic World: Dinosaur Preserve comes as part of a six-week long season that will pack in over 40 new experiences including content from other entertainment brands like Attack on Titan, The Smurfs, and The Terminator, all built on an improved game creator allowing for new features.
The Sandbox is an open-world video game on PC and Mac that invites players to explore and create in its blocky world. Users can purchase NFTs that represent a piece of land in the virtual world, which they can then build what they like on. Along the way, tons of brands have teamed up with the game’s creators and deployed their own experiences for players to enjoy.
Become an employee of a dinosaur sanctuary. Image: The Sandbox.
Jurassic World, the current evolution of the iconic Jurassic Park film franchise, is the latest major IP to enter The Sandbox—and the in-game event will take place ahead of the July 2 theatrical debut of the latest film, “Jurassic World Rebirth.”
The in-game event will serve as the flagship product of the game’s Alpha Season 5, set to launch later this month, as players become a member of the Dinosaur Protection Group.
In this role, users are tasked with ensuring the park runs smoothly in the absence of Owen Grady—the main character of the films, played by Chris Pratt. Players will be given dinosaur eggs that they will need to care for, and then once hatched, they’ll need to care for the baby dino for it to mature into an adult. The dinosaurs will grow using Jurassic Points, earned by performing tasks such as feeding or cleaning the dinosaurs.
“Alpha Season 5 marks a significant milestone for The Sandbox as we work towards our vision of building a social metaverse that combines gamified storytelling for brands with new formats for interactive user-generated content and culture,” a spokesperson for The Sandbox told Decrypt.
There will be 10 types of dinosaur eggs, half of which will be free-to-play herbivorous dinosaurs while the other half will be premium, purchasable carnivorous dinosaurs. Both the eggs and dinosaurs will be issued as NFTs with a limited supply.
You need to feed the dinosaurs for them to grow. Image: The Sandbox.
This in-game event will kick-start the broader six-week season that’s set to feature 40 new experiences—half of which will be user-generated, while the others leverage big brand partnerships.
During this period, more than $1 million worth of SAND tokens and over 50 NFTs will be up for grabs for players via the in-game battle pass. The Sandbox’s NFTs are issued on Ethereum scaling network Polygon, though earlier assets were deployed on Ethereum’s own mainnet.
All of these experiences have been built using The Sandbox’s new game maker, which offers improved character animations and gameplay features, plus a brand new ability system—which, for example, can grant players the ability to fly or double jump. A spokesperson for The Sandbox said that season launches offer a way to showcase new functionality and highlight fresh brand experiences.
“We plan on releasing multiple seasons this year,” they added, “and alongside that, creating strong LiveOps and metagameplay that allows players to progress and be rewarded on a platform level, outside of individual, siloed experiences.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
