Mystic Moose raises $5M to build game metaverse Planet Mojo

Mystic Moose, a newly minted indie studio, today announced it’d raised $5 million towards its latest project, a gaming metaverse called Planet Mojo. The round of funding was led by Animoca Brands, with participation from Courtside Ventures, Republic Crypto, Polygon Studios, and Sky Vision Capital, among others.

Planet Mojo is a browser-based gaming platform, or “metaverse” as Mystic Moose refers to it. Planet Mojo’s signature game, at the moment, is an auto-chess game in which players can buy their teams as NFTs. The NFTs in question are called “Mojos,” and they are small plant creatures native to the titular planet. The platform will also feature other lore and characters to be revealed at a later date.

Yat Siu, executive chairman at Animoca Brands, said in a statement, “We invested in Mike and Mystic Moose because of the team’s experience in creating, launching, and shipping commercial titles for the gaming industry’s top legacy publishers. On top of that, as a big auto chess fan, I’m very excited about Planet Mojo and its upcoming blockchain-powered metaverse and auto chess game. We look forward to working with the team to push blockchain gaming to the next level.”

Mike Levine, Mystic Moose CEO, told GamesBeat in an interview that the game’s theme is about the meeting of nature and technology. “I was inspired by nature in many ways… There is so much sci fi and cyberpunk in crypto, but we think there could be a lot more of that in this space. We wanted that to be a theme of this project.” He also added that Planet Mojo is built on a gas-free solution and will feature an eco-friendly message. He said that the company intends to use the funding to work on building the planet out.

Levine also added that Mystic Moose calls Planet Mojo a “metaverse,” though he acknowledged that there were different definitions of that word. As he put it, “We’re building a large, expansive world that players can socialize in, interact with, and play games in. We decided not to build a world where brands can come in, because that’s what the real world is. We wanted to create a magical place that people could escape to.”

Planet Mojo will drop its first set of Mojos in the first half of 2022. Mystic Moose is currently hiring.