Black Mirror is coming to the blockchain. The popular dystopian television series is working with a group of startups including PIXELYNX and Animoca Brands to combine digital collectibles and experiences with live episodic content.

The project launched on Base and sold out 7,000 NFTs at $40 a piece in two and a half hours, resulting in no public sale because of the popularity of the drop.

The first interactive experience—inspired by the ‘Nosedive’ episode of the series—is Smile Club, a way for fans to mint characters, engage in quests and attain a 5-star rating by acquiring SMLE points that are redeemable for rewards. The earlier you mint, the greater your points, leading to elevated social status and next-level rewards.

Over time, the Black Mirror experiences could potentially impact live episodic content and members might even be featured in new episodes made by community creators like BasedAF, which is building within the Smile Club universe. 

Users who aren’t able to claim a Smile Pass will be able to register for a free Smile ID that will provide basic access to the experience and rewards. The first collectible is designed to reflect your character and social status, dynamically adjusting as you participate in evolving quests.

“We’ve had over 250,000 people who have registered to be part of this experience,” Inder Phull, co-founder and chief executive officer of PIXELYNX, said to me in a recent interview. “One of the first ways you can access it is through the Smile ID, which is a free open edition where over 22,000 NFTs have been minted so far.”

The initial campaign worked as a “smile-to-check-in” experience where fans visited the website and smiled for five seconds. The program would then measure their smiles and allow them to enter.

Inder Phull

“What made it really successful was the referral method, which was ‘Share a smile,’” Phull said. “You could earn points to get on the allowlist if you shared smiles with other friends and got them ‘smiling’ with you.”

While over 100,000 people participated in the smiling activation, only the top 1,000 were in the guaranteed allowlist.

“We had a points drip that gave the most engaged users a bonus number of points when they started, meaning their social scores would be higher,” Phull said. “The higher the social score, the better the rewards.”

PIXELYNX signed a partnership with Black Mirror about two years ago to acquire the license and bring the IP into web3—and at the time—Phull was thinking about the role NFTs could play in storytelling, media and intellectual property.

For about a year and a half, Phull and his teamworked with the team at Banijay Brands—the Black Mirror rights holder—to navigate how Black Mirror would use smart contracts to build experiences on-chain.

“Our projects are really focused on community-centric IP experiences,” Phull said. “We have Korus, an interactive music platform which lets you remix sounds from different artists—allowing for IP remixing to happen on-chain in a seamless, transparent way—and we’re using a lot of the same tooling to build out the Black Mirror experience.”

The goal of bringing Black Mirror to web3 is to transform the experience viewers and fans traditionally have through passive viewership into something more participatory—a transmedia experience that takes place across multiple touchpoints. The episodic content PIXELYNX and Animoca are creating—alongside partners and activations with companies like Coinbase—all aim to showcase how the story world of Black Mirror can be experienced almost anywhere.

“This idea of interoperability transcends the idea of an asset being moved across different spaces,” Phull said. “A storyline can be consistent, and part of that storyline can be engaged with in many different ways.”

While PIXELYNX and Animoca are still building out the framework for the vision to operate at scale, one of the first things users can do is mint a character which will have a set of traits and a role in the Black Mirror world.

Bringing some Tyler Durdun vibes

“Users are sort of assigned a character and that character can ultimately be upgraded through your actions and activity,” Phull said. “The character may have a storyline and all of these other elements associated with it so people can take ownership of this identity in the Black Mirror universe.”

Also being built are chatbots allowing users to play with storylines and participate in the expansion of narratives. PIXELYNX will then take this underlying information and use it to affect  things that happen on a global storyline.

“There’s a very personalized element to it,” Phull said. “What you experience might be quite specific to you, but then all of these activities and actions start to consolidate into a larger, overarching narrative that sees your character ending up in some piece of content or impacting a specific storyline.”

The points protocol that rewards fans and users for their participation—whether it’s collecting, solving clues, or creating things—makes up the universe of rewards and earned mechanics across many unique experiences that people can engage with.

“One of the experiences is ‘Smile Club Radio,’ which is a dystopian music experience that lets you engage with different sounds and storylines through the music,” Phull said. “You can also engage with that content and ultimately own those assets. We’re playing around with a lot of things in the ownership space and are building an ecosystem of many different decentralized applications (dApps) that bring you closer to the Black Mirror universe depending on how you want to participate.”

While the characters users can mint are already predetermined, users will have the ability to “choose their own adventures” with respect to the different storyline options, with some creators being brought in to build their own narratives, such as the partnership with BasedAF.

Read more: LALA Is Powering The Next Wave Of Fan Engagement In Hollywood Through Ownership

“We’re leaning into working with really great creators to then expand on the Black Mirror universe and use NFTs as the mechanism to enable that,” Phull said. “There will be a lot of space for people to come and add to this world, but you’ll have to earn your way in to create in a more meaningful way.”

For Phull, web3 technology is what’s enabling those earnings and new storylines to exist.

“You can participate in so many ways,” he said. “You can purchase an NFT and experience all of the gated content. You can go deeper and really engage with our quests and try to increase your social score and earn rewards. Or, you can become a creator where you’ll be able to add your creative input to the universe.”

The approach PIXELYNX took for its music industry work is the same approach it’s now applying to traditional television and film. Instead of allowing fans to iterate upon music beats, the company is taking an IP that a great swath of the world is familiar with and is allowing folks to build and iterate upon it.

“Central to our vision is co-creation and immersive media,” Phull said. “We love the idea of communities being part of the experience, being able to add to it, and being able to take the DNA of the franchise and take it to new spaces. You get to be a character and you get to be the artist.”

Moving forward, PIXELYNX will roll out seasons of quests for Black Mirror, which will range from solving puzzles to voting other characters up or down to sabotaging other characters, and the rewards will range from digital collectibles to custom curated art from artists like mcbess.

“The first preseason will allow users to engage across a variety of mechanics over a full week period,” Phull said. “At the end of it, everyone will have a social score they will have built up as well as some experience points. From there, we’ll roll out rewards phase one.”

Beyond the rewards, the Black Mirror licensing and rights are also embedded on-chain within smart contracts, helping people understand what they can and can’t do with the IP.

“We are partnering with many ecosystems, so the idea that your Smile Pass will unlock other experiences in different worlds is very central,” Phull said. “We want to combine web3 technology with artists and creators to provide use cases of it all working, as opposed to just talking about the tech being a key piece. Blockchain is enabling this IP to collaborate and connect with fans in a way they’ve never been able to do before, and we’re thinking about this project as a launch pad for web3 culture to go mainstream.”