Two weeks after blockchain gaming studio Proof of Play shut down, a key community member from its Pirate Nation game is attempting to build a successor, albeit without the studio, the PIRATE token, and most of what made the original game “official” in the first place.
Booty Wars, announced on 19th August by a longtime Pirate Nation creator known as Murdoch (@TheGodMurdoch), is an independent project built on assets Proof of Play released under a CC0 license when it closed. The a16z-backed studio raised over $33 million to build blockchain infrastructure and Pirate Nation, a fully on-chain pirate RPG, which shut down in September 2025.
Murdoch, who says he’s recruited two developers, frames the project explicitly as a break from the original rather than a revival. The announcement repeatedly disclaims any affiliation with or endorsement by Proof of Play, and insists “this isn’t Pirate Nation 2.0.”
The plan, laid out under what Murdoch calls Booty Labs, centers on a new NFT collection; 6,969 Booty Pirates, with 969 (roughly 14%) reserved for the team and 6,000 for public sale, curated down from the CC0 archive to strip near-duplicates.
Chain selection is still open, with Robinhood named as a top contender. Gameplay will lean on a high-stakes PvP system pitched as more consequential and degen than the original. Murdoch says he’s been studying Cambria, Gigaverse and MOG to understand what keeps players returning, and is trying to import those retention mechanics.
Notably, Booty Wars is not inheriting Pirate Nation’s economic layer. Murdoch says explicitly the project won’t use the $PIRATE token or the original Founder Pirates collection, on the grounds that “we don’t control the token.” Instead, holders who kept a Pirate through the original shutdown (including those who burned it during the wind-down process) will be able to apply for whitelist consideration, with no guarantee of inclusion.
Indeed, the first version of the game to go live will be the small-scale Booty Wars V1, a core experience that will be used to find and refine the core gameplay loops that engage and retain players.
The response so far is encouraging. The announcement thread has pulled around 60,000 views and several hundred engaged replies, mostly from Pirate Nation veterans expressing nostalgia rather than outside press coverage.
The game’s website will go live with more details on Friday 19th August.
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