Features

Garga Talks Guinness World Record & The Future of Otherside

BY Matt Medved •

March 10, 2025

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Despite the current market downturn, 2025 is already off to a record-setting start for Yuga Labs.

On Feb. 22, the web3 company — home to Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Otherside and more — officially set a new Guinness World Record for the most players in a FPS (first-person shooter) on its metaverse platform Otherside with a final count of 2,197 players. The culmination of a multi-month campaign to break the record, the benchmark highlights the development of Yuga’s ambitious gaming efforts.

“We’re creating this experience to break this world record and show the platform’s capabilities, but more importantly, all the tools that we are using to build these things, we’re also making available via the ODK, slowly to our community,” explains Yuga Labs CEO Garga (born Greg Solano).

“It’s not just Yuga creating insane mass concurrency experiences but the toolset is being used by community members at this point—more like amateur and semi-pro folks who can build and mod their own experiences on top of that.”

We caught up with Garga to discuss the milestone’s significance, the platform’s future, and what lies in store for holders.

Matt Medved: What’s the significance of breaking the Guinness World Record within the greater context of Otherside?

Garga: Otherside is a metaverse platform we’ve been working on for years and are super excited about. One thing that’s near and dear to us at Yuga is when we set out to do something, we aim to do it so big and crazy that no one can follow. It was the same thesis behind our first ApeFest where if we hadn’t gone quite as big, I feel like it could have set a new meta where everyone wants to start NFTs that are throwing concerts, but having The Strokes, Beck, and Chris Rock made everyone else want to try something different. Project Dragon is a dynamic technical feat in many ways.

For the first trip to Otherside, we had about 4,600 users all in one lobby, which is a lot for video games—like Fortnite, you’re in a battle royale with 100 people. Battle Bit Remastered, I think, is the biggest battle royale I know of, and it’s 256 people. Those are voxelized, low-fidelity characters. Still super fun and insanely chaotic with 256 people, but it’s a bit different. We’ve done these spectacles before where we bring so many people together, and it’s insane to have a small town’s worth of people in one virtual space. The first trip was 4,600, the second trip was 7,000 people. These were very social and had light gameplay elements.

But when you think about a shooter, the technicals of getting everyone’s client interacting with each other at just the right time is insanely hard. Think about when you shoot someone in the head in Halo or Counter-Strike—you don’t want there to be an argument about who shot first. From a technical standpoint, having these incredibly dense mass concurrency experiences in the shooter game mode is a technical feat we’ve been solving with our partners at Improbable and M Squared for a while. And we felt like we were ready to break the Guinness World Record, which has stood at 1,500 people at once. We should be performant up until about 3,000 people… There was a thought of whether we should even tell people we’re trying to break a world record or just do it quietly. But we like to set a high bar and see if we can crush it.

Sometimes it’s nice to call a shot. In terms of targeting that world record, it’s another way of planting the flag and showing the progress and evolution.

It’s a way of showing how, in the Web3 metaverse, a lot of people talk about interoperability—the idea of being able to take one character and put it into something else. But I think the more interesting component is what we in crypto call composability. So, the idea is to take some building blocks from one protocol and stack your protocol on top of it. A lot of what we’re doing with Otherside is built with composability in mind. We’re creating this experience to break this world record and show the platform’s capabilities, but more importantly, all the tools that we are using to build these things, we’re also making available via the ODK, slowly to our community. It’s not just Yuga creating insane mass concurrency experiences but the toolset is being used by community members at this point—more like amateur and semi-pro folks who can build and mod their own experiences on top of that.

I always think about Warcraft 3 and how that game essentially spawned the MOBA game mode that got popularized into League of Legends and Dota 2. My hope with Otherside is to create really engaging experiences that we create but more importantly that we’re giving those same tools to our community so that they can create really engaging things as well and have ways to monetize those things that aren’t as burdensome as what we see in the Web2 world with 30% app take rates and that kind of thing.

What does the long-term future look like for Otherside? What are some of those upcoming milestones that you’re excited about?

We’re razor focused on persistence, which is basically up until this point we turn on Otherside for experiences about once a month, where we bring people together for events like the one we’re having here. But in June of this year, we plan to have the always-on experience where it doesn’t matter if we’re asleep, somebody can always be jumping into Otherside into some of the central islands that we’ve already exposed people to like the swamp metropolis and an upcoming one called the Nexus which is the core and center of the Otherside universe for us. My goal for persistence is really to have a range of different experiences that people can jump into, where we’ve teased some of these things in the past. We held a kind of VIP poker charity tournament on Otherside in the fall. We’ve debuted a kind of social feature that’s our take on Twitter spaces called Bubbles, and we have kinds of shooter and other kinds of games that either we’re building or the community is just building on their own with the ODK. And the goal is to be in June to have the most vibrant and performant and capable high fidelity crypto metaverse out there. Things have changed dramatically over just the last couple of months, it looks like some long needed clarity is coming to our space on the regulatory front.

There are plans to reward Bored Ape holders and Otherside deed holders this year. What can you tell us?

With everything that I do, I want to support the people that are supporting us, and my number one priorities at Yuga are Bored Ape Yacht Club and Otherside. And while we’re working on something, it’s a bit different, it’s a new twist to some things that are in the market. My goal is to always bootstrap any new protocol or network by rewarding our core. I think that’s a tried and true strategy in crypto and so I can’t reveal too much there except that it’s very top of mind for us. Absolutely.

“My goal is to always bootstrap any new protocol or network by rewarding our core. I think that’s a tried and true strategy in crypto and so I can’t reveal too much there except that it’s very top of mind for us.”

GARGA

There’s a lot of development happening on ApeChain. How do you envision its relationship with Yuga?

It’s interesting. I mean, I think there’s two ways to think about it. You can kind of plan for one way for things to go, but at the end of the day, it’s a decentralized network. And so what I think is best is to look at what’s working and try and feed that. And what I’ve seen on ApeChain is just how vibrant the NFT culture is. While everywhere else in crypto, especially I guess on Solana, memecoins are really the driving force. They’re not as big of a thing on ApeChain and yet I think the NFT culture on ApeChain is unrivaled compared to any other L2. And I think that’s really special and it’s kind of no mystery I suppose how that happened. We’re NFT guys. Our community loves that, of course, given a whole chain to play around with. That’s the thing that is perhaps most sticky and most innovative.

“I think the NFT culture on ApeChain is unrivaled compared to any other L2.”

GARGA

At the very start, with any of these chains launched, it’s a lot of copying and people just rushing things out, but we’ve seen some really thoughtful builders come to Ape. I love that. When I think about the symbiosis between ApeChain and Yuga, it’s like how can we help make sure that there are best-in-class tools on ApeChain for NFT founders and creators, and also make ApeChain power everything that we’re doing on the Yuga side? Whether it’s Otherside in the ODK, the toolset that we’re making available for people to build everything from poker on Otherside to massing currency experiences like Project Dragon and also certain things that we’re doing on kind of the club side with Bored Ape Yacht Club. But when I jump onto ApeChain, I think it’s the NFT culture that is so thriving there and that I want to help support and grow as much as possible.

There have been some significant acquisitions and changes in leadership at Yuga. With you in the driver’s seat, how would you describe your north star in terms of long-term vision?

My long-term vision for Otherside is to have it be the most thriving modding community essentially in crypto… where I want to bring it should be the most fun, easiest, coolest place for builders to come and create a 3D world or experience. And I think we’re going to show with Project Dragon and some other things that we’re doing, you’ll also be able to build things that you couldn’t do in web two. I think that’s one of the most important things for me when I think about Otherside is it’s not enough to just do the exact same thing and slap crypto rails underneath it. I want to create kinds of experiences and enable my community to make those experiences as well. That’s why this isn’t a Guinness World Record for the most players in a crypto FPS—it’s the most players in an FPS, period. So I want to create scenarios where our users, everyone can build and be rewarded by a protocol that enables people to do things that you can’t do anywhere else in the world.

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