‘Super Doginals’: Drop Everything and Play This Goofy Brawler on Dogecoin

Got a few minutes? There’s an original Doge-themed beat-’em-up game inscribed on Dogecoin via the Doginals protocol. It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s the perfect game to play as DOGE buzz is back in full swing amid a surge to a three-year price high price.

Super Doginals is a retro-style brawler in the vein of classics like Streets of Rage and Fatal Fury, as you control one of three characters—including two anthropomorphic Shiba Inu dogs—and stroll through side-scrolling environments, pummeling foes based on other meme-friendly creatures like apes, cats, and frogs.

According to an official description, the game sees players “step into the paws of Kabo and friends to thwart Rugstar the Wolf’s plot to steal the moon.”

Super Doginals launched on Friday, as Dogecoin continued its latest ascent following Donald Trump’s election win last week. I’ve been firing it up for a few minutes here and there over the last couple days, amid the market chaos, and it’s a refreshingly goofy homage to classic arcade battlers—a welcome respite from the insanity of the crypto space right now.

Billed as the “first full-fledged game on Dogecoin,” it’s tied to the Doginals and Ordinals art project Mini Doge. Pseudonymous creator Pimax told Decrypt’s GG that the game features over 1,500 pieces of custom sprite artwork across 14 unique levels, along with over 35 minutes worth of original music.

It’s a web-based game that you can play in a web browser with up to four local players, plus it offers gamepad support and can be played on touchscreen devices too.

Super Doginals is fully inscribed on the Dogecoin blockchain via the Doginals protocol, which allows people to permanently put artwork, code, and text onto the network. It’s based on the earlier Ordinals protocol for Bitcoin, which similarly allows for the creation of NFT-like assets on the original blockchain, including profile picture (PFP) collections and even playable games.

Pimax said that Super Doginals was built using recursive inscription tech, which—as with Bitcoin’s Ordinals—enables multiple inscriptions to be chained together to enable larger-scale apps and games.

It will also enable patches and updates to Super Doginals, and even let other creators launch their own riffs on the game if they please. Pimax previously deployed the shareware demo of iconic first-person shooter Doom on Dogecoin via Doginals, as well as a Doge-themed riff on classic puzzle game Tetris called Dogetris.