Last year, when news got out that Slim Jim had gone and registered the term meataverse, we all had a good laugh.
Over a year later and a few notches down the Gartner Hype Cycle, the salty meat stick company has finally launched its web3 world effort to get people to go online and collect digital art of cartoon meat sticks. The company, which, in a sarcastic nod to Facebook’s new corporate name, has periodically rebranded itself as MEATA on Twitter and described the effort in its trademark finding as something providing “services featuring virtual goods, virtual food products, and non-fungible tokens,” along with “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy, sell and trade virtual food products.”
But now, they’ve gone and done it by Jim, and I’m going along for the ride. Sure, it sounds ridiculous and something an adult who doesn’t eat Slim Jims would probably avoid wasting his time on, but here I am, the proud owner of GigaJim #1070.
Meet Gigajim #1070. From @SlimJim's #meataverse
— Michael Wolf (@michaelwolf) June 23, 2023
Not sure if it's sad my first NFT is a meatstick that's trying to get me to buy more meatsticks. pic.twitter.com/B49k47Guya
The site, which allows you to join for free and to mint one of ten thousand NFTs free of charge (they even pick up the gas fees), is user-friendly and targeted at the average meathead who doesn’t own a crypto wallet. I have a Metamask wallet lying around somewhere, but I just let Slim Jim’s Meataverse create a wallet for me, and within 5 minutes, I had minted my GigaJim.
The site comes complete with an origin story for the Meataverse world, detailing how how a brilliant young scientist named “Slender” Jim (what else?) is recruited by Slim Jim Industries to head up its secretive M.E.A.T. (mechanics engineering and technology) lab and, within a few years, Dr. Jim has proposed a theory of alternate meat dimensions (aka the ‘meataverse’), virtual worlds that are “meatier, spicier and home to powerful energies.”
When I started looking for ways to increase my GigaJim’s value, it (surprise, surprise) required buying Slim Jims and scanning the bar code. Once you show you’re consuming meat sticks in the physical meat world, you’re given more base sauce to add to the sauce extractor, and once you have three base sauces, you can create a super sauce and level up your Jim.
As I said, it’s all ridiculous, but I have to say, as corporate brand web3 metaverse efforts go, it has me (somewhat ashamedly) thinking about running to the local store and picking up some Slim Jims (which is, of course, the point).
See you in the Meataverse!
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