March 24, 2025

Garga Talks Guinness World Record & The Future of Otherside

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

Introduction

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.

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.

  • 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.

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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Introduction

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.

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.

  • 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.

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.