Bitcoin developers who are supporters of the Ordinals protocol continue its development. Pizza Ninja is a unique project that saved the classic 90s game TMNT on the BTC blockchain. Although it seems almost abstract, transferring the Nintendo classic to the BTC blockchain is possible by entering the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator into the blockchain.
TMNT on the BTC blockchain – the Pizza Ninja project surprises the Bitcoin community
The Pizza Ninja project amazed the cryptocurrency community with its creativity as it allowed the classic arcade game TMNT to be saved on the BTC blockchain. The company behind this bold, innovative – and for many bitcoin purists certainly controversial – venture is Ninjalerts. The Pizza Ninja project was nothing more than writing the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator on the BTC blockchain. All this was possible thanks to the Ordinals protocol, which is responsible for the boom in the popularity of minting NFTs on Satoshi Nakamoto's cryptocurrency network.
According to Trevor Owens, CEO of Ninjalerts, the team decided to put TMNT on the BTC blockchain for two reasons. Firstly, because the entire Ninjalerts team thought it was an amazing idea, and secondly, because old games from the 90s are starting to die out.
A July 2023 report by the Video Game History Foundation suggests that as many as 87% of classic games from the 1980s and 1990s are not currently in active, licensed circulation. According to Owens, this report was the main inspiration for Ninjalerts to launch the Pizza Ninja project.
Will the next gaming classics of the last century appear on the BTC blockchain?
According to Ninjalerts, a Super Nintendo emulator is embedded in every Ninja Profile Picture. This allows users to play TMNT using the Ordinals explorer or the Ordinals marketplace in their browser. The reason Ninjalerts opted for the SNES emulator was the cost of mining and the limited 1MB BTC block size.
Owens claims that the 16-bit format is probably the highest level to which L1, the first layer of the BTC network blockchain, can reasonably be reached. What next games from the 80s and 90s will appear on the BTC blockchain? If I had to bet, I'd bet on Mario Bros. Nevertheless, the whole project will certainly meet with quite a lot of opposition from critics of the Ordinals protocol.