Do you remember rushing home from school to play Call of Duty all night, screaming abuse to your friends on Xbox Live as you worked your way through a bag of Doritos? One Solana meme coin is bringing back those vibes to an apparently eager audience of traders, resulting in the token skyrocketing in value by 5,200% over just six days.
360noscope420blazeit (MLG) started in April simply as a tokenized representation of the prime years of Call of Duty gaming—before “omnimovement” and overly complex killstreaks, or the flood of microtransactions and goofy skins. It was a time when people hurried home to trick shot on Modern Warfare 2, spend hours slaying Nazi Zombies in World at War, or play Search and Destroy in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
The token gets its long name by combining the classic “360 no scope” trick shot—essentially, doing a spin before shooting someone without zooming in to aim—with the classic “420 blaze it” meme referring to smoking weed. Its MLG ticker nods to Major League Gaming, an organization that was at the heart of the Call of Duty esports scene before series publisher Activision acquired it, ultimately fizzling out after the pandemic. The token also uses MLG’s original logo, almost certainly without permission. The token evoked an emotion that attracted a cult-like crowd. As the project pumped out streams of maximalist Call of Duty montages reminiscent of the 2010s “dank era,” the core team—or “clan leaders” as they prefer—was deploying Call of Duty servers strapped with MLG-themed texture packs.
“Most people hear gaming in crypto and think of some Clash of Clans knockoff [or] other low-quality games where you spend crypto on microtransactions,” Munnopoly claimed.
But now, he believes, crypto gaming includes MLG and its custom Call of Duty servers. This is very much akin to Miladycraft, a Minecraft server run by the edgy Remilia NFT collective. That server became a place for the community to gather, celebrate its alternative culture, and throw events—even if Minecraft itself, much like Call of Duty, is a traditional “Web2” game.
Crypto gaming has been attempting to break into the mainstream for years. Last year, Hamster Kombat attracted 300 million players—more than many major AAA releases—but failed to capture the hearts of gamers as a simple tap-to-earn affair. By contrast, Off the Grid made waves with traditional gamers, but is still in early access and hasn’t yet made its crypto elements a particularly visible part of the game.
On January 7, iconic FaZe trick-shotter FaZe Fakie posted an MLG meme, tagging the account. As the hype continued to climb, Banks promised to get an MLG tattoo if the token hit a $100 million market cap. And it did. MLG went parabolic, hitting a $164.45 million market cap just five days after Banks found the token.
“Crypto and gaming have always been very alike, especially in terms of community and culture,” influencer and MLG token investor Jakey told Decrypt. “Gaming was once seen as nerdy, for the outcasts in school, until [the] script was flipped due to the culture it curated on the internet.”
“Crypto is in a similar place—was seen [as being] for the nerds, geeks, riddled with bad actors even, but has since experienced its flippening,” he added. “Creators, products, meme coins [are] all making it much more attractive and cool [to] be involved with crypto.” There’s long been the idea that gamers hate crypto. After all, mainstream game studios like Ubisoft received major backlash when attempting to implement the technology into their titles.
