Beetle Game

Beetle Game is a narrative tool employed by Remilia Corporation to create incessant chaos on the timeline and mass hysteria within its community. Initially conceived in 2022 as a MUGEN-style AI-controlled random battler with beetle NFTs, the actual game concept was quickly shelved while its marketing materials were repurposed into coordinated memetic activity and performance art. Beetle Game functions as a perpetually deferred promise that generates anticipation, with community members remaining half-aware of its dual nature as both performance and potential reality.

The indefinite teasing of Beetle Game exemplifies Remilia's approach to attention manipulation and participatory art, functioning as a flexible narrative container that can be redeployed across multiple projects and timelines. Through its strategic ambiguity, Beetle Game maintains perpetual engagement without requiring concrete deliverables.

Origins and concept

Beetle Game emerged in 2022 during the run-up to Banners NFT, a generative collection exploring early 2000s digital aesthetics with content sourced from the Milady Maker community. The project was initially conceptualized as a MUGEN-style AI-controlled random battler influenced by individual beetle stats, with beetles potentially acquired as capsule gacha-style NFTs. The hexagonal shape of the beetle NFT designs referenced Twitter's then-current and short-lived feature allowing NFTs to be used as profile pictures, which displayed in a distinctive hexagonal frame.

The primary inspiration for the beetle battle mechanics was the Japanese video game series Boku no Natsuyasumi (My Summer Vacation), which features beetle sumo wrestling as a nostalgic childhood activity. However, Remilia determined that creating an engaging beetle battle system in this style would require more thought and consideration than initially anticipated. Rather than delay the marketing momentum, the game concept was shelved while its marketing materials were aggressively pushed forward—transforming into mass hysteria and community mimicry as performance art that ultimately functioned as a bait-and-switch into the Banners NFT release.

During this period, Remilia used Beetle Game as a narrative tool to generate anticipation and coordinate community activity on Twitter, deliberately fostering chaos and speculation on the timeline. The concept gained particular significance during the May 2022 Milady Cancel controversy, when community members organized around competing factions identified as #clemgang and #lizzygang. This brief conflict demonstrated the community's capacity for coordinated memetic warfare. Writing in her Mirror essay "Beetlemania: War and Culture," community member cryptoprittie observed that Beetle Game would function as "a dojo, a space in which to learn from those more experienced in the ways of conflict" while maintaining the community's characteristic whitepilled aesthetic.

Recurring usage as narrative device

Following its initial deployment, Beetle Game became a recurring motif that Remilia employed across various initiatives without ever delivering a concrete product. The launch of Milady Chan, a real-time imageboard inspired by early 2000s anonymous board culture, was teased under the Beetle Game banner. The CULT token launch was similarly framed within Beetle Game's conceptual universe, with the achievements system and Beetleposting phenomenon playing into its narrative without constituting the game itself.

The flexibility of Beetle Game as a framework allowed Remilia to maintain narrative momentum across extended periods. Rather than functioning as a discrete product, it operated as what one community member described as "a year-long prank on a year-long prank," simultaneously a legitimate coordination mechanism and a self-aware commentary on hype cycles in crypto culture.

The pattern established by Beetle Game demonstrated how a sufficiently vague concept could be repeatedly recontextualized across disparate projects while maintaining conceptual continuity. Each new deployment reinforced the community's half-aware participation in both genuine anticipation and ironic performance.

Beetleboy and RemiliaNET

While Beetle Game itself never materialized, RemiliaNET, Remilia's identity service layer launched in 2025, incorporated a hybrid gacha-idle game called Beetleboy. Beetleboy allows users to collect beetles through a schizomorphism physical console reminiscent of mid to late 1990s handheld gaming devices.

Beetleboy plays into the vague conceptual definition of Beetle Game while finally providing users with an actual beetle-collecting mechanism. However, this manifestation maintains the ambiguity of the original concept—Beetleboy functions as both a genuine game system within RemiliaNET and a recursive commentary on the extended teasing of Beetle Game itself.

Cultural significance

Beetle Game exemplifies several key Remilia practices: the use of extended narrative teasing to maintain attention, the blurring of boundaries between earnest product development and ironic performance, and the structuring of community participation through deliberately ambiguous signaling.

The concept's power derived from its perpetual deferral. By never actualizing as a concrete product, Beetle Game maintained maximum flexibility as a narrative device while generating sustained engagement through the community's oscillation between belief and skepticism. This dynamic created a participatory performance in which community members remained half-aware of their role as both audience and actors in an extended alternate reality game.

See also

• RemiliaNET
• Schizomorphism
• Remilia Achievements
• CULT