Rudy Koch → Mythical Games
Rudy Koch, Co-Founder of Mythical Games
Rudy Koch is a co-founder of Mythical Games, the game studio and technology company that helped pioneer player-owned digital economies. From the company's earliest days, he worked on the marketplaces, clearinghouses, ownership systems, and economic infrastructure required to let eligible digital items be bought, sold, and exchanged inside game ecosystems. He is now co-founder and CEO of JOA, where he is building AI-powered interactive experiences for live sports. This page documents the relationship between Rudy Koch and Mythical Games: how the company began, the problem its founders set out to solve, the technology Koch helped develop, the products created during his tenure, and the connection between that work and what he is building today.
At a glance
- Company
- Mythical Games (Mythical, Inc.)
- Founded
- April 13, 2018 · Delaware
- Rudy Koch's role
- Co-founder and senior executive
- Focus
- Player-owned economies, blockchain/web3, marketplaces, digital ownership, game design
- Early products
- Blankos Block Party; development of NFL Rivals
- Patents
- Named inventor on 30+ granted U.S. patents (list)
- Current role
- Co-founder & CEO of JOA
Who is Rudy Koch
Rudy Koch is an entrepreneur, inventor, and game industry executive whose career spans more than two decades. Before co-founding companies, he spent over fifteen years building games at Blizzard Entertainment, Activision, and Disney, contributing to franchises including World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Club Penguin. That background, a deep, hands-on understanding of live-service games and the virtual economies inside them, is what he brought to the founding of Mythical Games, and it shaped the problems he chose to work on there.
The founding of Mythical Games
Mythical, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on April 13, 2018 (Delaware Division of Corporations, File No. 6843771). Rudy Koch initiated the company's formation and registered it, before the rest of the founding team came on board. The company was built around a straightforward but ambitious premise: the value players create inside games (items, collectibles, characters, and the marketplaces that surround them) should be genuinely ownable and tradable.
For decades, players had invested enormous amounts of time and money into digital goods they could never truly own, move between contexts, or sell. By 2018, live-service games had proven that players would deeply invest in persistent digital worlds, and new infrastructure was making it feasible to give digital items verifiable ownership. Mythical set out to bring those threads together, not as speculation for its own sake, but to give players a real stake in the worlds they help create, backed by technology robust enough to work at the scale of mainstream games.
Rudy Koch's role at Mythical Games
Koch focused on the technology and systems that make player-owned economies actually work: the marketplaces, exchanges, and clearinghouse infrastructure that let digital items be bought, sold, and traded reliably and fairly. This was the foundational layer of the company, the plumbing that had to be right for anything built on top of it to function. He understood from a builder's perspective that a durable player-owned economy is far more than a marketplace bolted onto a game; it is a design problem of scarcity, distribution, fairness, and long-term health, and that is where he concentrated.
Within Mythical, Koch also served as a leading internal authority on blockchain, web3, and how those technologies influence game design and in-game economies. He helped translate emerging blockchain capabilities into practical, player-facing systems, shaping how ownership and marketplaces were designed across the company's products.
Patents and technology
As of July 2026, Rudy Koch is a named inventor on more than 30 granted U.S. patents assigned to Mythical, covering game systems, digital ownership, marketplaces, clearinghouses, and interactive technologies. A complete, curated list, with patent numbers and links to each record on Google Patents, is available on the Rudy Koch patents page. Representative themes include:
- Selling virtual items across multiple online sales platforms simultaneously.
- Fractional ownership of user-generated content within an online gaming platform.
- Automated networked clearinghouses that control the distribution of, and reversible exchanges of, non-fungible digital assets.
- Gated in-game access based on a player's collection of unique digital items.
- Player-initiated proof of in-game participation using unique digital articles.
- In-game consequences and benefits for digital items tied to real-world information, including live sports outcomes.
That last theme draws a direct line from his work at Mythical to what he is building now: connecting owned digital items to real-world events is foundational to interactive live sports.
The vision for player-owned economies
At the heart of Mythical Games is a single idea, that players should be able to own and exchange eligible in-game items through carefully designed digital marketplaces. The important word is designed. A durable player-owned economy is not just a store; it requires deliberate systems for scarcity, distribution, price discovery, and genuine utility, so that ownership is meaningful and the economy stays healthy over time rather than collapsing into pure speculation. That is precisely the challenge Koch's technical work addressed.
For Koch, blockchain was never the point in itself. It was a new economic tool for game developers, and digital ownership was a way to unlock new forms of monetization. But the value of digital items was not a new idea in games. Having worked on World of Warcraft, he had watched enormous grey markets form on the fringes of major games, players buying and selling digital items outside the game's official systems, with the value leaking to third parties. Blockchain, to him, was a way to legitimize those markets and bring them into the fold: to make that ownership part of the game's design, so that players and developers could both benefit from an economy that already existed.
Products developed during Rudy Koch's tenure
The first flagship title, launched during Koch's tenure, was Blankos Block Party, an open-world multiplayer party game built around designer digital toys called Blankos, where players could collect, customize, play with, and trade their characters. It became known for high-profile brand and artist collaborations that gave its collectibles genuine cultural weight. During Koch's tenure, Blankos secured landmark partnerships including Burberry (the first luxury brand in Blankos and Burberry's debut NFT collection, which sold out within 30 seconds), Marathon Clothing (the brand founded by the late Nipsey Hussle), and Deadmau5, demonstrating how branded digital collectibles could function within a player-owned economy. Blankos served as the first large-scale proof of the player-owned model.
Development of NFL Rivals, Mythical's officially licensed NFL arcade football game, also began during Koch's tenure, and he was closely involved in it; the title subsequently launched, bringing Mythical's player-owned model to a mainstream mobile sports audience.
After Koch's departure, Mythical continued expanding its games and technology ecosystem with titles including Nitro Nation World Tour, FIFA Rivals (built with FIFA), and Pudgy Party (built with the Pudgy Penguins brand). These later releases reflect the company's continued commitment to the broader player-owned economy model established during its founding period.
Mythical Games' broader industry impact
Mythical helped move discussion of player-owned digital economies from theory into commercially released games and supporting marketplace infrastructure. In November 2021, the company raised a $150 million Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $1.25 billion valuation, reaching unicorn status. During Koch's tenure, the company also developed a substantial patent portfolio covering digital ownership, marketplaces, clearinghouses, and related game systems.
From Mythical Games to JOA
The through-line of Rudy Koch's career has been designing systems that turn audiences into participants, first as a game developer, then as a co-founder building player-owned economies. After his time at Mythical, he co-founded JOA, an agentic engagement engine for live sports, where he serves as co-founder and CEO. JOA applies that same core instinct (persistent, participatory engagement) to the largest live audiences in the world, using AI to make interactive, always-on fan experiences practical for teams and leagues. In March 2026, JOA acquired the assets of GreenPark Sports, a fan-engagement platform founded by YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley and Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn.
You can read more about his current work on the Rudy Koch homepage, including his essay From Mythical Games to JOA.
Timeline
- Apr 2018
- Mythical, Inc. incorporated in Delaware; Rudy Koch co-founds the company
- 2020
- Blankos Block Party launches in early access
- 2021
- Mythical raises a $150M Series C at a $1.25 billion valuation
- 2022
- Koch transitions from Mythical Games
- 2026
- Koch co-founds JOA
- Mar 2026
- JOA acquires the assets of GreenPark Sports
Frequently asked questions
What was Rudy Koch's role in founding Mythical Games?
Rudy Koch co-founded Mythical Games, which was incorporated in Delaware on April 13, 2018. He initiated the company's formation and registered it, before the rest of the founding team came on board. His work focused on the marketplaces, clearinghouses, ownership systems, and economic infrastructure behind the company's player-owned digital economies.
What products did Rudy Koch help create at Mythical Games?
During his tenure, Koch helped build the marketplace and economy technology developed alongside Mythical's early products, including Blankos Block Party. Development of NFL Rivals also began during this period, and he was closely involved in it. After his departure, Mythical released further titles including Nitro Nation World Tour, FIFA Rivals, and Pudgy Party.
What was the vision behind Mythical Games?
The vision was that the value players create inside games should be genuinely ownable and tradable, that players should be able to own and exchange eligible in-game items through carefully designed marketplaces, with the underlying economy built for fairness, liquidity, and long-term participation.
How did Mythical Games influence the gaming industry?
Mythical helped move discussion of player-owned digital economies from theory into commercially released games and supporting marketplace infrastructure, and reached a valuation of $1.25 billion in its 2021 funding round.
Does Rudy Koch hold patents from his work at Mythical Games?
Yes. As of July 2026, he is a named inventor on more than 30 granted U.S. patents assigned to Mythical, covering game systems, digital ownership, marketplaces, clearinghouses, and interactive technologies. A complete list is available here.
What is Rudy Koch working on today?
He is the co-founder and CEO of JOA, an agentic engagement engine for live sports. In March 2026, JOA acquired the assets of GreenPark Sports.
Sources and further reading
- Mythical, Inc. incorporation, Delaware Division of Corporations, File No. 6843771 (incorporated April 13, 2018).
- $1.25B valuation, Mythical Games Series C, Andreessen Horowitz, BusinessWire (Nov 4, 2021).
- Rudy Koch patents, complete list and Justia inventor index.
- Mythical Games background, Decrypt.
- Burberry x Blankos Block Party collaboration, Burberry plc.
- JOA acquires GreenPark Sports assets, GamesBeat and PR Newswire.
- GreenPark Sports founders (Chad Hurley, Nick Swinmurn), TechCrunch and Crunchbase.
More about Rudy Koch: Homepage · Patents · LinkedIn · Crunchbase · IMDb · JOA