For its “SAMURAI cryptos” blockchain and NFT project, animation studio GONZO is hosting a storywriting competition. The winning entries will serve as plot ideas for the ultimate NFT anime, and the winning authors will receive credit as “Proposal Assistance.”

The competition is being held by GONZO in association with Teller Novel, a smartphone novel submission service. The sole criteria for submissions is that they be motivated by one of the project’s six prompt illustrations.

Afro Samurai, Mazinger Z: Infinity, Junichi Takaoka’s Calamity of a Zombie Girl, Ugetsu Hakua’s The Tower of Druaga: The Aegis of Uruk, Burst Angel, Ai Yokoyama’s Space Battleship Tiramisu, X-Men, and Range Murata’s Last Exile, Solty Rei, and BEM are among the illustrators that contributed.

The deadline for submissions is October 18; they became available on Tuesday. At the end of November, the results will be released.

In the fall of last year, the “SAMURAI cryptos” project published their initial NFT. According to Gonzo President Shinichiro Ichikawa, the project would establish “a new age of animation for the NFT period with Japanese samurai” and will center on the terms “Cypher,” “Decentral,” and “Solidarity.” The project will include artwork created by Makoto Kobayashi (Last Exile, Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ), Michinori Chiba (Basilisk, Sk8 the Infinity), and Hiroya Iijima (Afro Samurai, Mazinger Z: Infinity).

The animation studio GONZO was established in 1992 by former members of Gainax. In 2000, the business combined with Shinichiro Ishikawa’s Digimation firm, giving rise to a new parent organization called GDH (Gonzalo Digimation Holdings). In 2008, GDH absorbed GONZO and renamed itself GONZO. GONZO was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2004, however the business was delisted in 2009. In 2016, Asatsu-DK purchased GONZO and turned it into a consolidated subsidiary after restructuring the business with the aid of investment funds. In 2019, the organization completed a “absorption-type company split” in which a piece of its anime production, intellectual property, and rights management business was transferred to the recently established Studio KAI firm.

In August, the studio began a crowdfunding effort in honor of its 30th birthday.