I Bought 22,000 Haribo Gummy Bears and Turned Them Into an NFT Chess Match
You may wonder what 22,000 Haribo gummy bears, a 170-years-old chess game and NFTs have in common? Well, yeah, probably not a lot, unless you come up with ridiculous ideas and here is mine outlined in these four parts:
- 🤔 Idea to make a real painting from the Haribo gummy bears (1/4)
- ♟ Exclusive coverage of the Immortal Game 1851 chess game (2/4)
- 🖼 Behind-the-scenes of making the painting & the final result (3/4)
- 🔥 Accidentally destroying the painting but making an NFT of it (4/4)
Still not bored? I’ll have to try harder then.
🤔 Painting with gummy bears
In December, I got my girlfriend a Haribo advent calendar and treated her with a small bag of gummy bears each day. She LOVES them and especially the green ones (which, did you know, are strawberry flavored in US? Yep, your life might have been a lie). Being a curious guy, I quickly realized that there are six different bear colors in total and an idea struck me What if I turned gummy bears into a painting for our living room?
I know — cool idea bro. But what on earth will this painting actually be? At the time, we had recently watched The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix and I loved that it caused chess to rise in popularity. I also thought that, from an artistic angle, making a chess painting would combine two worlds together — a board game that is popular among the “slightly older” generation and gummy bears that kids (and my girlfriend) are crazy about. The only remaining question then: “What’s the best chess game ever played?”
♟️ The Immortal Game (exclusive)
If you ask this question many chess players, you’ll get a wide range of answers. Having said that, there is one game that just blows my mind in terms of how it travelled through history for 170 years! I mean, even the Blade Runner movie referenced it in two of its scenes. It’s called The Immortal Game. I spent a week searching old websites to collect a unique list of where this match got featured. I’m now convinced that it’s the most famous chess game on record.
- ♟1851 — The Immortal Game chess match took place [Chess]
- 💵 1921 — Money printed with The Immortal Game [Money]
- 📕 1940 — Book of poetry released about the match [Books]
- 🎭 1968 — Live replay of the game in a Swiss square [Theatre]
- 🎬 1982 — Blade Runner movie scenes mimic the game [Cinema]
- 📧 1984 — Stamp with The Immortal Game at move 20 [Stamps]
- 🎹 2011 — Piano music purely based on the game’s moves [Music]
- 🎮 2014 — Computer game characters “replay” the match [Games]
- 🖼 2022 — The Immortal Game painting from gummy bears [NFT]
"If there is one game that has been an inspiration to future generations of players - this is it." - Raymond KeeneSo, I decided I’d join a long tradition of being inspired by this game, this time through art with gummy bears.
🖼 Behind the scenes & the final art
Alright, the chess game was chosen — what came next? Multiple challenges. Trust me, it was a crazy rollecestor with ups, downs and even more downs!
> Designing the painting
The obvious thing was that I needed a ridiculous amount of gummy bears. But how many approximately? My logic was quite simple — the painting should not be larger than 1.5 m x 5 m because otherwise it would be too large for our living room. This means that each chess square should be 0.19 m x 0.19 m or 128 Haribo gummy bears. Could I design realistic chess figures using that many gummy bears? Let’s see. Apart from the fact that the Knight looks like a lonely unicorn or the Queen seems to be more of a Coronavirus logo, I think I got pretty close. Ok, ok, at least let’s agree that the Rook looks rook-solid!
> Buying gummy bears
While this seems like the easiest part, believe me or not, getting these gummy bears took me not only driving through all of the petrol stations near by, but literally buying all Haribo packs from the biggest supermarket in the country. Once I met the manager and told her my plan, she was like “Are you insane?”. However, the staff turned out to be very useful and even helped brining all the gummy bears they could find in store. So, yeah, there was at least a single day where absolutely no Haribo gummy bears were available in that supermarket. I hope no kids got too upset!
> Sorting gummy bears
While you could order Haribo gummy bears in a single color, sadly, no direct shipment was available to my location and I also had a short deadline for this project. So I put my Joe Rogan podcast on and I sorted them into six different colors myself. The biggest challenge was to sort the red and the “pink” ones. I swear, when you spend hours doing it, they start looking absolutely the same!
> Drying gummy bears
Oh, and I forgot to mention, these gummy bears shrink. Daily. While obvious now, I did not take this into account at fist. So with some serious convincing of my girlfriend that having 22,000 gummy bears all around a house is a good idea, I kept them in paper bags for around 10 days to dry out. I think I’m still missing at least 1,000 or so. Gone without a trace…
Final result [Photo 1] [Photo 2] [Photo 3]
Now before we go to the next section, let’s assume that all went fine and here is the final result of a chess art made of no less than 8,192 real gummy bears.
🔥 Making NFT from a destroyed art
Well, the assumption we made that all went fine is of course not correct! Was the painting curved? Hell, yeah. Did all the gummy bears fit? Absolutely not. Finally, I did make a fundamental mistake of not properly glueing the gummy bears to the surface. To stop them from catching dust, I covered the painting with a blanket before going abroad. However, it’s really massive (2.0 sq. m) and it blocked the entrance to our terrace. So, it got walked by several times until it looked like the final portrait from The Picture of Dorian Gray movie…
Having said that, if there is anything I learned about art at school is that it’s about the story and not the paint you put on canvas. And you just read mine. I’ve also recently studied the NFT space and I loved that I could digitalize this piece so that someone else can own it forever (I’m not sure about the gummy bears lasting that long). For me, this is what NFTs stand for — an opportunity to remove the shelf life of art or even bring projects back to life, as in my case. So, I’ve transformed the main picture of the chess painting into a digital form (NFT) and called it the Immortal Painting.
- 🌊 OpenSea: Immortal Painting
- 🧳 Ethereum wallet: kingmate.eth
- 📭 kingmate@immortalpainting.com
Cheers to my friends who laughed their heads off hearing this story and encouraged me to write about it. I’ve now reached out to multiple NFT and chess enthusiasts including Garry Kasparov to get their feedback on this painting (0.00008192). If you like my art or you think it sucks — drop me a hello and let’s catch up!
P.S. It’s a 100-year anniversary of the original Haribo gummy bear this year. So, if there is one thing that went right here it’s probably the timing, haha.
Kingmate. ♟
