On June 16, 2010: A Tale in the Desert Makes History

Often overlooked in favor of the famous pizza purchase, the founder of the early MMORPG A Tale in the Desert, Andrew "teppy" Tepper, began accepting bitcoin as a subscription payment on this day.

Tepper announced his decision three days before the pizza order in a post on Bitcointalk:

“I run the MMO A Tale in the Desert. We charge $13.95/month for the game, and pay about $0.74 in merchant and gateway fees… We’ll now accept Bitcoins as an alternate payment method. The price per month is 2,000 BTC, which according to the exchange is a discount right now.”

At the time, this made perfect sense, as one month’s subscription translated to roughly $9.20 (a 33% discount) while costing 2,000 BTC—a mint when bitcoin was valued below $0.03.

Key Context & Challenges:

• Tepper hoped transaction metadata would link usernames to purchases, an idea later abandoned due to technical limitations and security concerns.
• Laszlo Hanyecz (the "Bitcoin Pizza Guy") immediately offered technical guidance.
• The conversation between Tepper and the nascent Bitcoin community touched upon the then-limited cryptographic capabilities, with Satoshi Nakamoto himself weighing in:

“Bitcoin uses EC-DSA, which can only do digital signing, not encryption…”

Despite hurdles, bitcoin subscriptions flowed in. The address Tepper initially listed received an astonishing total of **~42,100 BTC** over the first two months (worth ~$3.6M at the time, ~$4.4B now).

Tepper’s Continued Innovation in Gaming

Andrew Tepper returned to the gaming space three years later launching Dragon’s Tale, an MMORPG built around online gambling.

Following the precedent set in A Tale in the Desert, Dragon’s Tale also accepted bitcoin, and even included mining games that eventually distributed free coins until 2016.