We were lucky to catch up with Prince Chijioke recently and have shared our conversation below.

Prince, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

It’s funny because I remember being an eighth-grader coding HTML websites, creating digital art of anime characters, and dabbling with game design programs. However, back then the only future path I understood was in healthcare. I did undergrad then went to pharmacy school, but I always had an itch to do more creative things just for fun. It was really in 2018 or so when I played a game called Exploding Kittens and realized it was launched via KickStarter that I thought, “hey, maybe I could try launching my own game the same way one day.”

Prince, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Even though Smashed Studios only products right now are card games, I wouldn’t call it a card game company. It’s really more so a creative platform company that I plan to use to launch a variety of things. There are digital games that I’m designing as well as print media like comics. I got into it as a love letter to all the science kids who abandoned any serious pursuit of artistic endeavors as way to say, “hey, you can do other things too.” The goal is to show the world you can do more than one thing, then pivot to being that launching pad for part-time creatives who want to get an idea of theirs off the ground.

I’d say that I’m most proud of how Smashed started. It was launched via funding from a KickStarter campaign for the first game I created, Never Say Never. The campaign was fully funded in less than 30 days and since then, the games can be found on Amazon, Walmart.com, and have garnered brick and mortar interest from a few retailers. Not too shabby.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

Haha, I’m both a fan of them and a hater of them. I think NFTs provide opportunity for amazing use cases to create community and provide a means for people across various socio-economic classes and geographies to unite under a common goal. I’ve seen projects host free international meet-ups for NFT holders which seems pretty cool to me. They also provide a bit of a high for people who like collecting things and the digital aspect to NFTs makes that more liquid.

However, there are so many scammers in the NFT space! Every day I see ads for projects that lack creativity and are just copy/paste versions of more popular projects, but with terrible artwork attached to them. 2021 was a breakout year for NFTs, but now that crypto is in a bit of a bear market, many hopeful people are left holding the bag on projects that made big promises and delivered on nothing at all. Hopefully someone smart comes along and helps pull the curtain back on what a project SHOULD look like.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I’m not a woman, but I feel like being a creative is a lot like being pregnant. When that amazing idea hits you, I imagine it’s like finding out that there are double lines on that test. Then you spend time nurturing that idea until, finally, you bring it out into the world.

And just like a parent, seeing what you’ve created flourishing out in the world brings a different kind of joy to your heart. One time I went to an event in a different city and I saw people playing a copy of Never Say Never that I myself didn’t bring to the event. Walking in the room and being like, “whoa, I made that!” was such a rush. Even better when I saw that people were having fun playing it without having to pretend they liked it for my sake.

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