Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity app puzzle was unlocked at the weekend. Over the last six months Curiosity app users worked though 25 billion cubelets, in this collaborative musical destructive game, in a race to the centre and with the hope of a mysterious grand prize. The final cube was unlocked by 18-year-old Bryan Henderson from Edinburgh who only registered and started playing about an hour before he won. Now he will become a videogame god in Peter Molyneux’s upcoming Godus game.
Four million people downloaded and used the Curiosity app with the hope of a “life changing” prize. Yesterday Bryan Henderson decided to play the game for the first time and destroyed the final cubelet. “People are going to hate me for this,” Henderson told Wired in a phone interview, “but I only registered for the game earlier this morning, about an hour before I won the thing.” He is reportedly finding it hard to comprehend his success, yet 30,000 other people were playing Curiosity at the time of his breakthrough. In addition he didn’t even know he had won for nearly 10 minutes after clearing his game. When Wired asked Henderson about what kind of god he will be and if he will ever use his power selfishly he replied “I think now and again I’ll definitely take advantage of it”.
The reward
Now the teenager has been elevated to the status of a “digital god”, what does that mean? Peter Molyneux says Henderson will:
- Decide on some of the rules and morals in the game
- Have a “life changing” experience
- Gain real-world wealth - every time people spend money on Godus, the winner will get a small piece of that pot
This new digital god will enjoy these benefits “from the start until the finish of his reign”. This wording makes me think his position is more like that of a king than a god. Also this ‘reign’ terminology suggests that Molyneux has contingency plans to have a new god competition as and when he sees fit.
In the video presentation above Peter Molyneux says that this real-person morals-based god idea came to him many years ago but it is only now, with the widely available internet and mobile connectivity available to people, that it could be implemented.
Kickstarter was used to help pay for the development of the Godus game which is said to be “an innovative reinvention of Populous”. Godus is expected to be completed and ready for gamers to download around September 2013.
