Scottish teenager crowned 'digital god' after winning Peter Molyneux's Curiosity Cube
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Your support makes all the difference.The “life-changingly amazing” prize at the heart of a six month social-gaming experiment was announced yesterday morning and will turn one Scottish teenager into a “digital god”.
The game, entitled “Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube?”, saw players tasked with destroying a massive cube by tapping away at 25 billion smaller “cubelets”. Released for Apple and Android smartphones, it was promised that whoever destroyed the final cube would win the prize.
“Curiosity” was released in November 2012 by 22Cans, a studio founded by renowned games designer Peter Molyneux. By December the game had over 3 million users, many of whom purchased upgrades allowing them to reveal more of the cube with each tap.
18-year old Bryan Henderson from Edinburgh Scotland was named the winner on 26 May and chose to share with the public the video that lay behind the final cube.
In the video Molyneux tells Henderson that he will become a “digital god” in 22Can’s upcoming game "Godus". Announced in November 2012 and successfully funded on Kickstarter, Godus is a "god game" – a genre that Molyneux invented - that allows players to control a world and its inhabitants.
According to the video, Henderson will become “the god of all people that are playing Godus” and will “decide on the rules that the game is played by”. In addition to this, he will also benefit financially, receiving an unspecified amount of money “every time people spend money on Godus.”
In an interview with Wired magazine Henderson revealed that he had only signed up to play Curiosity on the morning that he won the prize. At the time that he destroyed the final cube there were around 30,000 players trying to the do the same.
Reaction to the announcement has been mixed. Molyneux has frequently invited controversy through his tendency for hyperbole when describing his projects, and some members of the games community have found that this prize has been over-hyped.
Markus “Notch” Persson, the creator of indie-smash game Minecraft, said on Twitter: “That was the most lame reveal ever.”
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