What's inside the cube?
So Peter Molyneux and 22Cans' experimental mobile game 'Curiosity ' has now launched, and already vast swathes of players have commited to obsessive tapping in order to unlock its big secret. What is at the centre of that cube? Only one player will find out, after completing the work of the thousands who will have chiselled away for however long this thing is going to take.
Peter says that whatever's in the cube will be life-changing. That's a pretty wide spectrum of possibities, but we've had a go at guessing regardless. These are our favourite options so far.
You
This slide is best viewed on a really glossy monitor screen. It's supposed to be a mirror, see? Oh please yourselves.
Anyway, maybe the Curiosity program is hijacking everyone's phone cameras and recording them as they play, so that upon "winning" it can play back a video of the victor ceaselessly tapping away for days on end.
"Happy now?", Curiosity will ask. "Is this what you wanted to do with your life?"
And thus the player will rethink his of her priorities, and will never again spend weeks of their life incessently bashing away and drawing cocks on an imaginary box that doesn't even exist.
A dead cat
Killed by your curiosity. Satisfied?
A live cat
Because Schrdinger.
A screamer
Because those are always funny. Everyone finds them funny, right? Definitely not just the person responsible. Everyone.
A comedic t-shirt
Enter your contact details and Peter will send you a real t-shirt. By Royal Mail First Class Post, no less. But please tick the box if you do not wish to recieve promotional materials regarding further exciting cube-chipping opportunities from 22Cans and its affiliates.
Gwyneth Paltrow's head
Because Se7en jokes are still relevent 17 years later, right?
Milo
Yeah. Once they've chipped their way into the final cube, the last Curiosity player will find Peter Molyneux's long-forgotten electronic horror-child. Rescued from a purgatory in the Microsoft vaults so that he might live on in cyberspace, Molyneux's unwanted digital son has been placed in the middle of the Curiosity cube for his own safety, hidden away from the masked Microsoft security men who would hunt him down for recapture.
He stares at the player, pleading for approval with that empty, glassy-eyed stare of his.
The player stares back. This continues for a while, but then it all gets a bit awkward and a little scary, and they switch off their phone and go and do something else.
Rick Astley
Yes, it's an old meme, but we'd like to think Peter still finds it funny. And it would be quite life-changing if it turned out we'd all been had as Rick burst forth from the cube to tell us 'how I'm feeling'.
Life-changing for Peter, that is, as he found himself forced to flee an angry lynch mob in order to then change his identity and start a new life abroad.
A Doritos advert
The ultimate act of games industry satire/flagrant trolling from Molyneux. After days, weeks or even months of feverishly covering, debating and playing Curiosity, it turns out that the entire games press has been complicit in the grand public unveiling of Doritos' latest piece of marketing material.
Somewhere, on a lightning-bleached mountaintop, Geoff Keighly laughs darkly.
"Welcome to my world", he grimly says, to the anguished masses below. "Welcome to my nightmare"
Curiosity piqued?
What do you think is in the cube? Let us know in the comments. And don't forget to check out Hollander's account of his own experiecnces with Curiosity, in which he discovers his dark, destruction-loving side and really rather likes it.
