Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube?
| Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube? | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | 22Cans |
| Publisher(s) | 22Cans |
| Producer(s) | Jemma Harris |
| Designer(s) | Peter Molyneux |
| Programmer(s) | Gary Leach, Tim Rance |
| Platform(s) | iOS, Android |
| Release date(s) | 6 November 2012 |
| Mode(s) | Online multiplayer |
Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube? was an experimental video game by Peter Molyneux's studio 22Cans. Originally called Curiosity, the game was later renamed to avoid confusion with the Mars rover. The social experiment ended on 26 May 2013 and was won by Bryan Henderson from Edinburgh, Scotland.
Curiosity was a multiplayer social experiment. The game setting was a featureless and minimalist white room in the middle of which floated a giant cube made of billions of smaller cubes ("cubelets") and white, floating text across each layer, usually topic related (hashtag, notifications etc.), with small messages. Players tapped the cubelets to dig through the surface of each layer and reveal the next layer below. The goal was to reach the center and to discover what was inside the cube. Each layer, which had a distinct look or design, contained a clue as to what was in the centre of the cube. Each cubelet destroyed by a player awarded them coins. Coins could be spent on tools that temporarily enhanced the player's abilities, such as picks ranging from iron to steel to diamond that increased the number of cubelets destroyed with each tap, or firecrackers that could be laid on the cube in long strings to chain together explosions.
22Cans added more gameplay mechanics as the players progressed through the cube. Version 2, released on 7 December, included three new features: Draw mode, Badgers and Golden Badgers, as well as a page graphing various statistics about the cube against time. In addition, Peter Molyneux suggested there may be more to the game than it would seem: "There is something we haven't told everybody about when you play the cube. When you play the cube you're also doing something else. You don't realize you're doing it. [...] You're not just doing things in the cube. You don't realize it but you're doing something in something else as well at the same time."
Peter Molyneux claimed that "what is inside the cube is life-changingly amazing by any definition". Critics stated that the game designer might be over-promising. When it was suggested to him that he should "tone down the enthusiasm", he responded: "I don’t want to believe less in something. I want to make something that is worthy of the emotion behind it."
Curiosity was one of the few games that could be successfully played by a simple robot.
According to the statistics pages available in-game from version 2, as of 8 Dec the game had over three million users. 22Cans did not anticipate such widespread interest in the game, and were not prepared to handle the extreme load, causing connectivity issues to persist from launch day to nearly a week afterward.
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