First Person To Beat New Video Game Wins A Bitcoin, Developer Says

In less than a week, gamers with an interest in cryptocurrency but without the will or means to invest in it will have a rare opportunity. A new video game, “MonteCrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma,” launches Tuesday on Steam for $1.99. It’s a series of puzzles set in a first-person maze environment, and whoever finishes the game first supposedly wins a single bitcoin, Motherboard reported.

“MonteCrypto” was developed and self-published by an anonymous outfit called Gem Rose Accent. According to the game’s official website, the identities of the developers will only be revealed once a player successfully decodes all 24 enigmas in the game and wins the bitcoin. Though there can only be one true winner, “MonteCrypto” has a “Dark Souls”-like feature, where players can leave behind written messages to either help or mislead other players.

Regarding the developers’ identities, the official Twitter account for the game is sparsely followed, and the only game developer it follows is David O’Reilly, creator of the popular experimental games “Mountain” and “Everything.” The short trailer on the game’s Steam page makes it look like it has decent production value, but until someone finishes it, there will be no way to know who made it.

A single bitcoin is worth around $10,000 at the time of writing. “Finish a video game and win money” will surely be an enticing offer for a number of players, though the “MonteCrypto” website promises it will be “amongst the hardest you’ve ever played.” Since it is a PC game, data-miners will surely dig into their files to find answers or hack their way to the end, but the website and Steam page did not address that concern.

Video games made with the express purpose of doling out some kind of tangible, monetary reward to victorious players are few and far between, but a couple of notable examples exist. In 2012, longtime game developer Peter Molyneux released “Curiosity,” an iPhone app in which users cooperatively tapped on an enormous cube with several layers until one lucky player reached the core. The winner, a teen named Scot Bryan Henderson, would get to be the lone virtual god of a game called “Godus,” even receiving a cut of the game’s profits. But that never really came to pass, according to Eurogamer.

However, “MonteCrypto” could be reminiscent of Atari’s “Swordquest” blunder from the early 1980s. Atari, then a gaming giant, was going to release four games, with the first player to solve each game’s riddle winning a different prize artifact worth about $25,000. Once there were four champions, they would then compete against each other in a final contest to win a jewel-encrusted sword worth $50,000. Only the first three prizes were awarded, as the fourth game was canceled amid a video game industry crash. The final two prizes were thought to be smelted down and reused later, according to a 2016 Ars Technica report.