Contact with Curiosity winner dried up amid Godus development woes

By Stephany Nunneley

Bryan Henderson, who won 22Cans’ Curiosity game in 2013, has yet to receive the “life-changing” reward promised for opening the mysterious cube in the game.

Speaking with Eurogamer, Henderson found upon opening the cube a video featuring a email contact and of Peter Molyneux congratulating the winner, appeared.

The prize for opening the cube in Curiosity was becoming a god in Godus as well as receiving a cut of the money made from the game from the “start and finish” of his rein as a god.

Henderson said his cut, according to 22Cans would be 1% of revenue from Godus during his reign as “God of Gods,” a feature which hasn’t been developed yet.

He and a friend were even given an all expenses paid trip to the studio.

18 months after his experience, it looks as though Henderson will never be able to collect on the promise.

According to Henderson, after his visit to 22Cans, communication ceased.

“All I wanted to know was, when will it happen?” he said. “They couldn’t really tell me. They said it would happen when the game was finished.”

“I would have to email them first. After a month or two of winning, I would email them every month, purely because I expected more communication from them, but it wasn’t happening.

“I would ask, so, what’s happening? When am I going to find out more stuff? What’s going to happen, specifically? They were taking their time to answer. They would say, we need to do this first and tell you afterwards.

“Since I won and a year after, I would email them as a ritual thing, every month, just to get some kind of update. Eventually, communication [was] non-existent, so I’m not even going to try any more.”

In response to Henderson being left in the dark, Molyneux offered an apology, saying Henderson should have a formal contact at the company, and that it was “pretty shoddy for us to not keep him posted.”

“I totally and absolutely and categorically apologize,” said Molyneux. “That isn’t good enough and I’ll take it on my own shoulders that I should have made sure he was communicated with. We will from today onward do that.

“It’s just on a list. The trouble is, it’s very easy to forget about things that are further down the list when you’re so busy with things at the top of the list. I think it’s unfair on him. We should keep him posted. I will speak to him myself.”

Earlier this week it revealed that back in January, 22Cans designer Konrad “FuriousMoo” Naszynski wasn’t sure whether some of the promised features in the Early Access and Kickstarter project would make it into the full game.

“To be brutally candid and realistic I simply can’t see us delivering all the features promised on the Kickstarter page,” he said. “A lot of the multiplayer stuff is looking seriously shaky right now especially the persistent stuff like hubworld.”

A Godus community update followed, with both Naszynski and Molyneuz answering backer questions, with Molyneux stating there was a “catalog of things that I did badly and incorrectly because I had never done a Kickstarter campaign before…and [on] all of these things I made some horrendous mistakes.”

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