A new video game, Montecrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma, released on Steam Feb. 20th is going to give players the chance to win a bitcoin. If you are the first player to solve all 24 puzzles you will win a whole Bitcoin, currently valued at $9,800. There’s also a 40% discount if you buy it on the release date, bringing the price down to just $1.19.
The game will retail for $1.99, and it contains 24 puzzles for players to solve. At this retail price 5,000 downloads would be enough for the developers to break even, though that doesn’t factor in the same-day discount or the volatile price of Bitcoin.
Each puzzle unlocks a word in the 24 word key for the wallet containing the Bitcoin. You can view the actual wallet for the Bitcoin-themed video game here. The first person to solve all 24 puzzles will gain access to the wallet and can snag the crypto for their very own.
MonteCrypto’s FAQ page links to to a bit of code on GitHub designed to help people crack their Bitcoin wallet password if they only remember some of it. The developers also suggest checking the FAQ page’s source code for more clues while you wait for the game to be released.
The development team behind Montecrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma is a secret. They currently go by “Gem Rose Accent” but say that they will say who they are after the game has been solved.
The developers said in a press release:
We are trying to keep our identities secret for now. But we can say we are a group of game developers and that we had a crazy idea for a game. As huge fans of treasure hunts we took inspiration from riddles like la chorette d’or (the golden owl), a statue of the owl was buried in 1993 at the same time a series of clues was published, and still nobody has solved the clues to find the owl and claim the 15kg (33lb) statue made of gold and silver.
Montecrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma follows in the footsteps of other games that have offered up financial rewards to players, such as the golden owl treasure hunt listed above. There was the North to Alaska board game, released in 1984, that offered a $20,000 gold nugget contest. (There’s no word if the contest was ever completed as only about 5,000 of the games were originally made.)
There was also Masquerade a picture book, written and illustrated by Kit Williams, published in August 1979, that sparked a treasure hunt by concealing clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare, hidden somewhere in Britain by Williams. The book became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts. In March 1982, Kit Williams received a sketch which he recognized as the first correct solution mailed to him. Williams immediately phoned the sender, “Ken Thomas”, a pseudonym of Dugald Thompson, and instructed him to dig for the hare. He realized that Thompson had not solved the puzzle in the intended manner, but appeared at the time to have blundered into a lucky guess. Shortly after Thompson was formally awarded the prize, Williams received a correct solution sent by two physics teachers, Mike Barker of William Hulme’s Grammar School and John Rousseau of Rossall School. Barker and Rousseau had seemingly unearthed the prize themselves when digging at Ampthill, but had not noticed it inside its clay box; Thompson discovered it in the dirt piles they left behind.
Then there was Treasure of the Golden Unicorn, a supplement for The Fantasy Trip pen-and-paper rpg from 1980. This supplement gave clues within the adventure to the real world location of a small golden unicorn figurine that had been buried. To this day, the figurine has not been discovered.
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