Curiosity’s god of Godus is mortal

The man who cracked the final cube in Curiosity will only have a limited rule over 22Cans’ upcoming god game Godus.

Bryan Henderson of Edinburgh won the "life-changing" prize at the centre of the colossal cube, which proved to be a tenure as "god of all people playing Godus."

Henderson will make decisions about how the game is played, and even get a cut of the proceeds.

But Peter Molyneux has now told Rock Paper Shotgun that this reign won’t be eternal.

"The interesting thing is that what Bryan has won is a grace period where he can be god of gods for a certain amount of time,” said Molyneux.

“It won’t be less than a few months. It might not be more than a year."

When this period expires, another player will take over as chief executive deity.

"And then we’ll unveil the ability to usurp the god of gods and replace him with someone else," said Molyneux.

"That someone else will then take on all of Bryan’s powers.”

Molyneux doesn’t think this weakens his claim that the prize is "life changing".

"It didn’t seem right to me that Bryan would be god of gods for all time,” he continued.

“It seems right to me that he has a period of time to be god of gods, and that can’t just be a few days. It needs to be substantial. And in that time, many things could happen.

"And of course, the amount of physical money he gets depends on how successful the game is. So he’ll probably be god of gods for an amount of time approaching a year. That’ll be a year from release, by the way. It needs to be enough time to make it meaningful for him in every sense of the word.”

It turns out that time isn’t the only limitation on Henderson’s omnipotence, and Molyneux says that the Prime Mover of the Godus cosmos has a board of directors in the form of 22Cans.

His decisions will be made through a dashboard appearing in-game about once a week, and also through direct communication with the studio.

"What they aren’t going to be is carte blanche uncontrolled, unrefined decisions that would throw the balance of the game out entirely," Molyneux explained.

"Bryan can absolutely request something to happen, and we’ll make our best effort to do it. But he can’t decide everybody in Canada will explode or anything like that. There are limits to his power.”

This is surely good news for Canadians, but the final decision of how much power Henderson will have and for how long will still have to wait for fan feedback.

"I want to gauge people’s reactions – not just to the center of Curiosity, but also to gauge the reaction to Godus," said Molyneux.

"Because maybe later today but certainly tomorrow, we’re releasing the PC alpha of Godus to Kickstarter backers, and it didn’t seem like that sort of decision should be made without some sort of feedback from the people who will actually be playing Godus.”