Beat the game, win a Bitcoin. Simple, right? That’s the premise of MonteCrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma, a PC game scheduled for release next week.
The mysterious game, the latest in a long tradition of public treasure hunts, offers players the opportunity to achieve a lucrative payday — if they can solve the game’s two dozen puzzles, that its.
At its core, MonteCrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma is a first-person maze exploration game, and players will be tasked with solving 24 “mind-bending puzzles.”
Embedded in the game’s files is a wallet.dat file containing the private key to an address with a 1 BTC balance. The wallet is encrypted with a 24-word seed that players will unlock once they beat the game. Only one player, however, will be able to claim the prize, and the rest will be met with an empty wallet.
Although the game is single-player, users can leave messages for others to find. Will they cooperate to solve the puzzles, or will they use the feature to try to steer them off the correct path? That’s what the game’s creators say they want to find out.
From the game’s Steam page:
“Montecrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma is an experiment in player choice and cooperation like no other, with a prize that translates not only to bragging rights but to real world value. How much will players be willing to share, how much will they be able to compromise and who will claim access to the final vault of Montecrypto?”
Incidentally, the development team, Gem Rose Accent, is as enigmatic as the game itself. The company has not produced any other games under this brand, and the developers said that they will not reveal their identities until a player has claimed the 1 BTC prize.
The game, which will be released on the Steam platform on Feb. 20, has a $1.99 entry fee. The 1 Bitcoin prize? That’s currently valued at $10,763, according to the CCN Bitcoin price index.