Curiosity Unboxed: The Global Experiment That Turned Taps Into a Mystery
by Scott
Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube? was an unusual social experiment disguised as a game, released by the British studio 22cans. It arrived at a time when mobile gaming was rapidly expanding and developers were experimenting with scale, monetisation, and community-driven mechanics. Rather than offering traditional gameplay, Curiosity posed a single question and invited the entire world to help answer it.
The idea for Curiosity came from Peter Molyneux, a well-known game designer with a history of ambitious and experimental projects. 22cans was formed with the intention of exploring unconventional ideas, and Curiosity was one of its earliest and boldest attempts. The game was released in late 2012 on mobile platforms, initially attracting attention due to its simplicity and mystery rather than flashy visuals or complex mechanics.
At its core, Curiosity was extremely simple. Players were presented with a massive virtual cube made up of billions of smaller cubes, often referred to as cublets. Each player could tap on a cublet to remove it, revealing another layer beneath. Every tap removed a single cublet, and every player around the world was interacting with the same shared cube in real time.
The simplicity of tapping hid a much larger technical challenge. Because all players were interacting with a single shared object, the game experienced widespread connectivity and lag issues, especially during peak interest. Servers struggled to keep up with the demand, and players often saw delays between their actions and updates to the cube. Despite this, the shared nature of the experience made the technical limitations part of the story rather than a complete failure.
The common goal was clear from the beginning: remove all the cublets and reach the very centre of the cube. No one knew what was inside, and that uncertainty was the driving force behind the game’s popularity. The promise that something significant awaited at the core kept players engaged, even though most of them understood they would never personally reach it.
The scale of participation was immense. Over the lifetime of the experiment, players collectively clicked 27,798,516,200 cublets, averaging around 1,593 cublets per second at peak activity. This was not the work of a few dedicated individuals, but a global effort involving millions of players contributing small actions toward a shared objective.
To encourage engagement and monetisation, Curiosity offered power-ups. These allowed players to remove multiple cublets at once, tap faster, or gain temporary advantages. Power-ups could be earned slowly through play or purchased with real money. Many players chose to spend money, not necessarily because the upgrades offered personal advantage, but because they felt they were contributing more meaningfully to the collective effort.
The game became a large-scale community project. Online forums, social media, and fan sites tracked progress, estimated timelines, and debated what the final reward might be. The cube became a shared obsession, with players checking in daily to see how close the community was to breaking through another layer.
It took roughly 50 days for players to reach the centre of the cube. When the final cublet was tapped, it was done by a single player who happened to be interacting at the right moment. That player was rewarded with a unique prize: the opportunity to become a god-like ruler in 22cans’ next game, a project that would later become Godus. The winner also received a share of revenue from that future game, a reward that was both symbolic and financially significant.
After the initial hype, 22cans faced challenges. Godus did not meet expectations for many players, and the studio struggled to recapture the same level of excitement generated by Curiosity. The experiment had succeeded in creating attention and engagement, but translating that success into long-term trust proved difficult.
Curiosity may never happen again in quite the same way. It relied on a perfect mix of mystery, timing, novelty, and a willingness from players to participate without guarantees. Today’s audiences are more sceptical, platforms are more regulated, and large-scale experiments involving uncertainty and monetisation face greater scrutiny.
In retrospect, Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube? stands as a fascinating moment in gaming history. It demonstrated the power of collective effort, the draw of unanswered questions, and the willingness of millions of people to contribute to something larger than themselves, even when the reward was unknown. It was less a game and more a global experiment in curiosity itself, and that may be why it remains memorable long after the cube was finally broken.