We've become used to quietly terrible billionaires, the type who use their wealth to reshape laws and practices to their benefit and use their gravity-shifting hoarding of resources to make the world slightly/greatly worse. But the type of barons who inspired works like The World's Most Dangerous Game are still out there. Take the anonymous rich guy who is looking to stage a battle royale on a private island for his own entertainment.
IGN reports that a rich person contacted the luxury curators Hush Hush to ask them if they could move beyond gaudy watches and helicopters to set up a 100-person deathmatch on a private island. We've moved beyond an era where encouraging outright murder is allowed, so the company got to work setting up an airsoft battle between participants wearing touch-sensitive armor. The winner of the three-day event will receive a £100,000 prize, or about $130,700. News got out about the match when Hush Hush posted an advertisement looking for a game-maker to design the island. The unsettlingly chipper ad lays out the request.
"Battle royale games have become incredibly popular over the last few years ago and our customer is a huge fan who wants to make the game a reality in the safest way possible,” Hush Hush founder Aaron Harpin said in the posting. “If the championship is a success this year, it’s something he wants to make an annual event moving forward, which is very exciting!”
If you don't know how to shape games for poor folks to fight each other in, maybe you can sell this anonymous man a Swarovski-crystal studded conch shell.
