Someone’s apparently planning to recreate a battle royale match in reality, if an advertisement on a swank website is any indication. The unnamed millionaire is offering to pay a princely sum for help making this endeavor work, but I’ll tell them this, right now, for free: it isn’t going to.
The advertisement is on HushHush, an online marketplace that bills itself as being for the rich and luxury-loving of the world — expensive jewelry, rare cars, pretty much what you’d expect. The site also has a “requests” category, and in this case the request is for someone to help a millionaire recreate the battle royale experience in real life. If you’re interested, the job apparently pays around $59,000 for about six weeks of work.
The competition itself, at least what they’ve thought out so far, will last for three days on a private island, with 12 hours of competition per day. They’ll get food and camping equipment, and will presumably be allowed to move about freely during the 12-hour detente. The winner will get £100,000.
As for every other detail… well, it appears Richie Rich needs help ironing those out. Aaron Harpin, the site’s founder, says the client “wants to make the game a reality in the safest way possible” and says the HushHush concierge team requires “a talented gamemaker to help us make the event as realistic as possible.”
So they want it to be a realistic simulation of a game in which people have to kill each other or die… but they also want it to be safe? Oh, that waiver is going to be a damned novel.
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Again, I’m gonna give this advice for free (which is probably dumb of me, but here we go): it’s not going to really turn out like the battles royale in the books, movies, and games — if only because there won’t be the thrill of an exploding collar, a carpet bombing, or an ever-widening storm to keep things interesting. It’s high-stakes, don’t get me wrong, and seeing what people will do for money is always entertaining — if it weren’t, reality tv wouldn’t be a thing. But there’s still something a little … off about the idea of a bunch of actual people going to a rich person’s island and fake-killing each other for their entertainment.
I’m seriously hoping we’ve stumbled upon the early planning stages of a charity event, because otherwise this just seems kind of pointless and self-indulgent. I’ve seen this compared to the Hunger Games, but hell, at least the Hunger Games had a purpose — demoralizing a massive labor class, yes, but that’s still a purpose. If this must go forward, then at least let me see Uncle Pennybags get down there in the trenches with a pith helmet and a BB gun and take their chances like everyone else.
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