Golf Club Wasteland Dev Offers $500 Million Version Of The Game In Elaborate Joke About Billionaires In Space

The developers of Golf Club: Wasteland, a golf game where human life is wiped out and the Earth is now a golf course for the super-rich, have launched a unique marketing stunt hoping to piggyback on the news about Jeff Bezos and other billionaires shooting themselves into space.

Demagog Studio's creative director Igor Simic is said to have had a "wake up call" recently and is choosing to remove the game from sale to the public and will instead sell it to just one person. The price? $500 million. Simic will then use the money to fly himself off Earth before the "inevitable climate, financial, and political apocalypse comes for the rest of us plebs."

"Golf Club: Wasteland started off as pure satire. The ultra-rich playing golf on the remains of civilization after initially fleeing to Mars as Earth crumbled thanks to consumerism, climate disaster, and Silicon Valley-fuelled greed," Simic said. "Well, now I'm not laughing anymore. These rocket obsessed billionaires like Musk, Bezos, and Branson are already packing their designer bags, so it's time I sorted out my own ticket off this doomed planet."

The $500 million version of Golf Club: Wasteland is called the "My Ticket Outta Here Edition," and only one person can buy it. "I'm hoping $500 million should be enough to at least get me a cheap seat next to the toilets for the final Mars flight," Simic said. "I've been told the price also needs to be adequate enough so that the potential buyer can reassuringly brag about it to their friends and Forbes Magazine."

Simic added--again, jokingly--that he wants to do the most environmental damage possible with Golf Club: Wasteland, and he's going to great lengths to make that happen.

"To further secure the game's value and exclusivity, I've decided to put this one-off version of the game entirely on floppy disks," he said. "This method will also allow me to use a custom formatting and copying process that so inefficiently uses computing power, it takes around 7 months to copy data onto one disk. This will help maximize the amount of environmental damage my video game can do, since I heard that's also really important."

Greg Pauper, a marketing intern at publisher Untold Tales--who may or may not be a real person--added: "With floppy disks having a capacity of around 1.44MB each, the buyer of Golf Club: Wasteland should expect to get a canvas nylon duffel bag with around 750 plastic disks. I'll see if we can put in a free t-shirt too."

All versions of the regular edition of Golf Club: Wasteland will be destroyed and buried in a New Mexico landfill. They might also be reprogrammed to run on Linux, "thus ensuring nobody else will ever play it."

A fictional spokesperson for Demagog's HR department added: "At Demagog, we are a family and feel we are in this all together, no matter what. The reward is the work itself and knowing we achieved something great, as a family. Also please don't try to unionize."

This is all a joke and none of it is true. Golf Club: Wasteland will be available on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, as well as Xbox Series X|S and PS5 through backwards compatibility when it launches in August 2021.