I Set the World Record on This Game (And It Only Cost Me $25)

I’m the top-ranked player globally in this pretty iPhone game, and it only cost me $25.

On Nov. 21, Electronic Arts subsidiary Chillingo published its 338th iPhone game, a racer with a minimalist visual style called Endless Road. It challenges you to outrun an earthquake that is causing the road behind you to collapse. The farther you drive, the higher your score.

Life After Disc is a series exploring new development in digital gaming platforms, from app stores to browsers to downloadable console games.

Roughly 16,792 players have purchased Endless Road, according to its GameCenter leaderboards, and as of this writing I have scored higher than all of them. Am I some kind of Endless Road savant? No, I just paid twenty-five bucks.

Since Apple began to allow “in-app purchases” for free iOS software, many games using a free-to-play model allow players to spend unlimited amounts of money on virtual items. While some game developers say they’ll never embrace a “pay-to-win” scheme in which the biggest-spending players will always dominate their non-paying friends, some embrace it. Some players find themselves spending thousands of dollars on these games to stay on top. In Endless Road, it only took me $25 and a few hours to become the world’s greatest.

As players weave between cars and obstacles in Endless Road, sometimes they’ll come across short lines of coins. Given that most runs will take around five minutes, players often collect between 100 and 200 coins. Many of the game’s best upgrades, such as powerful new vehicles, cost tens of thousands of coins, so it would take a long, long time to unlock them through regular play.

The more efficient method of unlocking everything involves your bank account. For $8.99, you can purchase a package of 150,000 coins, enough to unlock everything.

Before I had ever spent a dime on Endless Road, I was already pretty good at it. I was ranked 117th out of around 10,000 players. After buying the 150,000-coin package and playing just one more game, my ranking immediately shot up to sixth. I doubled the distance that I could drive thanks in part to my purchase of a 50,000-coin monster truck that could bump into other cars on the road without slowing down much.

The other major factor in my success was consumables, items that could only be used once. This is the design that allows players to spend and spend without end. One of the items lets you skip the first 700 meters of each run. Another causes extra powerups to appear in the game. One even gives you a second life, allowing you to come back with no repercussions after a crash.

Robert Ashley must not be a big spender.

The best powerup, though, is the “Extra Nitro,” which costs 350 coins and can be used as many times as you like in a single race. It gives your car an insane speed boost that propels you through most any obstacle, even other cars. In a game that’s about going fast to survive, Extra Nitro is essentially an instant-win button. No mistake really matters when you can tap the nitro boost button and zip away from danger. I bought 25 of them before every race.

Endless Road seems to be suffering from problems with hackers. One of the game’s leaderboards tracks the number of coins that players have collected while driving. I’ve collected 27,878 coins, but Game Center shows that some players have over 1 billion of them, which implies that they’ve somehow hacked the game and taken as many coins as possible without paying. Every player besides myself in the top five of the Distance leaderboard seems to has way more coins than could have been collected through normal play.

I’m not proud of the fact that my name sits above every other player of Endless Road. Sure, I probably actually am better at the game than many of them, nor did I hack it. But that score is inflated because I spent money. My highest distance driven was over 23,000 meters, but if I didn’t use coins I’d rarely make it past the 6,000 meter mark.

The first game with a table of high scores was Space Invaders. Back then, it really meant something. It was a goal to shoot for â€" could you knock the top dog off the list and replace his initials with yours?

But the high-score table of Endless Road is utterly meaningless. Not a single person at the top achieved their position because of skill, and no amount of playing will let you beat them if you don’t pay up.

Endless Road is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the “freemium” or “pay-to-win” business model for games. Every bit of value it may have in its design is invalidated when any random journalist with 25 bucks in his pocket can pay to become “the best.”

I know that games like FarmVille 2 are designed to make lots of money instead of providing a cool gaming experience. I know that many of the top players of big games are just men with deep pockets, and I know that there are many cute iPhone games which are really just toyboxes designed to repeatedly take your money.

What I don’t know is if I’ll be able to ever take a game like this seriously ever again. Maybe by tomorrow, somebody will out-pay me and become the new world champion of Endless Road. I won’t be there to find out.

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