The Crunchie: It's Not Just An Award, It's A Weapon

When we commissioned the statuettes for the Crunchies Awards last year, we hoped to create something a little more memorable than the typical plastic tombstone. We opted for a plastic monkey holding a bone aloft instead. While it does have a certain menacing quality to it, we never expected anyone to turn it into weapon.

But now you can find “The Crunchie” in the online game Duels. Our award has been re-stylized as a deadly mace with a power rating of 631 (which is massive, a run-of-the-mill mace has a power rating of 50 or less). There appears to be only one, and it is owned by a player named Loki (aka Andrew Busey, CEO of Challenge Games, the maker of Duel). You don’t want to mess with him. He’s got a Crunchie.

Here’s the description of the Crunchie on its dedicated Duels weapons page:

This stylized mace was crafted to capture a snapshot of history. The rise of tools, followed quickly by an escalation in both productivity and violence, heralded the dawn of a new age. The foundation of what became civilization, tools quickly became weapons. This mace memorializes the quest for dominance that transition brought. Raw competition and a battle to the top are captured in the simple bone weapon used by the savage. Today the competition may be more civilized, but it can still be just as brutal.

That sentiment sounds familiar. Here’s our description of why we went with the original design for the award:

The inspiration comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie a tribe of prehistoric ape-men interact with a black monolith that appears near them. The monolith inspires one of them to create the first use of technology – a bone used as a tool and a weapon. The video clip of the segment is in our original post on the award.

We are honoring startups that have innovated in technology; thus, we feel the award is symbolic culturally and appropriate. The additional flourishes, such as the baseball cap and jersey, were the idea of the artist to modernize the setting. And the ape is beating on old technology with his bone – a symbol of the disruptive nature of the technology world, where young startups often feast on their older, slower siblings.

Stay tuned for details about next year’s Crunchies Awards soon.