It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Griff Halliwell just last weekend. In the Munzee community, he was most widely known as the creator of popular Munzee tool http://eeznum.co.uk/
A Brief Munzee Bio
Griff enjoyed playing Munzee with his wife, Lesley. They shared the georiffles account and were even featured as Players of the Week in 2015 — you can check out the blog post HERE to learn more about them.
Aside from regularly capping and deploying munzees and participating in Clan Wars with their Plankers I clanmates, Griff and Lesley have also been a pleasant presence at Munzee Events throughout the years. In fact, they met Rob, our CZeeO, long before officially becoming family this year (if you read the POTW blog post, you’ll discover that they are Lou’s Uncle and Auntie).
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Griff and Lesley (georiffles) with Rob back at the original MHQ Bash at Franconia
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A group picture from the original office tours on Sept 27 ’14
The Full Story
Like many of our other players Griff and Lesley began as geocachers, under the name georiffles. Griff introduced the entire family to location based gaming, as noted in their POTW blog. Over the past 6 years since that blog he has continued to build out his website full of tools. The Munzee team will work to keep Griff’s Eeznum website running since it is a popular tool amongst the community. Griff always enjoyed testing his coding and learning new skills by finding ways to give players tools to track their own stats. He was one of the first 3rd party developers to build tools for players to use. He focused on giving unique user based stats, like how many of your own bouncers you had capped. He built maps with information to show all of the unique one of a kind munzees so players could find them easily and plan trips to cap them, or just monitor them from home for fun. The most recent, and fun, was for the Golden Tickets.
Griff’s daily routine included checking his treehouse and Skyland for bouncers, searching the area for others and monitoring for any new gamepieces launched by the team. He was always quick to implement new features and tools on his website. He worked well with Sam, the creator of Cuppazee, who will be helping the team with the Eeznum website and possibly incorporating some of his tools.
Outside Munzee Griff was an avid wind surfer and enjoyed spending as much time as possible on the water. He was a gamer at heart from the earliest gaming systems through to the most current. Over the last 3 years he spent countless hours on Fortnite playing solo, or online in squads with Rob, and Louise’s two boys Charlie and Harry. He was recently getting into making YouTube videos of those matches and documenting his Fortnite highlights.
Memorial Garden
Griff will be missed by his family, his friends, the Munzee team and community. The team is building a memorial garden but the location hasn’t been chosen yet. We hope you’ll check back next week to deploy a munzee in his memory.
Update November 24th the garden is ready, click here for the spreadsheet. Thanks to Dale from Space Coast Geo Store for the help building it.
Food for Thought
This may not specifically apply to Griff’s shared georiffles account because Lesley continues to play and we hope she will. His passing has reminded us of some feedback we’ve received from players over time. Specifically requesting a change to Inactive accounts to those that own bouncers: you may recall that when a player is Inactive, at certain times throughout the year their bouncers will return as RetireMyths, Zombie Pouch Creatures, and Phantom Flats. Instead of those undead-inspired bouncers, it was suggested that the bouncers return as angel versions of themselves. We thought this would be a good starting point for a new type of account status — rather than getting rid of the current way Inactive accounts work, as accounts can become Inactive for a variety of reasons — we can create a “Memorial” status or something like it. We are currently in the brainstorming phase for this feature, but we’ll definitely announce any updates when ready.
He also mentioned in his POTW post a wishlist item of a special pin for those players who reached 1 million points. It’s been a long time since that was considered so it’s back on the table for conversation.
We think Griff would be happy that his work will continue on, and his ideas and life will inspire future growth in the game he loved so much. Our sincere condolences to Lesley, and to Griff’s family and friends. May he rest in peace.
-Team Munzee
