A former Yoozoo Games executive has been handed a death sentence for the murder of a producer on Netflix‘s sci-fi show “3 Body Problem”, an American science fiction television series created by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss and Alexander Woo, based on the Hugo Award–winning Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
Lin founded Yoozoo Games in 2009 and owned the rights for all adaptations of the sci-fi bestseller, including a stage adaptation, an animated series, and the Chinese-language series for “The 3 Body”. In 2019, Yoozoo Games developed and published Game of Thrones: Winter is Coming, a multi-player online game based on the series. Later, he was involved in the production of “The 3 Body Problem”.
Lin invested millions of dollars on the copyrights and licenses connected to the franchise in 2014, the year the first book in the trilogy was translated into English. In 2017, he hired Xu, a former lawyer, to head a subsidiary of Yoozoo called The Three-Body Universe that held the rights to Mr. Liu’s novels. However, due to his performance at his job, Yao was relegated, and his salary was reduced, so he began experimenting with hundreds of poisons acquired on the dark web, testing them on pets to plan his final revenge.
He began adulterating beverages with methylmercury chloride, which he then brought to the office. Eventually, he poisoned Lin Qi by offering him supposed probiotic pills that actually contained lethal substances.
Lin Qui a local hospital after experiencing symptoms of poisoning and later died at the age of 39 on 25 December 2020. Xu, also 39 at the time, was detained by Shangai police.
Not only did Lin Qui was fatally poisoned, four other people also fell ill as a result of Xu poisoning drinks in the Yoozoo offices between September and December 2020. Luckily, they survived.
Xu Yao was found guilty by the Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court of fatally poisoning Lin Qi, China’s “billionaire millennial.” His sentence was handed to him on March 22, the day after the series debuted on Netflix.
The Netflix adaptation of “the 3 Body Problem” garnered 11 million viewers in its first four days.
