At a Labour party conference-adjacent event in September, The World Transformed, Jeremy Corbyn was pictured waving an arm in front of an arcade cabinet bearing the words Thatcher’s Techbase. The game – a modified version of 1994’s famous infernal shooter, Doom II – sees players hunting down a resurrected, cyborg version of the former prime minister in a labyrinthine fortress.
The images kicked off a minor media storm. “Pictured: Jeremy Corbyn plays video game that lets players kill Margaret Thatcher,” said The Telegraph; the photos were featured in the Daily Mail, the Express and the Times. They even appeared on Have I Got News for You.
Jim Purvis, the game’s creator – who took and later tweeted the photos – was somewhat surprised. “In real life when it actually happened it was so mundane and ordinary,” he says. “[Corbyn] was just walking around picking up books and looking at stalls and talking to people – and here’s this big machine making explosion noises … He wandered over and asked, what’s this about?” Apparently the former Labour leader checked out the game for about five minutes, but Jim’s photos made for an irresistible story. “The tweet fell into the hands of certain political commentators and when I woke up on Monday morning, the press was out there calling it the Maggie demon-death game ... I thought, that’s a great title for it.”
Thatcher’s Techbase is an interactive political collage, where players explore custom-made Doom maps decorated with iconography from Thatcherite Britain, from official campaign posters and political cartoons to more specific imagery such as the infamous cover art of the Iron Maiden single Sanctuary, which sees the band’s mascot Eddie wielding a knife while standing over Thatcher’s corpse. It’s a highly condensed slideshow of the political tensions of the era – and it’s part of a suite of British satirical video games that look at Britain’s political situation and wonder, when everything is so ridiculous, is there such a thing as a reasonable response?
The premise isn’t meant to be taken seriously – Purvis’s Thatcher is a gun-toting undead robot, after all – but the project was also partly about coming to terms with the impact of the Thatcher government’s policies. It started out as a joke inspired by Twitter during the pandemic: “I just saw a random tweet where someone made a joke about if they were sent to hell they’d spend their days wading through the place looking for Thatcher,” says Purvis.
“In the game, you can literally press a button to piss on [cyborg] Thatcher’s grave. You can punch her in the face. You can blow her up with a rocket launcher … [There’s] a more immediately cathartic element to it that there isn’t in film or TV. There’s a lot of people who are peed off with the situation they find themselves in, and the politicians that are leading them, and they’re looking for relatively safe ways to express their frustration.”
Another video-game work of British political commentary, Duke Smoochem 3D is a modified version of the 1996 first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D that veers between absurd and apocalyptic. Jacob Rees-Mogg enjoys a relaxing lie down in the House of Commons, when his repose is interrupted by Neil Parish crashing through the wall in a tractor filled with pornography. Out in the countryside, pandemic talisman Captain Tom pulls a literal gravy train filled with piping hot Bisto, while Keir Starmer calls in an airstrike on a field of alpacas from the safety of the Bake Off tent.
Created by Dan Douglas, the satirical project began life when news of Matt Hancock’s affair broke in June last year, and the Daily Mail published a detailed floorplan of Hancock’s office. “It reminded me of a video game automap view, and Duke Nukem 3D’s security camera feature immediately sprang to mind. I thought it would be amusing to recreate the scene within the game’s engine,” Douglas says. “That was supposed to be it – one room, one clip, hopefully a few laughs on Twitter. Then I got sucked in, and things escalated.”
Fast-forward a year, and Douglas’s daft Twitter joke has evolved into a rolling chronicle of Britain’s rapidly decaying social and political structures. Within its recreations of the British high street and countryside are dozens of references to the weirder extremes of the news cycle, some of which were added to the game within hours of the stories breaking. “It’s interesting that the mod has evolved into a topical social media project, when that wasn’t my initial intention at all,” Douglas explains. “I’m trying to imbue the project with as much affection as malice, and feel like I’m straddling a line between documentation and parody.”
Duke Smoochem is a fascinating repository of Britain’s chaotic last 12 months, just one of a suite of games trying to make sense of the UK’s ongoing implosion – exploring how the country has gradually, then suddenly stumbled into the myriad crises it is currently experiencing, alongside ways these problems might be fixed. Mixing satire, simulation, and working-class perspectives, they represent a shift away from more idyllic representations of Britain seen in games such as Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
Where Duke Smoochem confronts players with the results of Britain’s political and economic collapse, Landlord’s Super explores the causes of those same problems. Set in the 1980s, it challenges players to renovate a former council house in the wake of the Thatcher government’s Housing Act. Starting with little more than a brick and concrete shell, your task goes way beyond applying a lick of paint, requiring you to lay whole new floors, retile the roof, and rebuild entire walls brick by brick.
“One of the big things I wanted to do with Landlord’s is [show] how being able to buy your own council house was really good for individuals. But the repercussions of not resupplying the market with more council houses have been terrible for everyone,” says Greg Pryjmachuk, creator of Landlord’s Super. “You’re constantly trying to improve yourself, constantly building up your property portfolio. It’s not really of benefit to anyone.”
Landlord’s Super combines its bricks-and-mortar construction with a broader social simulation. Renovating your former council house requires money, which you can earn through finding a job at the local Jobcentre in the game’s fictional town of Sheffingham. Yet even if the Jobcentre has work available, there’s no guarantee it will pay enough for you to afford the materials your gargantuan DIY project needs. Luckily for you, a local pub regular named Scouse Jimmy knows where you can acquire those same materials for free, provided you’re not above a bit of light thievery.
Scouse Jimmy was inspired by Tony “Scouser” Neilson, who featured in the 1987 documentary On the Manor, which served as a major inspiration for Landlord’s Super. “There’s a scene in it where he goes around the estate trying to pinch scrap metal, and they’re asking him ‘What do you reckon Thatcher thinks about your antics?’ He comes back and he says ‘Thatcher should be proud of me. I’m an enterprising fella,’”, Pryjmachuk says.
On the Manor’s representation of life in 1980s Sheffield also inspired the town that players can travel to for work in the game, featuring high-street shops where you can buy your equipment, and a fully simulated pub, which serves the fictional beer the game is named after. “Building the house and then selling it gave me this perfect narrative encapsulation of the era, because it gathered all the themes around the breaking-up of working-class communities,” Pryjmachuk says.
Landlord’s Super isn’t explicitly satirical like Duke Smoochem, but the two projects overlap in how they use the unique qualities of video games to interrogate British politics and society. “Video games have a great deal of freedom in how they choose to present satire,” Douglas says. “Something I’m trying to do with Duke Smoochem is use the full array of features possible within a retro first-person shooter – level design, staged effects, wall decoration, weapons, enemies, NPCs, pickups, text prompts, dialogue, sound effects, menu screens – to bombard the player simultaneously.” Pryjmachuk, meanwhile, compares his project to visiting a special exhibition in an art gallery. “When they host work, they’re exploring a theme, down to the layout of the building. The way you experience it is all-important. I think games are very good at that.”
Purvis never expected Thatcher’s Techbase to be more than an amusing curiosity, but rather than bask in the ephemeral glory of social media clout, he decided to put the attention to practical use. “I spoke to a couple of charities who are involved with causes related to Margaret Thatcher, like people working in the coal mining unions, tenants’ unions, refugee councils, Section 28 and LGBT charities,” he says. Purvis added a page to the Thatcher’s Techbase website, asking players who wanted to support the game to donate to the charities he contacted.
Since then, Purvis has used Thatcher’s Techbase to help and promote these charitable causes wherever he can. When Tennant’s Brewery contacted him demanding he remove images of Tennant’s Lager cans in the game, he convinced the company to donate £2,000, split between the game’s associated charities, in exchange for the removal. “We basically bullied Tennant’s Lager into paying a bunch of money to charity,” Purvis jokes. For the arcade cabinet that featured at The World Transformed. Purvis collaborated with art collective Props for Protests, donating any coins that went into the machine to Living Rent.
At the moment, the British political reality regularly outdoes the most extreme absurdities of satire. But Pryjmachuk hopes players of Landlord’s Super will gain a better understanding of the root causes of Britain’s inflated housing market and deprived working-class communities, while Purvis hopes players of Thatcher’s Techbase come away with a desire to make a difference as well as a smile on their faces. “Because obviously, with the situation as it is in Britain, there’s a lot of groups who need support. People need help,” says Purvis. “I think the major takeaway is to take an interest in the charities associated with our project, and if possible, make donations to support them.”
“Unfortunately, the Duke Smoochem 3D I started building over a year ago already seems overly optimistic,” concludes Douglas. “The country is falling apart faster than I can hope to depict.”
