In Doom-based adventure, Thatcher’s Techbase, “Margaret Thatcher is back from Hell… and the lady’s not for returning!”
There are three things – aside from the overt anti-Tory, anti-Thatcher sentiment, obviously – that I particularly enjoyed about the trailer for soon-to-be-released, Boom-compatible Doom adventure, Thatcher’s Techbase:
- It begins with a parody of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker’s infamous/terrible “THE DEAD SPEAK!” opening crawl (which is never not funny)
- It’s set in the “Tenth Circle of Hell: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” (which is very apt at the moment)
- It proclaims that “Margaret Thatcher is back from Hell… and the lady’s not for returning!” (which is just genius)
This is all preamble, a bit of fun to lubricate you for a jokey mashup of right-wing, British Empire iconography with Doom’s demonic setting, where the power fantasy is killing Tories and saving the world from the reanimated corpse of Maggie Thatcher. (I was going to refer to them as “demonic Tories” but that seems a bit redundant, doesn’t it?)
https://twitter.com/letshugbro/status/1438110445613760513?s=20
But here’s the thing: Doom-based games are, almost invariably, really good. Doom-based games are like pizza. Even the worst one, reheated with a hangover the following morning, is still better than most other things.
And Thatcher’s Techbase does not look like a bad Doom-based adventure, at all. It looks like a really coherent and well-put-together one, in fact, combined with an admittedly tongue-in-cheek narrative that many of us (particularly from the North of England, Scotland, and Wales) would probably find more horrific than the idea of an actual demonic invasion from Mars.
Yes, there will be people who recoil at its politics. There will also be people who consider it disrespectful because Maggie Thatcher is dead/was our Prime Minister/was allegedly a human being. (These will tend to be the same sorts of people that refer to everyone offended by racism, homophobia, and misogyny as “snowflakes”, then cry foul when someone turns the tables. It’s funny how it always works out that way, isn’t it?)
We might be waiting a while for our next General Election and our next opportunity to vote the Tories out, sadly. In the meantime, you could always take your frustrations out on Thatcher’s Techbase when it launches on “PC, Mac, Linux and whatever the hell you want to try running it on” on September 24, 2021.
It’s also free-to-play, but the game’s developer would like you to donate to some worthwhile charities that Thatcher definitely wouldn’t have approved of, like Stonewall and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.
Or as the Thatcher’s Techbase credits succinctly put it: “This game is dedicated to everyone Margaret Thatcher hated and everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher.”
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