• Thu. Dec 5th, 2024

Crapshoot: Shadow President, a sim that lets you press the big red nuke button

Byadmin

Jun 5, 2021


From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. This week, absolute power corrupts, absolutely. What would be the point of it otherwise? To make the world a better place? Not with this many nukes!

At the start of the 90s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the promise of an end to the Cold War, the United States decided to put all the power of the President into one single computer program. Nobody there having seen The Terminator, this seemed like a good idea at the time; as indeed did calling it the “Shadow President” system, which was not sinister at all. Not even a little. Nope.

CHIEF OF STAFF: Mr. President, meet Shadow President. Would you like to sit through an informative but incredibly boring tutorial, or would you prefer to mash all the pretty buttons like a deranged chimp while we all hope you don’t accidentally have us invade Utah again?



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