At the end of the original Doom, players are faced with the infernal Spider Mastermind responsible for the demonic invasion of Mars’ moons. This creature is a repellent monster—a giant brain with red eyes and fangs hooked up to a robotic chassis with metal insect legs and a chaingun—whose fearsome appearance has only now been matched in Doom history with an even more terrifying abyssal beast: Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher’s Techbase is a free Doom modification that tasks players with descending to “The Tenth Circle Of Hell: The United Kingdom Of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” to face down the (now more literally) Iron Lady in her new, more visually demonic form.
The mod’s creator, Jim Purvis, explained to NME that he’s from a town outside of Glasgow, Scotland “that was badly affected by Thatcher’s infamous policies on heavy industry and social housing in the 1980s.”
“Almost everyone I know was affected by the decisions of the Thatcher government in some way or another, and we’re still seeing her ghost all over the place in our current socio-political situation,” he says. “She was a satanic figure in Scottish culture well before I turned her into a cybernetic demon.”
As such, Purvis has just taken the next logical step toward illustrating this to a wider audience, filling up his take on Doom with era-appropriate propaganda and enemies who “parrot real things that the Iron Lady said while in office.” The mod’s arsenal even includes weapons like a “Trident Launcher” that’s been put into the game in reference to the UK’s Trident nuclear program—and “to give Thatcher a taste of her own legacy.”
Rip and tear through a blue Tory hell this Friday, September 24th by heading over to the Thatcher’s Techbase website and following instructions on how to get it set up. Rather than accept any money for his work, Purvis has suggested that players can donate to any of a number of charities listed on the site.
[via Boing Boing]
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