In 1984 Peter Harrap came up with Wanted: Monty Mole, a strange take on one of the most divisive events in British history: the Miner’s Strike…The defeat of the striking miners broke the union movement’s grip on the levers of power in the U.K. Harrap’s game, released at the height of the strike, cast players as a mole who breaks the picket lines to get coal direct from a fictional secret mine owned by Scargill. The game’s theme attracted widespread media interest but it was more absurd than political — Scargill’s mine was packed with bizarre enemies such as hairspray cans, leaping sharks and bathroom taps.
I love the notion that video games in the UK were, for a time, such an accessible, idiosyncratic medium that people were using them to make absurdist, Monty Python-esque social commentary. Today’s video game industry seems worlds apart from such eccentricity, although indie iOS efforts like The Incident and Mimeo and the Kelptopus King make it easy for me to imagine a return to those days.