Political DOOM: Thatcher’s Techbase

God, isn’t it the worst when video games get political? I just want to have a good time and escape everything! Politics have no place in my video games, I only care about cool guy stuff like “the specter of nuclear Armageddon” and “the epistemological crisis brought on by an overwhelming flow of uncontrolled information.”

Okay, now that I’ve made a guy up to get mad at, let’s get to the real meat of the matter here, which is that DOOM maps can also be political! I know! You and me are both very surprised by this, because DOOM has a very simple game loop: kill demons, get keys, get out. Except because DOOM is so open, and its mapmaking community is filled with so many talented people, it was probably inevitable that someone would eventually decide to make a DOOM with a message. That message, in this case, is “Fuck Margaret Thatcher* and all her ilk.” Which hey, I can get behind that message! So in 2021, Jim Purvis, inspired in part by the Tim Roger’s DOOM review (no, really) and in part by, well:

“At the start of the winter coronavirus lockdown last year, I was playing a lot of the original 1993 Doom on my computer, and fancied making a map for my pals to play. Not long after I started messing with Doom Builder, I saw a tweet by @spewlieandrews where he joked that if he was sent to Hell, he would spend eternity scouring the place for Thatcher – I thought that would make for a fun wee project. The game grew arms, legs and horns from there, as my pals began suggesting more and more ridiculous things to include.”

-Jim Purvis

The trouble is – inasmuch as there could be said to be trouble, mind you – that if you want people to see your message (your strident, beautiful, Fuck Thatcher message), you have to also make something that people will want to play. Fortunately, Thatcher’s Techbase does in fact have the chops – mostly because Purvis freely admits he ripped off a bunch of stuff from existing maps (there are 1:1 adaptations of stuff from E1M1, E1M3, and a couple bits from DOOM II that I recognized but I haven’t played enough DOOM II to be able to pull the map number off the top of my head, and the credits have a section labeled “DOOM wads I shamelessly borrowed from”) to build out part of the environments. Which honestly works really well!

The Tenth Circle of Hell

The premise of Thatcher’s Techbase is simple: A mysterious transmission from the long-dead Thatcher threatens her return from hell, and you go down to stop her by traveling to the tenth circle of hell (The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) where you can shove a rocket or six up her arse (that’s how British people say “ass”). After an introductory map wherein you actually do ride the elevator down to hell, you enter the Techbase and the slaughter begins and does not end until, well, have you ever seen a giant Cyberdemon dressed as Margaret Thatcher? That’s still not where the game ends. Instead there’s a whole thing with an Icon of Sin but Thatcher (not to mention multiple Spider Masterminds but Thacher) and eventually you get through to Thatcher’s head on a stick and punch it and you’re done.

It is a long fucking map, I think it took me around an hour and a half (maybe two hours?) my first go-round. I beat SIGIL II levels faster than that, and those are big fucking maps! There’s a brief epilogue level (that’s where Thatcher’s head on a stick is) but mostly you are just going through a single dizzyingly intricate map that has more demons and also British Conservatives than you can shake a stick at. I specifically want to shout out the way the map will send you to a far corner to get something done – to collect a key or hit a switch or whatever – but it always has a shortcut or a new route to get you back to where you need to go quickly. This is good level design, to me! I am going to half-seriously invoke Dark Souls here and say there are in fact some moments which felt like Dark Souls to me, except instead of taking an elevator back down to Firelink Shrine I walked through a tunnel of blood and popped out in a bathroom stall. It’s clever, is what it is, and while the encounter design does feel a little too punishing sometimes, I think it’s overall fair. That said, I was absolutely starving for ammo at a few points, which is more down to my poor play than the map being overly stingy, I think.

At some point, however, I think it starts to overstay its welcome. I was just kind of ready to be done with it by the end, and I was playing through in 20-30 minute chunks over a couple of days (four sessions total, plus running around to take some screenshots and the like). The end really goes for it, but I’m not sure it quite gets there. The image of a hellish House of Commons is great, but running up and down the aisles while a billion things try to kill you is less exciting and more just annoying. I appreciate the effort, even if it didn’t quite pull it off.

The Icon of Sin but Thatcher is a puzzle boss (there’s a number of switches you have to hit in order to escape) and let me tell you something, it’s a real motherfucker. I was glad I’d had a save just before the shit really hit the fan so that once I figured out what to do with god mode on I could reload and do it honestly! This might seem like cheating to you, and that is because it is, but it is also because holy shit man there’s archviles running around!

I need to specifically call out the spritework here: Jim Purvis called in a bunch of favors from friends of his, including Rafel Batista de Lima for art, Barry “Epoch” Topping (of Paradise Killer fame) for music, and frankly gorgeous artwork from Core Lo Art to get things moving. The various Thatcher paintings you encounter are uniformly gorgeous, and the variations on the demons (giving the Mancubus Trident missiles for legs is an unsubtle but extremely impressive touch, for example, along with making everything Conservative Blue) are impressive. Through it all you have a rollicking soundtrack which keeps coming back to God Save the Queen which, yes, fantastic.

Arcade Mode

I never did beat the arcade mode, but I did appreciate its addition of Archviles dressed as Margaret Thatcher and also for the most part it seemed to have a lot fewer hidden switches and whatnot. If I had to choose which to recommend, it would be the arcade version – especially if you haven’t played a ton of DOOM. I’ll tell you something for free, it is that this has something close to 500 fuckin’ demons in it and that isn’t counting whatever the Icon of Thatcher spawns. A lot of those demons are archviles, I think! That’s a lot of fucking demons! I don’t know if the numbers are the same in Arcade mode, but you know what? It’s fucking good either way.

Oh also Jeremy Corbyn played the arcade version (a less puzzle-filled version) of the game and the UK press lost their minds about it, as they do about everything Jeremy Corbyn does, such as “saying killing tens of thousands of children is wrong” and “saying the UK shouldn’t keep giving weapons to governments engaged in a genocide.” If you’ve got Corbyn on board with your DOOM wad, you’re doing something right, is what I’m saying.

Bethesda Sucks

I would be remiss in saying that if you want to play Thatcher’s Techbase, you should be able to boot up the mod browser in DOOM I+II and play it. I say “should” because you could do that at first, before someone got mad and complained to someone at Bethesda about putting political content in DOOM. Because no corporation – especially no tech corporation – in history has ever had a fucking spine at all in their fucking lives, Bethesda pulled the mod down. Not because, the company stressed, he’d done anything wrong, although their message did include an encouragement that he educate himself on The Rules about Mods.

Someone who is not Purvis recently re-uploaded it, so you can still grab it, but never forget that Bethesda is run by a bunch of weenies. It sucks to see DOOM, a game that was unapologetically itself even in the face of a whole bunch of Satanic Panic and Violence in Video Games Discourse back in the day (and still now, probably), run by some people who can’t stand the thought of a game being mean to a dead politician who was responsible for gutting the Social State and causing the deaths of thousands, but that’s for another altogether more depressing essay that I will write and then delete immediately because I don’t need to be a bummer.

Bethesda sucks, is what I’m saying. You can just fuckin’ download the thing here, the site has instructions on how to get it all up and running. It also has a nice trailer and links to a bunch of news articles like the ones about people losing their shit because Corbyn played it that one time.

A Real Work of Art

Maps like Thatcher’s Techbase are part of why I love DOOM so much. That someone can take a joke and just run wild with it, then put it out for free in a format that can play on damn near anything, is part of the beauty of DOOM to begin with! I love the spirit of it even if I do think the map itself probably could’ve been tighter (I also wouldn’t say no to taking out a couple of those fuckin’ Archviles, but that’s just because I hate the bastards). As a DOOM wad, it’s pretty damn good! As a work of political satire (there are actual voiced lines from Thatcher herself which are, you know, actual recordings of actual shit she said, just with an occasional filter on them, just as an example), it’s a delight.

Now I just need someone to do one of these with Ronald Reagan.

*If you don’t know who Margaret Thatcher is or why she sucks, well, I guess read a fuckin’ history book or something? She basically dismantled the British state and caused untold suffering to those less fortunate, and pretty famously said society doesn’t exist and it should be every man for himself. She fucking sucked! The American equivalent would be Ronald Reagan, although unlike Reagan who didn’t know where he was by the end of his presidency, Thatcher finished out her term and didn’t get hit with the dementia stick until she was out of office. Now she’s burning in hell, assuming hell exists.