The Daily Mail would be horrified if it knew what it had spawned. Back in 2021, when news broke of Matt Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair, the tabloid printed a floorplan of the health secretary’s office, complete with details such as “queen painting” and “kiss door”. For most people, it was unnecessary detail added to one of the most nauseating moments in modern politics. But for Dan Douglas, a 39-year-old from London, it served as artistic inspiration.
“It reminded me of a map from a video game,” he says. As a 90s teenager, Douglas had adored the first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. “I was the perfect age for its relentless pixelated gore and crude humour. Playing it felt almost illicit,” he says. So wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to re-create the Hancock scandal using that game’s built-in level editor? That should get a few laughs on Twitter, he reasoned. And then things spiralled out of control.
In the 18 months since, Douglas has spent huge chunks of his free time building Duke Smoochem, a fully playable mutant of the original game populated by the UK’s most dismal charlatans and funniest memes. Want to see Nigel Farage being submerged in a lorry-load of Yazoo milkshake? Or disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish driving a tractor through the House of Commons? How about visiting the factory where Sun writer Harry Cole’s swiftly written book about Liz Truss is being pulped because she didn’t hang around long enough for its release? Duke Smoochem has all of these things and more, making it not so much a social media gag as a searing portrait of a Britain in decline. There’s even a scene in which the player can visit a public library that has been converted into a food bank. Inside, the books have been pulled off the shelves and thrown on a bonfire for warmth, while a volunteering David Cameron can be found extolling the benefits of the “big society”.
“There is certainly anger in there,” says Douglas. “Anger at a nation ravaged and atomised by neoliberalism. I’m terrified by the accepted cruelty of our government and dismayed by the state of the opposition.”
Douglas’s modified game (known as a mod) has a loose plot: the titular Duke is washed up and working as a tabloid journalist. After fighting his way through an alien-infested Wetherspoon’s (because the Brexit bus has blocked the road) he obtains the CCTV footage of Hancock’s affair and plots to escape the capital on an open-top sightseeing bus. Some of the jokes will be familiar to anyone with a passing interest in UK culture: Captain Tom slowly hauling a gravy train along some train tracks, for instance. Others are incredibly niche, such as GB News presenter Darren Grimes attempting to destroy the grave of Karl Marx (as he once imagined doing on Twitter).
“Putting together a set-piece featuring Liz Truss approving fracking, which immediately causes an earthquake and takes down Tower Bridge, took a lot of work,” Douglas says. Another memorable moment involves Geronimo, the alpaca who was controversially euthanised after testing positive for bovine tuberculosis. That was an event that caught the hearts of the nation and prompted Keir Starmer – a man normally found on the fence about even the most glaringly obvious moral issues – to state that there was “no choice” but to kill the animal. In Duke Smoochem, this is immortalised in a scene in which Starmer orders a drone strike upon a field of alpacas from inside the Great British Bake Off tent.
“That airstrike is something I’m really proud of,” says Douglas. “There are a lot of timed effects working in tandem to pull that off. And it fits the tone I’m going for, which is very silly and slapstick.”
It looks hilarious but also exhausting. When an amusing news event breaks, Douglas will often tweet about how it means he will now have to build it into the game, a compulsion he can’t resist. He says there are weeks when he devotes the majority of his free time to working on the game, even photographing litter on the floor because he feels it fits with the game’s atmosphere.
At 16, Douglas was diagnosed as bipolar, and he has had several in-patient stays at psychiatric hospitals. When lockdown first arrived, the stress of it caused him to spiral into a manic episode, which was followed by a long bout of depression. “Getting involved in a long, multidisciplinary project like Duke Smoochem has helped me stave off negative thoughts and redirect my mind away from endless ruminating,” he says, explaining his dedication to the project. “It’s very much been a recovery tool.” He believes working on the game helped pave the way back for him to return to his job in broadcasting. “My psychiatrist approves,” he says, “although I’ve only talked about the project in the vaguest of terms. I’m not sure they know how daft the thing I’m putting together is.”
The game may be daft but Douglas takes it seriously. He is currently studying maps made by professional gamers to make sure his mod is actually fun to play – even for people “not exposed to the minutiae of UK culture”. And one of his rules is that, despite the Duke Nukem games’ fondness for guns and gore, no public figure can be harmed in the game. “I’m keen not to be branded a ‘sick gamer’ by the Daily Mail,” he notes.
Instead, it is architecture that takes the brunt of the violence. The tool Douglas uses to build his levels is famed for its demolition effects. “Wanton destruction of British landmarks is something I’m leaning into as society slowly implodes,” he says. “Stonehenge, the Marble Arch Mound and a branch of BHS all get razed during the course of the mod.”
With all these niche references, Douglas could worry about his material dating before it is finished. Instead, he sees it as a “playable time capsule” that immortalises some of our nation’s most pitiful moments.
In a sense the project brings to mind a pixelated version of Cold War Steve’s collages, albeit with some less obvious targets in the line of fire, and Douglas likes to describe his work as “an interactive shitpost”. There are also parallels with Thatcher’s Techbase, a Doom mod that pits the player against a resurrected Margaret Thatcher. (Jeremy Corbyn made headlines when he had a go on it, a moment that Douglas represents in the game.) Douglas sees similarities with these but says his inspirations were actually more tangential: the humour of Viz magazine, or the way the Fall’s Mark E Smith could put a “surreal spin on the mundane and inane”.
“I’m fascinated by esoteric fragments of modern British culture: the ‘indoor gamer’ holding a slice of Greggs pizza while being interviewed for a PoliticsJoe video, the photo of the upside-down peas accompanying pie and chips on a menu, the comically protruding F on the sign for Forest Hill’s Ferfect Fried Chicken, where you can see the faint P underneath when it’s lit up.”
For the public, the project currently exists purely as an ongoing Twitter thread, and Douglas doesn’t have an date in sight for when his playable version will be released. He is currently juggling eight game locations that are all at different stages of completion. It doesn’t help that the project continues to grow far beyond his original dreams. He’s even managed to get Lee Jackson, the composer of Grabbag, the theme to the original Duke Nukem 3D, to write a piece of music for the game called Double Decker Chase.
Besides, maybe an endpoint is not important. In its current social media iteration, Duke Smoochem operates as a powerful piece of protest art, artfully skewering our nation’s decline with a remarkably clear eye. Douglas is keen to point out the joy in his work, too, which counterbalances the gloom – such as the painstaking recreation of Finsbury Park’s famous bowling lanes Rowans, or the inclusion of CBBC presenter Lauren Layfield corpsing at the puppet dog Hacker saying “we’re just normal men”. Recently he added Thor the walrus, who was seen pleasuring himself on Scarborough harbour over the new year. There are even plans to incorporate an AI co-op level where the player teams up on an assignment with journalist and trusted source protector Isabel Oakeshott.
“I guess I see Duke Smoochem as both a documentation of, and rebellion against, an increasingly absurd country, packaged as nostalgia,” Douglas concludes. “It’s probably exactly what 13-year-old-me would have created had social media been around in 1996.”
