On the eve of the June 8 mid-term election, British Prime Minister Theresa May was asked in an interview what was the “naughtiest” thing she had ever done.
After much fumbling and many “oh dears”, a red-faced, extremely embarrassed May confessed to Julie Etchingham of ITV the “naughtiest thing” she ever did was when “me and my friends used to run through the fields of wheat, the farmers weren’t too pleased about that.”
Her answer caught everyone by surprise and was the object of much mirth in the British press and on social media. However, two people have gone further — they’ve created an online game, available at comewheatmay.com, based on May’s adventures as a kid.
Web developer Oli Cannings and his friend Steve Whittingham created the game in which the user can run through fields of wheat. Designed along the lines of popular mobile phone games Temple Run and Subway Surfer, the user, playing the role of May, has to avoid running into scarecrows placed in the fields.
Taking their tongue-in-cheek game a step further, the scarecrows are all May’s arch enemy in Parliament, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
{{/usCountry}}Taking their tongue-in-cheek game a step further, the scarecrows are all May’s arch enemy in Parliament, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
{{/usCountry}}“It gets quite poisonous in the final week of an election campaign, so we wanted to offset the fear and smear remarks from both sides with some levity,” Whittingham was quoted as saying by BT.com. “It took just over a week for Oli to complete the tech build in his spare time.”
The game has been quite successful on the web, with the creators saying it has been played more than 20,000 times in just 48 hours.
And asked about further political games, Whittingham said it’s a possibility but not something they are looking at right now. “It all comes down to how nimble we can be with just a two-man operation and full-time jobs,” he said.