2006 Bernie Sanders Flash Game Is A Bizarre Fossil From Internet Past

Try to recall the mid-2000s: George W. Bush is in his second term. The internet is a fledgling tool nowhere near the life-enveloping force it is today. There, the height of political comedy is JibJab videos where Bush and John Kerry call each other "pussies." In this strange, primitive era, Bernie Sanders is running for Senate reelection in Vermont. And his campaign has a goofy idea.

Sites like Newgrounds and eBaum's World were titans of this era thanks not only to the comedy videos they hosted but the cheaply-made, free-to-play flash games visitors could play there. Someone on the Sanders '06 team must have been a fan, because they went and created a Bernie-themed side-scrolling shooter which a visitor to Bernie.org could play.

The game was rediscovered by Twitter user Nathan McDermott yesterday, who tweeted that the game is still playable with a little internet wizardry. With the help of the waybackmachine, the game can be played if you allow Adobe Flash to run in your browser.

The game, barebones as it is, is surreal as hell in 2019. It features the senator in a plane firing "facts" at "the extreme right wing" (represented as a backwards R and a literal wing), "fat cats" (literal cats), "big money" (bundles of cash), and "mudslingers" (buckets from which hands come out and fling projectiles, by far the hardest enemy in the game). Sanders can power up by picking up "Hydrogen" (hydrogen being a popular potential alternative-energy source in 2006) and scrolls, which allow him to sling facts at a much faster rate. If he's hit, Sanders will say "Disastrous."

If nothing else, the game is a bizarre look at how politics and the internet convened in the mid-2000s to create a much sillier atmosphere than that of the political internet we know today. It also makes one wonder if the strategy should be adopted again, and what kind of free-to-play video games the current batch of presidential candidates could create to boost their campaign. Bernie Bernie Literature Club, anyone?