Ten Years of Tyranny

The standard fantasy role-playing game builds a world for the player to take up arms in a contest between good and evil. Generally speaking players want to be good. A developer who worked on BioWare’s Mass Effect series once said that, given the choice, “something like 92%” of Mass Effect players chose the path of virtue. The simple concept of Obsidian Entertainment’s role-playing game Tyranny—a concept soured by unfortunate timing—is this: What if the player was the villain? And what if they couldn’t get out of it?

In Tyranny, power exists to be hoarded. It can also be used for the exercise of cruelty. Surrounding the player and allied with them are freaks and fools who have been empowered to use the weapons of the state: to suppress, degrade, humiliate. The fantasy world is run by authoritarians, sadists and bureaucrats who shape the law like a rubber mask to fit the face of a sui generis tyrant unknowable and unquestionable. The Tyranny player’s goal is not to overthrow or escape this evil system but maintain their place within it. The “kindest”, most neutral route one can take through the game is to focus on self-preservation over greed, cruelty or avarice, but just to exist in the system is to already be corrupt. 

Tyranny was released on November 10, 2016, one week after the first election of Donald Trump; a few months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Ten years on, the game’s relevance is hardly diminished. In the world of Tyranny, the alt-right dog has caught the car, the institutions that would once have resisted, did once resist, are in states of collapse or surrender.

“It didn’t really meet the expectations we set for it initially,” said Tyranny publisher Paradox in 2017. No wonder. Who in 2016 wanted to buy a video game whose power fantasy was to play as John Roberts or Stephen Miller in the Trump administration?

In a video game, people want to be good, or perceived as good. They don’t want to burn down libraries or perpetrate a genocide, as they can do in Tyranny. In real life—as we know, as we throughout history have always known—people are perfectly happy to do those things. The trouble with Tyranny—and with Mass Effect, and with all games—is that these actions are classed as atrocities. There are people all around us with an endless appetite for atrocity and no stomach at all for being told they are wrong to commit them. No wonder this game did not sell better. 

In 2025, the UK publisher Persephone Books reissued the long out-of-print 1934 novel Crooked Cross, by a British author, Sally Carson. Crooked Cross and its two sequels observed with dread and clear sight the rise of the Nazis through a fictional Bavarian family that gets involved in the Party. In retrospect the book was so far ahead of its time that a 1937 theatrical adaptation was admonished by the right-wing British press for being too hard on Nazis. Even a positive review of the play, in the Times, commended the text for its balance: “Miss Carson is not proclaiming the virtues of any alternative system, whether it be Communist or democratic. Still less does she plead the cause of Judaism as such.” Three years later, the Nazis bombed the United Kingdom; weeks after the end of the Blitz, Carson died.

Persephone’s managing director, Francesca Beauman, has said that her press brought the book back into print after 80 years because of its relevance to the present, and to the second Trump administration in particular. The novel was timely in the thirties, it is timely now, it will be timely again. A recent piece in the London Review of Books identified Crooked Cross as belonging to a select genre: keenly observational literature from the 1930s that presages and understands the horrors to come.  

Crooked Cross has been a small hit in the United Kingdom and I think this is why. You do not feel so alone, nor so helpless, if you can look to the past and understand what is happening now. In fact there is nowhere that you will find a better answer.