Bethesda has removed the Doom mod Thatcher’s Techbase from its certified mod listings, apparently following a complaint from a user or users about the mod’s subject matter being political. Thatcher’s Techbase is built around attacking the hellish alt-universe lair of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was in office from 1979 to 1990 and died in 2013, but has now been resurrected in “The Tenth Circle of Hell: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”
Thatcher’s Techbase has been around for years, but the problem is Bethesda’s recent re-release of a “definitive” bundle of Doom 1 and 2, which incorporates a boatload of new features and official map packs alongside tools that allow modders to easily share their work in-game. This created a kind of semi-official status for popular mods, which are now being distributed directly through Bethesda’s game, and it turns out that this might be an issue when said mod allows you to piss on the grave of a dead politician.
Thatcher’s Techbase was created by Jim Purvis, who on the release of the new Doom bundle was delighted that the mod would for the first time be available outside of PC (the in-game mod support extends to console versions) as part of the official mod collection. It lasted a scant few weeks.
“Bad news everyone,” wrote Purvis on August 30, sharing a screenshot of a message received from Bethesda customer support. “The creation Thatcher’s Techbase has been reported for real-world politics and has been removed,” reads the message from Bethesda. “As a result, this account is receiving an official education notice.” An education notice certainly sounds like a dystopian euphemism, but in this case the message just goes on to point to various Bethesda guidelines about mod content.
Thatcher’s Techbase is still available easily enough from the mod’s site, while at least one enterprising user has already re-uploaded a version to the official Doom mod catalogue. But I’d imagine, whatever your stance on this, its prospects of staying in the official mods list are not great.
The most curious thing about this is the reference to “real world politics.” The map pack is basically a Doom campaign featuring locations like the Houses of Parliament and weapons like the Trident Launcher (the UK’s nuclear deterrent, first announced in 1980 by the Thatcher government), but it’s also an absurdist hellscape stuffed with demons and respawning Tories: I don’t think anyone is going to confuse this with anything that’s actually happened in UK politics ever.
I suppose it’s hard to deny the mod is political in the sense of being anti-Thatcher, even if it’s such a surreal project that one could only classify it as satire. Whether Bethesda really wants to get into the business of playing whack-a-mole with any mod that has aesthetic links to real-world people or politics is another matter. As mecha-Thatcher shows, monsters can be surprisingly resilient.