Our Beloved Leader, Now Available for Download

Forget Super Mario. Forget Sonic the Hedgehog. The video game hero 2014 deserves is Kim Jong-Un on a unicorn, gunning down enemies in a side-scrolling shooter called Glorious Leader!—developed, with admirable commitment to the bit, by a studio called Moneyhorse. The premise is exactly what you think: North Korea’s Supreme Leader, riding the mythical beast his state archaeologists claim to have unearthed beneath Pyongyang, bringing peace and human rights to a grateful world one exploding American soldier at a time.

There’s a long tradition of turning authoritarian absurdity into satire—The Great Dictator, Team America—but the video game format feels especially right. The dictator as playable character, the propaganda posters as level art, the unicorn as power-up. North Korea produces its own glorifying media with such earnest maximalism that parody barely needs to exaggerate anything. Moneyhorse seems to understand this. The joke isn’t just that Kim Jong-Un is ridiculous; it’s that the visual language of heroism is ridiculous, and Glorious Leader! is fluent in both.