For decades, satirical publication The Onion has been the leading voice for razor-sharp political comedy. Now, at a time when the site feels like it’s reaching an unhinged peak, it can add another accomplishment to its résumé: video game developer. Well, more or less.
After releasing The Onion Voting Simulator 3D on its website earlier this month, The Onion’s first-ever game is now available for free on Steam. The short, lo-fi game draws inspiration from PC classics like Chex Quest to gleefully lampoon American democracy (and The Onion’s former owners) just in time for the midterm elections on Nov. 3. Ahead of its Steam launch, The Onion head writer Mike Gillis explained where the game came from and what unique opportunities the publication sees for satire in gaming. It may not be, shall we say, the most polished game, but it does represent an era of creative freedom for a rejuvenated gaggle of satirists.
Image: The Onion/Global Tetrahedron
Despite being best known for its political comedy, The Onion has long flirted with gaming as a target. In 2019, for instance, it launched Onion Gamers Network (or OGN, for short), to take aim at the weird world of gaming. That gave us gems like “Bad News For Gamers: OGN Has Learned Ocarinas Are Real And They Fucking Suck.” But the idea for The Onion to actually make a game came about two and a half years ago, after the site was sold by its former owner, the now-dead G/O Media under its CEO Jim Spanfeller.
“Global Tetrahedron had just taken us over from our private equity hell and I think we were all just like really, really energized by that,” Gillis told Polygon. “That moment of like, holy shit, we can actually seize our fate instead of being ground down into dust under Jim Spanfeller’s boot. So I just went off on a weekend and was like, what would an Onion video game look like?”
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Gillis had been experimenting with game engine Godot alongside a collective of developers in Chicago, and decided to put that to use to create a prototype for a short 3D “voting simulator.” The Onion’s management thought it was “fucking awesome,” but there was just one tiny thing in the way of making it a reality. You may remember it if you were conscious in 2024.
“The presidential election was sort of like this huge monolithically important thing,” Gillis said. “It felt like, well, if we’re putting something out that is like, ‘This entire thing is worthless, this is a waste of your time,’ what are we saying there? So, it was this thing that the staff was excited about, but it felt like it made more sense in the midterms.”
You’re between a rock and a hard place in modern American democracy.
2026 felt like a better time to lampoon the whole rigmarole of voting. The Onion Voting Simulator 3D simply throws you into a middle-school gym and tasks you with voting. Easy enough! Well, except for all the hoops you have to double jump through to get there. There’s a long line to wait in, various forms of ID you need to wrangle to prove your American purity, and a hellworld beneath the floorboards where G/O Media burns. (“It’s so strange that that’s the foundation of the rot that all of the horrors of the modern world subsist upon!” Gillis said. “It’s just an interesting thing to think about!”)
If that all sounds a little stressful, you can also play in Stay At Home Mode and smoke a bunch of weed on your couch instead.
Image: The Onion/Global Tetrahedron
While it’s all built on some absurd cynicism, the intent wasn’t to suggest that voting doesn’t matter. Gillis noted that the upcoming midterms are still “extremely important,” but he felt like a game making fun of voting could speak to a real frustration that many people experience around this time.
“It really sucks to have to exist in a broken system, where you can feel like a peon who has only a modicum of impact on the average race, and a lot of the candidates aren’t maybe your ideal candidates, and the end result is probably gonna be more stasis,” Gillis said. “I think it’s trying to touch on just the general experience, the sensation of being a tiny drop in the giant ocean of democracy.”
Gillis found inspiration in 2013’s The Stanley Parable, one of gaming’s great comedies. The narrative-driven game about an office worker disobeying the directions of an unseen narrator already had the right satirical framework, considering that it toys with players and their sense of autonomy in a tightly designed world. That idea happens to line right up with The Onion’s own philosophy.
“The Onion’s Latin motto is ‘Tu stultus es’ which means ‘You are dumb,’” Gillis said. “We point that out in so many different ways, but in this particular case, it’s like your stupidity is thinking that you have a choice and the reality, from an emotional landscape, is you’re between a rock and a hard place in modern American democracy. And so the game is kind of like, try to find a way to vote and make an impact on this. And the source code of the game is essentially baked in to tell you, ‘No, you can’t do anything. Nothing. You’re only gonna have the experience that we have created for you.’”
Image: The Onion/Global Tetrahedron
All of this is possible because The Onion is currently in a position to experiment and get weirder under Global Tetrahedron’s independent ownership. The site is currently in a bit of a creative renaissance, with projects like The Onion’s takeover of InfoWars giving writers more gonzo avenues for satire. Gillis sees more fresh opportunities for humor through games as part of that — especially now that the team is working on a more stable website. (He noted that “the entire headquarters of G/O [would] explode” if they had tried to put a game on The Onion’s old site.) Considering that the team has been encouraged about the reception to The Onion Voting Simulator 3D so far, we may see more games from The Onion in the future. At least, so long as there’s a good punchline to extract from players’ misery.
“I think humor is just, like, finding surprising ways to make a person fail,” Gillis said.
