It was the President Madagascar meme which first put me on to Pandemic 2 - a free online Flash game in which you play the part of a global pandemic, with the aim being to wipe out humanity as quickly as possible. The joke is that Madagascar has only a single seaport as a point of entry in the game, and the government there is extremely quick to shut off all communications before your virus arrives. For the record, I have yet to win the game, although I did manage to wipe out everyone apart from Japan, New Zealand, and (of course) Madagascar.
The topicality of the game put me in mind of a text-only game from the 1980s - which I cannot find mentioned anywhere on the internet - which allowed you to simulate a nuclear exchanged between the US and USSR. It did a very nice job of re-creating the mindset of MAD: launch everything you have at everything they have in the first wave, and hope that you still have something left at the end to technically make you the winner.
It also made me think that topicality in games was something that we didn't have for quite a while. In the glory days of the British computer game industry in the 1980s we had plenty, with Harrier Attack and Wanted: Monty Mole springing to mind. I suppose the small size of games then made it easy to produce them quickly, while events were still recent. As game have gotten more complex, the development time has increased markedly. Flash games seem to have provided a new way of producing things quickly, though.
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