Hindustan Times (Bathinda)

Online game helps you be ‘naughty’ like UK’s PM

- Kartikeya Ramanathan kartikeya.ramanathan@htlive.com n

NEWDELHI: On the eve of the June 8 mid-term election, British Prime Minister Theresa May was asked in an interview what was the “naughtiest” thing she had ever done.

After much fumbling and many “oh dears”, a red-faced, extremely embarrasse­d May confessed to Julie Etchingham of ITV the “naughtiest thing” she ever did was when “me and my friends used to run through the fields of wheat, the farmers weren’t too pleased about that.”

Her answer caught everyone by surprise and was the object of much mirth in the British press and on social media.

However, two people have gone further — they’ve created an online game, available at comewheatm­ay.com, based on May’s adventures as a kid.

Web developer Oli Cannings and his friend Steve Whittingha­m created the game in which the user can run through fields of wheat.

Designed along the lines of popular mobile phone games Temple Run and Subway Surfer, the user, playing the role of May, has to avoid running into scarecrows placed in the fields. Taking their tongue-in-cheek game a step further, the scarecrows are all May’s arch enemy in Parliament, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

“It gets quite poisonous in the final week of an election campaign, so we wanted to offset the fear and smear remarks ,” BT.com quoted Whittingha­m as saying.

“It took just over a week for Oli to complete the tech build in his spare time.” The game has been played more than 20,000 times in 48 hours.

 ?? SCREENGRAB ?? This is what you get when you hit a ‘Jeremy Corbyn scarecrow’
SCREENGRAB This is what you get when you hit a ‘Jeremy Corbyn scarecrow’

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