Source: Wykop.pl
I'd wanted to write about this one for a while. All I had was a rumor — that something like this had actually happened in early-2000s Poland, as a promotional stunt for one of the biggest city builders of the era, SimCity 3000. Turns out it wasn't hard to find, and thankfully the rumor turned out to be true. Sometimes I feel a strange pride in how goofy my country used to be. It's definitely too serious now.
Gazeta Wyborcza — one of the country's biggest newspapers — teamed up with TVN and the publisher Cenega Poland to put actual mayoral candidates in front of computers and make them play SimCity 3000. Not as a metaphor. Literally. Real candidates, real cities, same rules everywhere, in Białystok, Katowice, Kraków, Olsztyn, Zielona Góra, and Warsaw.
One of the strangest pieces of pre-election marketing I've ever come across.
In Warsaw, the candidates spent nearly six hours parked at computers inside the Palace of Culture and Science — one of the most politically loaded buildings in the country — on October 20th. The lineup included Marek Balicki, Zbigniew Bujak, Lech Kaczyński, Andrzej Olechowski, Janusz Piechociński, and Julia Pitera. Real people, running for the actual job of governing an actual city, handed a fictional one instead.
Some clearly had no idea what they'd signed up for:
Julia Pitera and Lech Kaczyński admitted they'd only read the game's instructions beforehand.
Most opened with the obvious move — fixing broken infrastructure. One, PSL's Janusz Piechociński, built a zoo first. Statement or distraction? Hard to say. Zbigniew Bujak and Andrzej Olechowski tried governing their virtual city the way they wanted to govern the real one — one neglected public transit, the other kept taxes low and predictably ran out of money for water and electricity.
Midway through, the organizers unleashed disasters on every city — fires in four places at once, riots, an earthquake, a typhoon, and, for good measure, a UFO. Most candidates handled the first wave fine. The second wave landed right as the standings were being finalized, and did real damage.
The winner in Warsaw wasn't close. Lech Kaczyński grew his city to nearly twice the size of his nearest competitor, with a healthy budget surplus, despite carrying serious unemployment the whole way through. A caption under his photo notes he expanded the city elevenfold in 85 minutes.
One detail the original writer clearly didn't think twice about: the winning player in Kraków used the exact same advisor Kaczyński used in Warsaw — a man named Zbigniew Ziobro. If that name means nothing to you, it will. Within a few years he became one of the most powerful justice ministers in Poland's modern history, serving under a government led by Kaczyński's own twin brother. These days he's on the run from that very same justice system, holed up somewhere between the US, Thailand, or God knows where. In 2002, he was just really good at SimCity.
The interview segment is where this goes from odd curiosity to something worth savoring. Asked what he found hardest about the game, Kaczyński said the beginnings were the easy part - he knew to start with medicine and water. It gets harder once you've built up a real budget, and one well-timed disaster to the power grid can end even a strong player's plan in an instant - he said.
Asked whether anything in the game was more frustrating than governing actual Warsaw, his answer was blunt: nothing like it exists in real life. There's no UFO. And he said he sincerely hoped he'd never have to deal with actual riots in the city.
On preparation, he said they'd gone looking for people who actually knew how to play, that friends had connected him to his eventual advisors, and that exactly which politician had put him in touch with them was, in his words, a kitchen secret.
Kaczyński won the real Warsaw mayoral election that same year. Three years later he was President of Poland. He died in 2010, in the Smolensk plane crash, one of the most consequential and divisive figures in the country's modern political history.
Before any of this huge life story mattered, he was just an ordinary politician having to put up with some dumb promotional campaign.
Curated for Lost Net
Source: TopSecret, issue 57, Author: Dariusz 'Sir Haszak' Michalski