A game has been developed based on the Suez Canal Crisis, in which a cargo ship, the Ever Given, has become wedged at an angle in Egypt’s Suez Canal. The Suez Canal Bulldozer game (developed by Eric Wilder) is as simple as it sounds, and best of all, it’s free to play.
You play as a tiny bulldozer against the vast cargo ship, reportedly weighing 200,000 tonnes. Your job is to push a boulder against the ship in a bid to move it. As much as you try, the Ever Given will not relent.
The controls are simple, pressing the J key will trigger a prompt message which reads, “it’s super stuck”, (a nod to Pokémon), while the arrow keys move the bulldozer back and forth, and that’s it.
After about ten minutes of endless thrashing at the arrow keys in every variation imaginable, attempting a softly softly approach, or a long run-up, it’s evident that the game cannot be won, despite one player’s claim that after four grueling hours, they’d managed to make the ship move.
Since the crisis began on Tuesday, the memes have been coming in thick and fast. Courtesy of Buzzfeed, the stuck ship generated a wave of memes comparing the crisis to a variety of everyday situations. There’s everything from procrastinating writers, the struggles with living in lockdown, to the two Hobbits against Sauron’s forces in The Lord of the Rings.
The Suez Canal calls for aid! https://t.co/Fz1L8Nc0I7 pic.twitter.com/O4BppK4e7k
— Lord Of The Rings Memes Bot (@LOTRMemesBot) March 25, 2021
There’ve been countless fruitless efforts to free the ship from the 120-mile-long Suez Canal owned by Egypt, a man-made waterway that links the Red and Mediterranean seas, since Tuesday (March 23), while millions of dollars in trade have been delayed as a result. Since Saturday, over 300 ships have been waiting for the canal to be cleared.
