Campaign ’84 (ColecoVision)
While many modern election years in the U.S. will be accompanied by a political simulator allowing you to try your hand at running for president, such a game existing way back in 1984 on a system as simple as the ColecoVision immediately intrigued me. However, Campaign ’84 isn’t aiming to simulate the electoral race between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale at all, something that becomes abundantly clear when you start a round of it and see the list of issues you need to pick your stance on. While banning saccharin is at least a reference to real issues and you could extrapolate a water gun ban might be tied to making sure kids aren’t caught wielding toys that look like weapons, some of the issues presented in the randomly selected set of eight include things like banning shoes with laces and reducing pet rock unemployment. Clearly far sillier than a political sim, Campaign ’84 instead hopes a dose of wackiness can make up for the fact it would rather not try and be an authentic simulator experience.
The main goal of Campaign ’84 is to still win a presidential race despite some oversimplification and silliness, but the way campaigning is represented is certainly unusual. After selecting either a Republican elephant or Democratic donkey to represent yourself even though party allegiance plays no role in the game’s outcome, you’ll find yourself placed on the east coast of the contiguous United States. While Hawaii and Alaska are absent, you are able to travel to all 48 other states to try and drum up support, although entering them to do so isn’t quite so easy. Your animal avatar can only travel on the borders of states initially, and while traveling along such lines is a cute concept, the map does model some of the very small and shaky parts of state borders that can lead to you getting hitched on little squiggles you can’t really see well. As you travel around a state’s borders though, you’ll want to be holding down a button to enter it, each state having an unmarked but consistent across all playthroughs entry point to do your campaign work. No matter how that goes, afterwards the state will be blacked out, allowing you to run across it without impediment, meaning you can try to clear up some space to better travel if you’re worried you won’t hit major states during the game’s time limit.
Campaigning in a state doesn’t actually involve making any choices or answering questions. Instead, a large group of people are standing in rows, their bodies colored so that the group of them look like the United States flag. Your elephant or donkey now needs to run around collecting people to earn support, but as you clear away more people, your options for drumming up support become limited. Every step you take needs to touch a new person or your campaigning comes to a close and you’re booted back to the map, so making sure you don’t trap yourself by carelessly running through people is important. During this segment though numbers will also bounce around atop the colorful constituents, these numbers representing the set of eight issues you gave your opinion on when the playthrough started. However, the numbers won’t remind you what the topics were, so it’s more important you remember if you marked a number rather than your opinion on a subject like making oysters the national food. Numbers come in marked and unmarked variants and grabbing one that matches your opinion gives a huge popularity boost in that state while grabbing the wrong numbers leads to an immediate popularity reduction.
Campaign ’84 has 8 different modes for play and in most of them you won’t always have to go for trying to get 100% popularity in a state in order to ensure you get its electoral votes once time runs out. Three of the modes are different solo versions of the game where every state you didn’t campaign in is automatically granted to the other party when votes are tallied up, meaning the main crux of achieving victory is balancing your time so you can campaign in larger value states without giving up too many smaller states that the other side can still make up the deficit. Time limits are tighter on higher skill levels and time is always ticking whether you’re on the map or in a state, but you can grab dinner plates that move around the map for “donations” that grant you additional time. On the other hand, red symbols that are meant to look like cameras according to the manual will instead inflict you with a scandal if you touch them, reducing the time you have left to campaign. Both are as silly as the issues you gave your opinion on, one of the scandals again about pet rocks as one might disown you and one of the donations actually framed as your mother in law being generous despite her better judgment. The fourth skill level for single-player modes uses some unknowable factor to decide if you’ve truly won a state though, the game not showing a visible opponent trying to win those states so you’re operating blind and hoping you outdid their supposed work since even in states 100% on your side it seems the game still might swing them on this highest difficulty level.
An unfortunate truth about Campaign ’84 is that the mild strategy involved doesn’t really add much excitement to the process. Once you start to understand how many electoral votes a state has you’ll always be running towards places like Ohio, Texas, California, and New York to ensure you get the big ticket territories, and even in the mode where the game won’t hand you states just for putting in some effort, the unknown activities lead to it being impossible to counterplay your political adversary. The four remaining modes though are for human vs. human play where players take turns campaigning. The different skill level settings are still meaningful here because they increase the amount of plates and cameras on the map or issues bouncing around to grab while in a state, but you can now at least see someone contest your popularity in a state when it’s their turn and know why you lost it. However, to keep things fair, any state that neither player campaigns in at all abstains from the vote, so you can at least either try to contest someone’s work claiming a state or go for states they haven’t even touched in your efforts to earn support. That doesn’t make the process any more exciting though, the campaigning in a state mostly just running around touching people in what is apparently meant to represent shaking hands with the citizenry according to the manual. If the numbers you need to speed up the process don’t appear it drags on even longer, what mild counterplay strategy that does exist not helping to alleviate a gameplay style that starts off uninteresting and only gets more monotonous from there as each state, no matter the size, is going to require similar efforts to stake your claim. When the votes are tallied and Hail to the Chief plays for the victorious party, it hardly feels like it was earned through anything more than the resilience to actually commit to running around all those states doing the same activity every time.
THE VERDICT: Even once you come to understand Campaign ’84 is aiming to be silly rather than an authentic political sim, that barely present humor doesn’t alleviate the remarkable repetitiveness of its approach to earning votes in the presidential race. Every state features the exact same dull process of running around a flag-shaped crowd of people with the only hope to speed it up being your arbitrary stances on ridiculous issues, even something initially rather cute like having to travel along the borders of the states to get around immediately forgotten in favor of the absolute drag that is gameplay. With almost no subtlety to gunning for the states with the most electoral votes and no depth to holding a state beyond either campaigning there at all or beating out the other player’s percentage number when you do the exact same thing, Campaign ’84 already feels worn out after your first presidential race and the options to change up how the campaign unfolds do nothing to improve the process.
And so, I give Campaign ’84 for ColecoVision…
A TERRIBLE rating. While it’s easy to accept the moment you learn how to play that this isn’t going to be an authentic electoral race, it doesn’t even have the appeal some simplified board game version of a presidential campaign might have. The numbers needed to win are tied to the minigame where you run through crowds for far too long, the segments less about interesting gameplay and more about wasting your campaign time. Grabbing the issues numbers is a relief primarily because it means less time doing that absolute chore that is campaigning in a state where no interesting decisions are being made and the gameplay fails to challenge you. Out on the map it’s usually fairly easy to wind your way around the scandals too so border navigation isn’t that compelling, and the way the game handles electoral college vote distribution means the only time you need to worry about losing a state is when you see another human player take it from you on their turn or when you’re playing against the inscrutable fourth skill level’s opposing party. Scandals could have potentially disrupted your hold in states and donations could have done the opposite, and while their use at bolstering your time campaigning is a fine idea, it also means that work done with the extra time isn’t going to be any more entertaining than the laborious state-taking process you’ve done plenty of times before. Smaller states could have been easier to claim to make going after them a more strategic choice, but instead it is all fairly similar and far worse for it, the ColecoVision certainly limiting how complex it could be but there was likely room for some mild strategy instead of Campaign ’84 hinging all of its appeal on being ambitious rather than entertaining.
The peculiarity of Campaign ’84 is perhaps the only part of it worth paying any attention to. While its choice of console likely lead to concessions, it did try to at least bring a presidential race into a person’s living room even though it can’t really capture any of the politics and the humor it presents in its place is quickly forgotten in favor of groaning at the awful gameplay. While a true electoral simulation might be rather dry and would likely just be text based on the humble ColecoVision, it would at least be more authentic. Campaign ’84 could have also leaned into absurdity more and made it more of an action game if it didn’t want to be dry. The compromise attempted here ends up not providing authenticity or interesting play though, so once you learn what the game is, it’s best to leave this campaign behind as a historical curiosity rather than something worth putting some time into.