Before Mitt Romney and Barack Obama square off in November for all the electoral college marbles, questions linger heavy in the air like the musty, dead scent that wafts off the Koch brothers: Which way will Ohio swing? Will the economy rebound in time for Obama to ride the wave of revival to a second term? Is your grandma going to write in Ross Perot as a candidate again?
But most of those questions are boring compared to this: Which one of those fellas would win in a fight?
Until one of the debates devolves into a barroom brawl, there’s no real answer — unless you download Uncle Slam, a presidential boxing game from Cleveland-based Handelabra Studio. The $2 app’s been around for a little while now, letting players swing away as nine different POTUS characters, including the big names like Washington and Clinton. You know Abraham Lincoln kills vampires, for instance, but could he beat up Truman?
On July 4, Handelabra will drop in Romney and Obama and begin aggregating the results from players in a running tally until election day to predict the winner, which, when you think about it, is basically as scientific as actual polling. All it’s missing is a hologram of Wolf Blitzer as referee.
“Each character has special moves,” says Jeremy Handel, CEO and founder. “Obama’s is Obamacare, which boosts his health. And Romney’s is a huge campaign rally where he throws a campaign poster.”
The game follows each on the campaign trail in bouts spread across the country, from town hall meetings to bus rallies, until through the might of the gloves, one emerges victorious — which is how elections were decided until 1880.
Uncle Slam’s just one of the apps from Handelabra, which is headquartered with two employees in an office above the Agora in the rejuvenated Midtown tech corridor.
“With Uncle Slam, there’s a lot of silly things in there, but there’s information, too,” says Handel. “With presidents, people really have opinions about ones like George W. Bush, for instance, but not many people have a take on Woodrow Wilson.”
Not really. But we’d sure as hell like to see him fight.
