2024 Santos

2024 Santos is a joke mod created by a Reddit user by the name of u/2019h740 that stars Congressman George Santos. The mod features George Santos, Mitt Romney, Bernie Sanders, and Rand Paul all running against each other, in a strange world where many of Santos' famed lies have caught on.

Gameplay
The only playable character in this mod is George Santos himself, and the only playable VP is House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The mod is very obviously a joke, being set in a universe where most of the nation now believes that George Santos was, among other things, the First Man On The Moon and a Founding Father. The mod is very short, only being 5 questions long. As the mod progresses, the scandals unravel, but Santos is able to overcome them through increasingly absurd answers. To add to the irony, there are frequently wild popularity swings between answers and with no defined ideological lines, states abruptly and at times randomly veer between the four major candidates. That said, Santos' strongholds tend to be New York, California, the South, and particularly West Virginia, Romney's strongholds tend to be in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains regions, Rand Paul's strongholds are in Kentucky and West Virginia, and Bernie Sanders' strongholds are in New England. Romney does not appear on the ballot in West Virginia.

The game's advisor is Elise Stefanik, who has a condescending tone throughout the mod, as opposed to the glowing writing of the intro. In the second half of the mod, she begins to openly control Santos' movements, breaking the fourth wall by saying she is pre-selecting answers for him, and in one instance in which Santos experiences a lapse in sanity, forces him to go to upstate New York instead of Michigan.

The mod includes two possible endings, one in which Santos wins and another in which Romney wins. Both are written as a joke. The Santos victory includes a short summary praising Santos similar to that of the 2019 North Korea mod, while the Romney victory includes a dystopian ending based on the Nixon 1972 mod, in which Santos is kidnapped by the FBI and taken to hospital, before hallucinating that he is George Washington.

Creation
2024 Santos was announced on May 29th, 2023, and many people in the comments were sarcastically supporting Santos. In the Reddit post, a Nikki Haley VP option was said to be worked on, but it never happened in the final product. Just 5 hours after the original mod announcement, u/2019h740 posted another update showcasing the mods starting margins and questions. Once again, the comments would be jokingly praising George Santos.

Mod launch
At 7:30 PM EST, on May 31st, 2023, the George Santos would be formally released for people to play. It garnered over 70 upvotes, with people being supportive of the mod. However, it wouldn't be added to the loader for unknown reasons. A common assumption is that it was too short and too much of a joke, but that is pure speculation.

A second mod launch was made on June 17th, 2023, including an additional nine questions, bringing the total number of questions to 14. The expanded mod mentioned new topics unrelated to the original Santos scandal, including a Trump University diploma based on the "Dual Major" meme.

Reception and legacy
The mod overall would be jokingly received well, but Tom (creator of 1948Red) would go on to call the mod "meh", specifically saying, "wish they had leaned into it more and made more jokes beside the one they repeated over and over again. The mod was as minimal as possible but still managed to be lame and tiring."

It, along with Spongebob 2008, Chris Chan 2012, DPRK 2019, and The Divorce Trail would join the leagues of a sub-genre known as "joke mods". Coincidentally, Spongebob 2008 was the first mod to release within May 2023 and Santos 2024 was the last mod to release in May 2023.