1988 Gary Hart

A screenshot of gameplay from 1988 Gary Hart. Shows the only slight changes to the base game 1988 scenario and the subsequent grammatical errors.

1988 Gary Hart (also known as Gary 88) is an infamous mod created by a Reddit user by the name of u/Ken_iorn. The mod was originally announced on September 13th, 2021. In the announcement post, the author, claimed that the mod was 95% complete, which generated large hype around the release of the mod in the following days. On September 16th 2021, the mod was officially released to the public. Following backlash against the lackluster content of the mod from users in the thread, the code was locked only a couple of days later. The redox for the mod was then promised by the author; however, after some threads complaining about bugs in trying to create the mod, the project was officially abandoned.

Gameplay

A screenshot from 1988 Gary Hart, showing part of Code 1, including the use of Dukakis' photo and the bare-bones description of Hart.

The mod was only a slight modification to the 1988 base game scenario. Occurrences of Dukakis within the scenario were replaced with either "Gary" or "Hart" and questions completely irrelevant to a Hart candidacy were poorly rewritten. The picture of Dukakis remained in Code 1 despite the mod intending to be an election involving Gary Hart. Additionally, multiple grammatical errors appeared throughout the scenario.

Mod launch

On September 16th, 2021, a thread releasing the code 1 and code 2 to the mod was published. It garnered a measly 29 upvotes, with commenters widely criticizing the mod. The release thread is characterized by players of the game arguing with the original poster. In many of the comments, the author does not seem to understand what users and insinuating. The biggest example is one user commenting "This scenario was made by Dan Bryan" (indicating that the content found was completely created by Dan Bryan and not the original poster) garnering the response of "Huh I can't figure out how to put my credits so idk".

Reception and legacy

The only known teaser of the 1936 mod.

The mod remains infamous among the community and has often been nominated as the worst mod ever released. Because of the community was relatively new when the mod was released, it often serves as a warning of hyping up unreleased mods. Most of the users who were able to play both code 1 and code 2 of this mod are some of the oldest users on the community. The mod author later attempted to create a 1936 mod but this project was quickly abandoned, The only glimpse into the potential mod was the screenshot pictured on the right.