Hidden Agenda

It's 1988, the Cold War is slowly winding down, and someone in Colorado is sitting down programming a game where you play as the president of a fictional Central American republic. Not an action game, not a space shooter — a political simulation with moral choices. I wasn't ready for that back then. The game also taught me quite a bit.

Hidden Agenda by TRANS Fiction Systems puts you in the chair of the freshly elected president of Chimera — a fictional country somewhere in Central America that just overthrew a dictator. The country is in ruins, the economy is in decay, guerrillas in the mountains, foreign pressure from all sides. It's not about conquering territory or building a base. It's about what you do with power once you finally have it.

The game works as a series of political decisions — you appoint ministers, approve laws, respond to field reports, receive delegations. Each choice has consequences that might show up ten game months later, when you can't even remember why you signed that land reform decree back then. The controls are purely text and keyboard-based, no graphical frills. DOS in its purest form. The game doesn't judge you as you play — the verdict comes at the end, when history itself passes judgment on you. That was a pretty unusual idea back then.

What set Hidden Agenda apart from its contemporaries was its deliberate connection to real 1980s geopolitics. Pressure from Washington, left-wing rebel factions, the question of human rights versus economic stability — the developers clearly read the news. That's why the game even made it onto American universities as educational material. Political science students dissected it in seminars. That didn't happen to many game titles from 1988. Today it's aged a bit through the linearity of its branching — there are fewer options than it seems at first glance — but as a thought experiment it still works.

Today, mostly those who want more from strategy than just having the right unit in the right place will play Hidden Agenda. Those who want to feel the weight of choice, where there's no purely correct answer — just compromises and their price. You can run it in your browser through DOSBox emulators without much hassle. An hour with it will tell you more about how power works than many more modern political simulators with prettier interfaces.