The Hot Young Supreme Court Justice PC Game Is Deeply Upsetting, and I Must Have It
The Hot Young Supreme Court Justice PC Game Is Deeply Upsetting, and I Must Have It
A brief introduction to Supreme Courtship, a Kickstarter game that begins with Antonin Scalia getting poisoned on the steps of the Supreme Court building by Knockoff Carmen SanDiego.
Sometimes, the murky depths of the internet urp up something so cheerfully deranged that I am reduced to sitting silently in my chair, staring glassy-eyed into the middle distance, pondering the awesome breadth of the human experience and also worrying a little bit about whether I am having a stroke.
This is how my body reacted to encountering Supreme Courtship, a failed Kickstarter project from 2019, which nearly gave us a computer game that—I swear this is real—allows you, playing a character whose backstory includes a stint as the host of a courtroom TV show about adjudicating legal disputes between ghosts (???), to assume the role of America’s newly-appointed Supreme Court justice. Gameplay involves working alongside young, hot versions of real-life justices to hear oral arguments, decide big cases, and explore “what justice means in our society.” Here are your eight colleagues, rendered as the stars of an animated Real World spin-off that for some reason streams exclusively on the Frontier Airlines in-flight app.
Here is me, conducting a live TV interview about my judicial philosophy. Please note that the game does not allow for customization of outfits, although I admittedly owned every one of these items of clothing in 2011.
Along the way, players will also have the opportunity to—again, I am not making this up—solve the enduring mystery of who murdered their predecessor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, by poisoning the whiskey he chugged from a flask while ascending the steps of the Supreme Court building in the middle of the night. Here is the climax of the game’s cinematic, borderline-hallucinogenic opening sequence, which portrays the nefarious assassin, Knockoff Carmen SanDiego, standing triumphantly over the prone body Scalia, who spent his last fictional moments on earth dressed like Homophobic Jack Webb in Dragnet.
Supreme Courtship’s developers describe the project as a “judicial friendship simulator” that centers “comedy, friendship, and experiencing life as a justice.” Among the characters you will get to know are John Roberts, the “cool and collected court dad”; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the “feminist firebrand and master dissenter”; and Anthony Kennedy, who is described as both the Court’s “wily and temperamental swing vote,” and also as an “adorable twerp.”
In light of the credible sexual assault allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the developers explain that they made the difficult decision to exclude him from the Supreme Courtship extended universe altogether. This is both extremely funny as far as punishments go, and also ten times more significant a punishment than the real-life Kavanugh ever experienced.
As far as I can tell—at least, from the 15 minutes I was able to play the online demo of Supreme Courtship before I was rushed to the hospital because blood started pouring from my eyes—the other justices’ in-game personalities are a bit less developed. Process of elimination, however, indicates that these two are the avatars of Justices Samuel Alito and Stephen Breyer. I am not sure which is which; candidly, I am not sure what result would upset me more.
The game’s promo site feels like a time capsule from the “Notorious R.B.G.” era of Supreme Court pop culture crossover: There is the requisite glowing tribute to the cross-ideological friendship between Scalia and Ginsburg, for example, and the developers’ stated goal of creating a game to make the Court “not as scary as it is on the news” feels very quaint in light of, you know, the scary things that the Court is actually doing. On the one hand, a game that literally caricatures the politicians who use their positions of power to inflict a multitude of harms on vulnerable people feels trivializing and cringe. On the other hand, with S-tier merch like this available to early supporters, perhaps I will find a way to tolerate it.
According to Supreme Courtship’s Kickstarter page, the project ultimately raised $27,109, just short of its $32,000 fundraising goal. I have asked our lawyers to research whether IRS rules would allow a nonprofit media outlet like Balls & Strikes to write a check for the $4,891 balance, and will provide an update as soon as I have it.
(h/t @liberatepalestine.bsky.social)
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