A YouTuber has gone viral after inserting the likeness of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders into several hit video games, including Resident Evil 7 and Star Wars: Battlefront II.
The eerily realistic rendering of the popular politician was based on the picture of Sanders wearing mittens at Joe Biden’s inauguration last month, which quickly became an internet meme.
Australian YouTuber @ToastedShoes commissioned “mods” – unofficial alterations to the code of a pre-existing video game – which dropped Sanders into games including Dark Souls, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Fallout 4.
“I hit up my boy Joe Mashups,” he explains in a video. “I got him to make a highly-detailed Bernie Sanders sitting model. I contacted the best modders in the entire gaming community and we set to work on seeing how many games we could mod Bernie Sanders into.”
In Battlefront II, Sanders is added as a player character, and is given Darth Maul’s duel-bladed lightsaber to wield.
In the Resident Evil mod, Sanders is added as a villain pursuing the player-character around the game’s terror-inducing map.
A clip of the YouTuber playing the Resident Evil mod went viral on Twitter, accumulating almost 200,000 likes as of Monday (1 February), and over 50,000 retweets.
Viewers reacted positively to the video, describing the mods as “absolutely legendary” and “hilarious”.
