Bush Shoe Toss Games Go Viral
During President George W. Bush's valedictory visit to Iraq, an Iraqi journalist launched his shoes at Bush's head during a press conference. Since then, an assortment of games, animated GIF's, videos, and creative websites have appeared to making light of the journalist's shoe toss.
Tew's "stupid little flash game" started getting millions of hits, and threatened to overload the servers for Tew's new humor site. "We've spent the last three days trying to keep the servers alive and we're meant to be working on our other main startup PopJam. So we whacked it on eBay," he said.
Many websites and animated GIFs have also drawn supporters. One website, Thank You for Throwing Your Shoe, asks people to: "Hold up your shoe for Muntadar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who was arrested for throwing his shoes at President Bush. We don't condone shoe throwing, but we prefer it to war". The site is a gallery of people holding up their own shoes in support, and has hundreds of submissions already.
Alex Tew, an internet entrepreneur who made history in 2006 by selling a million pixels at a dollar a piece on milliondollarhomepage.com, created a simple flash game, sockandawe, that allows users to throw their own shoes a "Bush".
Tew's "stupid little flash game" started getting millions of hits, and threatened to overload the servers for Tew's new humor site. "We've spent the last three days trying to keep the servers alive and we're meant to be working on our other main startup PopJam. So we whacked it on eBay," he said.
On Ebay, his game went for $7,818 to a British-based internet media company. "It was just a bit of fun, a bit of an experiment," he said. "It's actually turned out to be a useful fundraising exercise for our start-up, which is good given the present economic circumstances."
Other games have proven just as popular, and have tallied over 50 million virtual tosses already. These include:
- Kast Sko Mot Bush, a cool, catapult-powered game
- Ninja Bush, which puts the president in a black ninja outfit and lets him return fire with baseballs
- Bye Bye Bush, which shows the president on an infinite field (and gives players a seemingly endless supply of shoes)
- Bush Shoe Incident, which tests players' reaction time
Many websites and animated GIFs have also drawn supporters. One website, Thank You for Throwing Your Shoe, asks people to: "Hold up your shoe for Muntadar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who was arrested for throwing his shoes at President Bush. We don't condone shoe throwing, but we prefer it to war". The site is a gallery of people holding up their own shoes in support, and has hundreds of submissions already.
