2099 was an interesting year with plenty of newsmakers, economic crisis and political change. What better way to relive it all than with a simple Flash game that takes a shot at it all?

The game, created by K. Thor Jensen, was [URL=http://www.heavy.com/post/2009-the-game-2545]posted at comedy site Heavy.com[/URL], where Jensen is the editorial director. It features such celebrities as Tiger Woods, Bernie Madoff, Balloon Boy, Glenn Beck and even zombie Michael Jackson. The idea of the game is to move your icon around the square board to collect dollar bills while avoiding the 2009 pitfalls and pratfalls.

According to [URL=http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/01/05/2009-the-game-designer-creates-anti-2009-diversion/]a blog post at the Wall Street Journal[/URL] by Jamin Brophy-Warren, Jensen fell vstim to the economic turbulence in early 2009 and was forced to create landing pages for Google spammers at $5 a pop. He became frustrated with all the media coverage about "stupid things" while he was trying to survive.

From Brophy-Warren's post:

[INDENT]Fortunately, Heavy hired Jensen and shortly before the year drew to a close, he spent about a day developing the game “to do something that reflected how I felt about the year gone by,” Jensen said. The two feelings he experienced the most? “Helplessness and annoyance,” he said. As a result, players have no offensive capabilities as they try to collect cash even when the giant head of Kanye West comes a tumbling in from off-screen. (I found Woods the hardest to avoid. A metaphor perhaps?)[/INDENT] The game is a quick little time waster. My best score in 10 minutes of playing is posted above.

[url=http://www.gameculture.com/2010/01/07/relive-2009-through-flash-game]More...[/url]