If tabloid journalism was a Kairosoft game

If you’ve turned on the news or read a UK paper that isn’t The Sun in the past few days, you’ll no doubt have heard about the demise of the biggest-selling English language Sunday newspaper in the world - (aptly named) The News of the World - at some point.

The closure of the 168-year-old tabloid comes amidst claims of skullduggery of the most vile kind, such as hacking the phones of crime victims, bribing police officers, and even buying royal phone numbers.

While we wouldn’t normally delve into the murky world of tabloid journalism (except when it involves ragging on The Sun when it prints rubbish), all this scandal and intrigue have got us in the mood.

So we present Journo Hack Story: a game that takes you closer to the dark side than Darth Vader's codpiece.

Made in a similar vein to Kairosoft’s similar-sounding management games, Journo Hack Story puts you in charge of a small but ambitious local paper.

You start with just a handful of eager staff and a small printing press, with just 100 years to make your paper the biggest in the world.

“How does one go about this?” you breathlessly ask.

First you need to make sure your staff is the best you can have, which means regularly (as in, once a week) hiring and firing staff based on their ability to write headlines (key criteria include: Pun-ability, Pun Placement, Pun-ch lines, and Hobbies).

But even with a crack team of journos producing superb puns every week, you still need some headline stories.

Depending on the various skills of your journos, you’re given the choice of a number of ‘genres’ and ‘features’ to blend together, with some creating better stories than others (you can get more by levelling your staff up).

So putting ‘Football’ and ‘Royalty’ together is unlikely to get many readers, but combining, say, ‘Football’ and ‘Extramarital Affair’, or ‘Pop Star’ and ‘Drugs’ will make your readership explode.

Really successful stories can then have sequels made, which can generate sales for months on end.

All headlines are, as in real-life, completely customisable (as long as it conforms to a 14-character limit), although the quality of writing is completely reliant on the stats of your employees.

Once a story is in motion, you’re treated to a charming animation of your assigned journo rooting through rubbish bins outside a house, exclaiming “I See!” and gaining various ‘points’ that will make the story more juicy.

Every year, one or more Public Figures will arrive that you can write these stories about, with an audience number that could either rise or fall over time.

You have to be careful about which Figures to invest in, though, as the initial cost of setting up the wire-taps, employing private detectives, and bribing officials is high, and certain people last longer in the public eye than others.

Knowledge of very-similar sounding real life people will be an advantage here (top tip - drop the singer Bobbie William after 2000).

Now and then, a silver-haired PR head will turn up at the office with bonus items for sale that boost your workers' productivity. Items such as 'Call Girl Testimony' cost a bomb to purchase, but can make the difference between a good story and a ‘Shocking Exclusive’ (that’s the best kind).

After 100 years is up, the paper is shut down amid claims of widespread lawbreaking and generally immoral activities.

Here’s where the score is calculated, with your total circulation number making up the bulk and an extra special ‘closing down souvenir bonus’ applied to the final year’s figures, dependant on how many ‘Shockers’ you created over the years.

But the fun doesn’t have to stop there! Once you’ve completed the game once, a new Game+ option becomes available, which lets you re-open the same publication again a few weeks later with the same staff and readers.