It began on a forum thread that no one significant was reading, as these things frequently do. In the days following September 11, 2001, someone scanned and posted an old card from the 1990s video game Illuminati: New World Order, which featured a tower in flames with smoke curling toward a corner caption. The picture went viral. After that, it was dormant for some time. Then, in 2016, it reappeared, but this time it was linked to a different kind of upheaval: the election of a red-hat-wearing real estate developer to the US presidency.
The game was not intended to be prophetic. It was published in 1994 by Steve Jackson Games as a satirical parody of conspiracy culture that required players to assume the roles of enigmatic puppet masters vying for world dominance. In the rulebook, Robert Shea, who co-wrote the novels that served as its inspiration, even made a joke about how the Illuminati had to be behind the game since, by definition, they were behind everything. It was a wink. At the time, the majority of readers interpreted it that way.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Game Title | Illuminati: New World Order |
| Publisher | Steve Jackson Games |
| Original Release Year | 1994 |
| Inspired By | The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson |
| Game Type | Multiplayer collectible card game |
| Notable Cards Cited Online | “Terrorist Nuke,” “Combined Disasters,” “Population Reduction” |
| Status | Out of print |
| Cultural Resurgence | Post-9/11, 2016 Trump election, 2020 pandemic, Jan 6 Capitol riot |
| Related Movement | MAGA / Trumpism |
| Reference Reading | Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019) |
However, in the 2000s, something changed. The cards were now considered proof rather than a joke. Watching this develop over the course of two decades of online discussion gives the impression that the game became less about gameplay and more about a need—the need to think that something that seemed random was actually written by someone, somewhere. That hunger was only intensified during the Trump administration.
The cards’ neat mapping onto the chaos is difficult to ignore. The “Terrorist Nuke” card features a tower of smoke. A “Population Reduction” card appeared in the early stages of COVID-19. Predictably, after January 6, a “Enough is Enough” card featuring a figure of an insurrectionist draped in a flag went viral. In any real sense, none of this was a prediction. Almost any significant event could be retrofitted onto the images because they were sufficiently ambiguous. Vagueness, however, has a power of its own.
That power is important because Trumpism, as academics have been attempting to define it for ten years, is partially powered by the same mechanisms. Slogans like MAGA are “open signifiers,” meaning whatever the supporter wants them to mean, according to communications researcher Zizi Papacharissi. This is also how the card game operates. A Rorschach test is performed on a blurry illustration, and the test nearly always yields what the viewer brought into the room. There are more architectural similarities between brand politics and conspiracy theories than people like to acknowledge.
Beneath all of this lies an uncomfortable reality. The game’s cultural renaissance coincided with a genuine breakdown in confidence in institutions, the media, and the notion that public events have observable causes. A 1994 card game begins to appear almost comforting when officials seem aloof and results seem manipulated. At least someone was supposed to be in charge, even if they were fictional. That’s human, but it’s also depressing.
Ultimately, the future is not what the Illuminati cards truly depict. It’s an attitude. a persistent, low-pitched murmur of mistrust that peaked during the Trump administration and doesn’t seem to be going away. The decks are no longer available. The theories aren’t.
