Last week, the Trump White House launched an arcade on the White House website with, among other games, a racist version of Tetris meant to invoke the Trump slogan “Build The Wall.” On Tuesday, after receiving a not-so-veiled threat from The Tetris Company over possible copyright infringement, the game was removed from the White House Arcade page, which does continue to be a real thing somehow.
The removal, spotted by VGC, happened quietly. During its short-lived time on the page, the game basically tasked players with building a wall with Tetris blocks on the border between the United States and Mexico. Forget for a moment that, famously, when you successfully build a gapless wall in Tetris, it disappears. You can’t expect that level of consideration from the people running the federal government.
The game—built for the type of people who complain about political messages in video games but consider this to be “based”— immediately drew the attention of The Tetris Company, which posted an image on its social media accounts that “At Tetris, we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them.” In the caption of the image, the company added, “P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’. P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”
The company isn’t kidding about that. There’s an entire movie about how copyright law was central to the distribution of Tetris, and a hefty portion of the company’s Wikipedia page is dominated by documentation of its many legal battles. The Trump administration is no stranger to being taken to court—per Just Security, it’s been challenged nearly 1,000 times during Trump’s second term alone—but apparently opted to avoid litigation on this one and just drop the game entirely.
MAGA gamers still have a handful of other games to choose from in the Trump Arcade, including a Flappy Bird knockoff, a Snake-like game about deportation, a Tapper-style game about improving school lunches (a thing they got extremely mad at Michelle Obama for), and a Duck Hunt-esque game about securing money for Trump savings accounts. It’s all very cringey, but considerably less likely to invoke a lawsuit.
Gamer nostalgia has somehow become a staple of Trump’s second stay in the White House. His staff of aggrieved incels, longing for the worry-free days of playing games in mom’s basement, have repeatedly used video game imagery to promote parts of the Trump agenda, prominently using clips from games like Halo to recruit for ICE or Call of Duty to celebrate the war in Iran. Meanwhile, Trump’s actual policies keep making gaming more expensive. But hey, it’s a small price to pay for a weekend of playing Tetris for xenophobes.
