White House Website Briefly Hosted Racist Tetris Clone Game Until The Tetris People Complained

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Pick your favorite zombie movie or television show and you’ll eventually be confronted with dialogue justifying the killing of the zombies with the idea that they are no longer human.

“They aren’t people, Rick. They’re just bodies. We have to stop thinking of them as if they’re still alive.” – The Walking Dead

“They’re not human. Look at them. They’re just… meat.” – Shaun of the Dead

The point is that there should be no ill feelings towards the treatment of a zombie, because they aren’t like us any more. They aren’t worthy of compassion. They deserve no quarter, only violence. They are a threat to our very survival and doing away with them, or at least keeping them away from where humanity exists, is the only solution.

Or, if you’re the Trump administration, you use this same justification as a bank-shot for immigration policy by hosting a Tetris clone game on the White House website.

The White House’s “Build the Wall” game asked players to stop a “Zombie Border siege” by stacking Tetris-styled bricks in an attempt to “hold the line.” Unlike in Tetris, though, the blocks in “Build the Wall” don’t disappear when you complete a line, meaning each brick contributes to an impassable barrier for the pixel-art “zombies” marching in from the “Southern Border.” That change makes the gameplay pretty uninteresting for anything but cheap propaganda, and it also means that every game quickly and ironically ends with a “Border Breached” message when the blocks inevitably fill up the well.

Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of Texas migrant rights group Frontera Federation, told AFP last week that the makers of the game “have lost touch with what it means to be human and care for others.”

The game is now thankfully gone from the site, though several other obvious game clones remain. This is not new ground for this administration, of course. Team Trump has made a habit when campaigning and while in office of using video game imagery for all kinds of things, such as touting MAHA nonsense, shitposting about the horrors of its own immigration activity, or bragging about the body count of the wars Trump promised he’d never start.

So, why did the game get taken down? Did someone in the administration realize how horrible and racist the whole thing was? Did Trump himself suddenly suffer from a spasm of moral clarity?

Doubtful. More likely it was this.

In a statement on Friday, a spokesperson for The Tetris Company said it was “reviewing the matter” and that the company “was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’ and did not authorize or license the Tetris brand or intellectual property for the game.” The company reiterated that message in a social media post Friday afternoon, writing that it “believe[s] in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them.”

Now, I’m not going to sit here and cheer on the enforcement of our overly broad copyright system. But I sure as hell understand why the Tetris people don’t want there to be even the barest chance for them and their game to be associated with something as disgusting as Trump’s Build The Wall “game.” And ArsTechnica is right to note that the Tetris Company has a long history of being very protective of its intellectual property rights, which government lawyers almost certainly are aware of.

Whether taking the game down will be enough to keep the Tetris Company from acting, I do not know. What I do know is that this administration is filled with deeply unserious, racist, and troubled people. Immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are not zombies. They shouldn’t be compared with zombies. Whatever immigration policy you prefer, they are people.

And that really shouldn’t have to be said out loud.

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