An anti-immigration-themed adaptation of Tetris was removed from the White House website over the weekend. The move comes days after The Tetris Company disavowed any involvement with the game and said that it “take[s] copyright infringement very seriously.” 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 last week that the makers of the game “have lost touch with what it means to be human and care for others.” “Build The Wall” was one of five simple web games that went up on a new “Arcade” section of WhiteHouse.gov (as well as an alternative arcade.gov URL) just before Labor Day weekend.
The game’s previous URL now returns a 404 / Page Not Found error and has done so since sometime after Sunday morning, according to Internet Archive snapshots (where a playable version is still available). Other Trump Arcade games based on Flappy Bird and Snake remain on the site today.
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