The White House dropped a ‘Build the Wall’ arcade game

The White House just dropped a new browser game called Build the Wall. You stack blocks to stop a zombie border siege. The shapes are aliens — the administration's word for anyone crossing the southern border. It's a straight-up reskin of Tetris, and The Tetris Company called it out fast.

That's the funny part: they're using one of the most recognizable games in history to push a policy agenda. The PR team behind it clearly thought this was clever. The copyright holder didn't.

It's not just Build the Wall. The White House put out a whole suite of arcade-style games with policy themes. Some are fine — light puzzles, simple mechanics. Others are straight-up racist, and all of them sit on top of games they don't own. The Verge reports that the copyright holders may not be happy to be associated with the MAGA agenda.

This is the White House PR team running a game studio as a policy operation. The audience is whoever clicks a link from a White House press release — mostly people already in the culture war. The real story is that they're using other people's IP to make propaganda, and they're not pretending otherwise.

Why this matters for us: when the government starts treating other people's games as propaganda tools, it's not just about the pieces on the board — it's about what they're building behind them.