The White House Built a Tetris Knockoff. Tetris Has Some Questions.

The White House launched an arcade.

And no, that isn’t the beginning of a joke, although we’re going to have to work pretty hard to convince ourselves of that over the next few paragraphs. Arcade.gov went live September 3 with five browser games based around different administration initiatives, all wrapped in the comforting glow of retro video games. There’s just one little problem: some of those games look awfully familiar.

There’s Flappy Bill, which sends a bald eagle carrying legislation through obstacles over Washington and owes more than a little to Flappy Bird. Rio Run takes the basic structure of Snake and moves it to the Rio Grande. Supply Line has players sorting school lunches on a conveyor belt, while Trump Savings Tycoon involves grabbing money to fill children’s Trump Accounts. Then there’s Build the Wall, a falling-block puzzle game that you could probably identify from across the room while squinting through somebody else’s glasses.

It’s Tetris. Come on, seriously. It's fucking Tetris! Technically, it’s not Tetris. That distinction is becoming rather important because The Tetris Company would very much like everyone to know that it had nothing to do with this.

In a statement following the launch, the company said it was not involved in creating Build the Wall and had neither authorized nor licensed its brand or intellectual property for the game. It also delivered the six words you generally don’t want to hear when your new game looks suspiciously like somebody else’s old game: “We take copyright infringement very seriously.” The company says it is reviewing the matter.

That’s where this gets interesting, because Arcade.gov isn’t some kid screwing around with a game engine in his bedroom. This is sitting on the official White House website.

The games themselves are openly designed to promote administration policies, which isn’t something we need to debate here. Politicians have been finding increasingly strange ways to advertise themselves since long before any of us had an internet connection. What interests me is the decision to package that message inside games that immediately remind players of existing commercial properties.

It doesn’t stop with the games, either. Promotional material for Arcade.gov has played with the familiar startup imagery of Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo, while one animation turned the classic SEGA logo into “MAGA.” Apparently somebody looked at decades of recognizable video game branding and decided the safest possible approach was to just start blatantly ripping them off.

That’s also why the Tetris response is important. There’s a difference between making a generic falling-block puzzle and creating something that causes virtually everyone who sees it to immediately say, “That’s Tetris.” Exactly where that line sits legally is a question for lawyers, and The Tetris Company hasn’t announced any legal action. It has only said that it’s reviewing what happened. For now, that’s enough to make this one of the stranger video game stories of the year.

There is, however, one final detail that makes Build the Wall almost impossibly funny without anybody having to make it political. The entire point of Tetris is clearing complete horizontal lines. You carefully arrange a bunch of differently shaped pieces so they fit together, and when you successfully create a wall from one side of the screen to the other, the game makes that wall disappear.

So somebody took a game about making walls vanish and turned it into Build the Wall. Maybe licensing should’ve been the second thing they thought about.

Game design should’ve been the first.