Someone at the White House Owes Tetris an Apology

I’ve been half-following this story about the White House launching a little arcade of parody games to promote deportation policy, and my first reaction wasn’t outrage. It was something closer to secondhand embarrassment. Someone in a government office, presumably paid a public salary, sat down and made a knock-off Tetris. Not a clever one. A bad one, by the sound of it, where the lines don’t even clear properly. Tetris, a game so tightly designed that it’s basically a solved piece of mathematics wearing a jaunty Soviet-era costume, and they couldn’t be bothered getting the core mechanic right.

That’s the detail that got me, more than the politics. The laziness of it.

Because the politics are grim, obviously. Using recognisable game aesthetics, ripped-off Sega and Nintendo intros, a Tetris clone, to sell deportation policy to what I assume is meant to be a younger, extremely online audience, is a genuinely ugly bit of propaganda. There’s nothing new about governments using pop culture to sell hard policy; it’s just usually done with a bit more craft, or at least a bit more shame. This has neither. According to people picking it apart online, one of the intro animations is literally the original console boot sequence with the government’s logo pasted over the final frame. Not reimagined. Pasted.

What’s caught my attention in the discussion around it is the bit everyone keeps circling back to: nobody’s going to sue. Tetris put out a statement that reads like a threat, something like “we take copyright infringement very seriously,” and people are still betting that’s as far as it goes. Nintendo apparently sat out a near-identical situation last year involving Pokémon imagery in an immigration enforcement video. Nintendo. The company that has sued fan projects into oblivion for using a Mario font without permission. If Nintendo won’t go near this, nobody’s holding their breath for Sega.

I don’t know Nintendo’s internal reasoning and neither does anyone in that comment thread, but the theory going around, that a company doesn’t want to pick a fight with an administration that controls tariffs on the hardware it needs to sell, isn’t crazy. It’s the kind of quiet, structural chilling effect that doesn’t need an explicit threat to work. Nobody has to say “sue us and we’ll make your Switch cost more.” The possibility is enough. That’s a genuinely uncomfortable thing to sit with: a legal system that exists on paper, functioning exactly as intended, right up until the other side is powerful enough that using it becomes a commercial risk rather than a legal formality.

I grew up on a GameCube in a fibro house in the outer suburbs, saving up paper-round money for cartridges, and there’s a particular kind of affection you develop for the actual craft in those old console boot sequences, the little chime, the cube spinning into place. Watching a government agency strip-mine that imagery for a deportation ad isn’t just tacky, it’s a small theft of something that a lot of people, across a lot of countries, genuinely loved without it meaning anything political at all. My daughter thinks Tetris is what old people play instead of Candy Crush. Fair enough. But even she rolled her eyes at the screenshots I showed her, and she doesn’t usually clock why something’s cringeworthy versus just old.

Where I land on this, and I hold it loosely, is that the specific game doesn’t matter much. Tetris, Pokémon, whichever console startup screen gets recycled next month, it’s a symptom of something bigger: institutions and companies that would normally push back on this sort of thing quietly deciding the cost of pushing back is too high right now. That’s not a video game story. That’s a story about what happens to the ordinary checks on power when enough of them decide, one by one, that today isn’t the day to use them.

I don’t have a tidy way to close this out. The games are bad, the politics are worse, and the most interesting thing about the whole affair is what nobody’s doing about it.