White House pulls 'Build the Wall' game after Tetris Company complaint

A video game posted to the Trump administration’s website — one that reportedly mirrored Tetris’ gameplay closely — has been taken down after the Tetris Company complained. The White House had recently posted a number of arcade-style games to its site, and one of the more controversial was “Build the Wall,” which tasked players with stacking blocks of various shapes and sizes to build a wall and keep out a “zombie border siege” — a premise widely criticized as racist.

After Build the Wall’s existence became public, the Tetris Company, which owns the rights to the original Tetris game, said in an Instagram post that it “was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall,’” adding: “We take copyright infringement very seriously.”

The page for Build the Wall now returns a 404 error, meaning it no longer exists; Kotaku first reported that the game was no longer visible on the White House’s website. TechCrunch has reached out to the Trump administration for comment. Still visible on the government’s site is another game, Rio Run, in which players control a white male character whose goal is to deport as many immigrant characters as possible.

Why it matters

A rights holder’s public objection was enough to get one government-hosted game pulled, but a similarly themed game on the same site remains untouched, underscoring that copyright complaints, not the content’s substance, drove this particular takedown.