The White House made a “Tetris” clone. The Tetris Company was not amused.

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 AFP 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.

Hey, that’s our game

In a statement provided to the press on Friday, a spokesperson for The Tetris Company said it was “reviewing the matter” and that the company “was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’ and did not authorize or license the Tetris brand or intellectual property for the game.” The company reiterated that message in a social media post Friday afternoon, writing that it “believe[s] in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them.”

P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.

P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously. pic.twitter.com/Fu02khRpT3

— Tetris (@Tetris_Official) September 4, 2026

The Tetris Company has a long history of protecting its intellectual property via frequent takedown requests and legal proceedings against games that copy its gameplay and/or style. And while unofficial Tetris clones are still relatively easy to find, officially licensed versions of the game are available on everything from the Data Zapper M7000 to a giant plastic chicken McNugget.

While gameplay mechanics and rules are generally not copyrightable, the look and feel of a particular expression of those rules can be protected under US copyright law. In 2012, a Circuit Court judge identified some basic elements of Tetris that he said could earn this kind of “trade dress” protection when appearing in concert, including the size of the playfield and the “next piece” display. Legal arguments aside, the White House probably wants to avoid a prolonged public fight with the makers of a beloved video game during the run-up to federal legislative elections.

In promoting the launch of the White House Arcade site, the White House social media team created parody videos mimicking the iconic start-up sequences from classic game consoles from Sega, Nintendo, and Sony. The Trump administration has previously used explicit Halo imagery to promote its military policies, a move that resulted in pointed silence from Microsoft.