White House pulls Tetris-like 'Build the Wall' game after Tetris Company complains

White House game vanishes after Tetris Company speaks out

A browser game hosted on the Trump administration's official website has been pulled shortly after the company behind Tetris publicly disavowed any connection to it. According to TechCrunch, the page for the game, called "Build the Wall," now serves a 404 error. Kotaku was the first outlet to notice that the title had quietly disappeared from the site.

An arcade on a government domain

As TechCrunch reports, the White House recently began adding a set of arcade-style games to its website, a striking use of an official government domain. Among them, "Build the Wall" stood out: gameplay involved fitting falling blocks together in the manner of Tetris. The game drew controversy on its own terms before any intellectual property question surfaced. TechCrunch describes it as having been widely condemned as racist, with an in-game objective of erecting a wall to hold back what the game itself termed a "zombie border siege."

The Tetris Company responds

Once the game began circulating publicly, the Tetris Company, which owns the rights to the original Tetris, used an Instagram post to make clear it had nothing to do with the project. "The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of 'Build the Wall,'" the company stated, adding: "We take copyright infringement very seriously."

Soon after, the game's page stopped resolving. No lawsuit or formal takedown request has been publicly reported, and the administration has offered no explanation for the removal, so a direct link between the company's statement and the disappearance cannot be confirmed. TechCrunch says it contacted the White House for comment; its report includes no response.

Other titles remain online

Whatever prompted the removal appears limited to this one game. TechCrunch notes that another title, "Rio Run," is still playable on the government's site. There, the player takes the role of a white male character whose stated goal is deporting immigrant characters.

Why it matters

The episode is a compact case study in how intellectual property pressure can reach even the most prominent government web properties. A whitehouse.gov address offers no exemption from copyright scrutiny, and a rights holder's public objection was followed, for reasons that remain officially unexplained, by the content's removal.

It also illustrates how quietly official web content can be edited out of existence. The game came down with no statement, leaving journalism and archives as the only record that it was ever there. For a government domain, silent deletion has implications well beyond arcade games: the same mechanism can remove policy pages or historical material without a trace.

Lastly, the incident keeps alive the broader question of why an administration is publishing politically themed games on an official website at all. That question becomes sharper now that one contested title has vanished while "Rio Run" remains online.