This week, the White House removed a Tetris-inspired game called Build the Wall from its recently launched arcade website after the Tetris Company publicly warned that it takes copyright law “very seriously.”
Here are a few options the White House might consider to replace the game:
Super PAC-Man
Players direct a round creature with a constantly moving mouth through a maze as he munches on tiny coins. Meanwhile, the ghosts of financial lawsuits past pursue Super PAC-Man—but consuming excerpts from favorable Supreme Court rulings allows him to temporarily devour these ghosts, too. Once Super PAC-Man collects all the coins, he progresses, unsatiated, to the next level, where he sends out a single text and all the money starts flowing directly toward him.
Words With Enemies
Players form new, hateful attacks in this Scrabble-like multiplayer game using letters cut from public-school textbooks, removed museum displays, and maps depicting the former Lake Ontario. Highest-scoring insults include: SCUZZY, ZANY, and LOW-IQ JOKER. Extra points are awarded for letters placed on various Random Capitalization Squares.
Mario-a-Lago Kart
Up to four players race golf carts around a cartoonishly decorated beach club, crashing through boxes of classified documents to unlock power-ups including nuclear footballs and black markers for unlimited redactions. Between races, players can refuel at the gas pump, assuming they have collected the requisite 175,000 coins per gallon. The winner receives a golf trophy; second, third, and fourth place—as well as any observers or people simply standing nearby—get access to state secrets.
Grand Theft Crypto
This game is all in the timing: Players must market their own cryptocurrency, then wait until just the right moment to cash out, crashing the currency and tanking other players’ life savings.
The Oregon Data Center
Modern-day pioneers move into a covered wagon after an eminent-domain order for the construction of a data center displaces them from their hometown. Drinking water is scarce, noise pollution is earsplitting, and morale is low as players try to survive the perilous journey to one of the few remaining corners of protected parkland. Inevitably, all players die when artificial general intelligence bioengineers a new form of dysentery.
Goldeneye
In this first-person interior-design game, players gild every nook, cranny, and free patch of wall space in their virtual home office.
Coal Minecraft
No longer beholden to child-labor regulations, players ages 6 to 8 design their own pickaxes before descending 1,500 feet down a shaft to mine bituminous coal. Open-world play means that the only limit is kids’ imagination and black lung and tunnel collapse.
Super Smash the Kennedy Center
Players battle conservationists, historians, and patrons of the arts atop a revered memorial building, destroying it in the process. Downloadable content expands play to the Reflecting Pool, the National Mall, and the East Wing of the White House.
Candy Crush the American Dream
Players rearrange foods that were once safe to eat into matching groups to make them disappear as part of an FDA recall. But miss just one, and players will contract a parasitic infection that sends them to the hospital, where they will incur astronomical medical bills, which will prevent them from qualifying for a mortgage, which will force them to move back in with their parents.
President Evil
A zombie occupies the most powerful office in the world. At the conclusion of Level 2, President Evil might insist that the game isn’t over, but so long as it works as intended, someone else will finally get a turn to play.
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