Making gaming great again 

This article is a work of satire and is meant to be received as such

Sadman was eleven the first time he cleared a line in Tetris, hunched over a console in his cousin's room with a half-eaten pack of jhaal chanachur beside him, and he is forty-one now, sitting in the same slouch in a different room, stacking bricks on a government website that calls it "holding the line".

For three decades, Sadman assumed his childhood was simply gone, kept away with his Pokémon card collection and his unbroken Street Fighter II combo, available only as a story he told at parties, where he was only invited out of courtesy. 

Then Arcade.gov went up, and it turned out the past had just been waiting for the right administration to reissue it. Sadman's eyes lit up, filled with patriotism and a lot of cheese; he was ready to play his part again, for a country he never set foot in.

The genius of the thing is that none of it is new. 

For the uninitiated, Arcade.gov is the American government's newest civic offering — a website where classic arcade games have been patriotically reskinned into immigration policy. Tetris became "Build the Wall", " Rio Run" is Snake, the one that used to live on Sadman's mother's Nokia 1200. "Flappy Bill" is Flappy Bird with a bald eagle bolted on. Sadman does not need to learn a single new input. His thumbs already know these games in a way his hands no longer know how to parallel park. 

What Sadman needed, it turns out, was never a new game. He needed the old ones to finally mean something. Something bigger than just a fun little afternoon with his friends. Something that would allow him to make America great again. He believes his green card is on the way. 

As a boy, Sadman stacked blocks because blocks needed stacking. There was no wall behind the wall. Now every line he clears is described to him as border defended, and he finds he plays with more purpose than he used to, the way a man might rake leaves faster once he decides it's exercise rather than chores. The zombie horde massing at the edge of the screen is, he understands, a metaphor for people who illegally come into his country and destroy the glorious freedom.

The SEGA logo on the site's loading screen has been redrawn to spell out "MAGA", and Sadman noticed this before he noticed anything else; his chest swelled up with pride. The music is Green Hill Zone, the first level of the Sonic game he owned on Genesis in 1991, and it still does exactly what it did then, which is to make him feel eight seconds younger with every loop. 

That the tune now plays under a Tetris knock-off about migrants rather than a hedgehog running sideways through a loop-the-loop strikes him as, at most, a rounding error. A jingle is a jingle. His nostalgia does not appear to check citizenship status. 

There is a scoreboard for "Rio Run" that counts deportations, and Sadman beat his own personal best on a Tuesday lunch break, which is the first time in years he has beaten a personal best at anything. He did not train for this. He did not need to. The muscle memory was banked in 1994 and has simply been sitting in an account, drawing interest, waiting for a withdrawal that finally made sense to him.

No one had consulted the Tetris Company, and once it caught on, it put out a statement about believing in uniting people rather than dividing them — the kind of line a company delivers just before it stops talking. Sadman isn't tracking any of that. Licensing is not on his mind. His only thought is that they should have been more patriotic and not claim copyright. 

Sadman has a newfound meaning in his life. For years, he has had to sit through modern video games and their nonsense DEI propaganda. Video games should just be about having fun. And, of course, deporting immigrants.