Forget GTA VI. Trump releases his own ‘Maga’ video games

While the world awaits the sixth instalment of Grand Theft Auto, the US president is releasing arcade games based on the key points of his political agenda. “Do you get distracted easily? We might have a solution,” reads the tweet with which the White House publicised the five retro-style mini-games (plus one more to come) available on a dedicated website, arcade.gov. There is “Build the Wall”, a “Make America Great Again”-style Tetris game in which players must construct a wall to defend the borders against an onslaught of “zombies”: “Protect your border from the oncoming horde,” reads the game’s tagline. In ‘Rio Run’, on the other hand, you become a US border police officer patrolling the Rio Grande, the great river that marks the border between the United States and Mexico. The aim of the game is to ‘deport’ as many immigrants as possible. In ‘Supply Line’, players can give free rein to ‘Maha’ (Make America Healthy Again): ‘Organise school lunches to make America healthy again’. How? By selecting, from a motorised conveyor belt, only the healthy foods from the inverted food pyramid devised by the US Chief Public Health Officer, Robert Kennedy Jr.

While in "Trump savings tycoon" players must catch money with a net, it is "Flappy bill" that is attracting the most attention. The objective is to guide the traditional American bald eagle through the columns (perhaps those of the U.S. Congress?) and ensure that the bill clutched in its talons reaches its destination. Despite its retro aesthetic, the game faithfully replicates the gameplay of “Flappy Bird”, a mobile game that went viral in 2013. The mechanism was simple: the player guides a small bird through gaps between green pipes; each tap on the screen makes it flap its wings and rise, whilst without taps it falls back down, but a single collision with a pipe or the ground immediately ends the game. Simple rules, but extremely high difficulty. So much so that the excessive frustration it caused players prompted its creator, Dong Nguyen, to withdraw it from the market just a few months later. “It’s become an addictive product,” he told Forbes. “I think it’s become a problem. To solve it, the best thing is to get rid of Flappy Bird. It’ll disappear for good.” But no, thanks to Trump’s decision. 

We’ll have to wait a little longer for the sixth game in the series. In the meantime, Trump is giving GTA VI a run for its money in his own way; in that game – as the creators have explained – there will be no mention whatsoever of the tycoon’s return to the White House.