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."

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Code in an early macOS 26.7 release candidate suggests Apple has been developing two unreleased game controllers that identify as first-party hardware, according to reporting from MacRumors‘ Juli Clover.

MacRumors reader Pdfu found GameController profiles for devices labeled T6502 and T1057 in the first 26.7 release candidate, which shipped in mid-August. Both appear to include standard gamepad parts: a D-pad, dual analog sticks, shoulder buttons, Home and Menu buttons, and analog triggers. The two designs differ in haptics. T1057 also includes accelerometer and gyroscope support; T6502 does not.

Dedicated hardware plug-ins for each device were present as well, which Clover noted is more consistent with real hardware than leftover placeholder strings. Apple later removed the references in the second 26.7 release candidate.

The find sits alongside a broader set of unreleased-device strings previously spotted in the same build. Apple has long rumored work on a physical game controller and has never shipped one, despite chances around Apple TV, Apple Arcade, and Vision Pro. The company has instead leaned on third-party pads and, in the Vision Pro case, partnered with Sony on PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers.

The strings could describe shipping products or internal test hardware used to validate controller support. If Apple did bring a controller to market, features such as Find My and instant pairing across Apple devices would be the most obvious ways to stand out from Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo pads that many players already own.

The relevant diffs are available in the blacktop/ipsw-diffs repository on GitHub, with Pdfu’s notes in the MacRumors forums.

MacDailyNews Take: To accompany the next-gen Apple TV hardware?

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