SEVIERVILLE — The White House’s new online arcade, which invites visitors to stack border-wall bricks in a Tetris-style build game and guide a pixelated Tom Homan through a Snake-style chase along the Rio Grande, has a physical counterpart now: a converted cabinet at Foothills Fun Center, wedged between Skee-Ball and a claw machine stocked with Vols keychains.
Owner Curtis Ogle said he loaded the wall-building game onto an old Ms. Pac-Man cabinet Tuesday after a regular asked whether it counted toward ticket winnings. It does, at the same rate as everything else in the row: four tickets per 1,000 points.
“Redemption tickets pay out the same either way,” Ogle said. “A brick’s a brick.”
The White House arcade, which also includes a Flappy Bird riff starring a legislation-carrying eagle and a falling-money game tied to the administration’s child savings accounts, drew immediate national criticism and reports that Nintendo was reviewing the site’s console-style loading screens for its own branding. Ogle said none of that came up at the counter.
“Had a kid ask if the eagle one counts as two players,” he said. “Told him no, same as Flappy Bird.”
Foothills Fun Center has run White Stores gift cards as prizes since the chain closed, and the new cabinet sits three machines down from a Ms. Pac-Man unit still charging a quarter a play, a rate Ogle said he has “never seen a reason to revisit.” He said he’d add the eagle game “if somebody asks,” and that the arcade’s food-sorting game — the White House’s Tapper-style entry — is still logged in his register system under its old cabinet’s name, Big Buck Hunter.
Ogle said he has not heard from the White House, Nintendo, or anyone else about the cabinet, and does not expect to.