White House Uses Nintendo Wii Gameplay to Share Unclassified Military Footage

Donald Trump’s White House staff is once again using Nintendo games to promote its political agenda, this time focusing on the Wii Sports franchise to drum up support for Operation Epic Fury, the ongoing military conflict in Iran. New unclassified military footage has been released on the White House’s social media accounts featuring clips of bombings mixed in with images and sounds from Nintendo’s classic sports simulation series.

Released in 2006 alongside the Nintendo Wii console, Wii Sports is widely considered one of the best multiplayer Nintendo games of all time. The innovation of motion controls mixed with a variety of sports attracted a lot of players, and since it was bundled with the console in most regions around the world, it’s also instantly recognizable to almost anyone who ever owned a Wii.

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The newly released video posted to the White House’s official Twitter account opens with Wii Sports‘ theme song and a mock-up of its title screen, but with the title replaced by the words “Operation Epic Fury.” What follows is a mash-up of Wii Sports series activities like boxing, tennis, golf, archery, baseball, and bowling, intermixed with unclassified, black-and-white video footage of military strikes in Iran. The cuts between gameplay and military footage repeatedly happen at the moment of impact in each of the sports, with the game’s announcer reacting in kind, such as shouting “Hole in one” just after a golf ball has hit the center of a bullseye, followed by a real-world explosion. The video appears to utilize footage from both the original Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, making particular use of the latter game’s aerial dogfighting mechanics in the Air Sports category in one snippet.

There is an emerging pattern of the White House social media team using video game assets in its images and video posts. A week before the Wii Sports-related video was posted, the account shared a Pokemon Pokopia meme supporting the MAGA agenda, using a popular image creator that lets users post custom messages over the game’s cover art. The message was very brief, accompanied only by the words “Make America Great Again” and a couple of emojis. It elicited an official response from The Pokemon Company International, which stated that the company did not authorize use of its intellectual property for the meme, and that its “mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda.”

This also isn’t the first time the official White House social media team has used video game footage to promote Operation Epic Fury. On March 4, Childish Gambino’s song “Bonfire” and gameplay from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 were mixed with footage of strikes in Iran in a video on The White House’s Twitter page, which appears to have since been taken down. Two days later, the account posted a video of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas‘ theme song and protagonist, Carl Johnson, which repeats over multiple clips of various military targets in Iran being struck, showing the franchise’s trademark “Wasted” animation accompanying every explosion.

Carl Johnson AKA CJ in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (4)

While the White House hasn’t relied solely on Nintendo for its video game-related posts, it has been the most common target in recent months, and the Pokemon franchise, in particular, seems to be a favorite of the social media team. In September, a video of ICE agents detaining people set to the original Pokemon anime theme song stirred up controversy on the White House’s TikTok account, using the franchise’s “Gotta catch ’em all” tagline to draw a parallel between virtual monster collection and federal agents’ rounding up undocumented immigrants. Replies to all of these posts have been overwhelmingly negative, though they seem to be proving popular with the MAGA voter base, with the ICE-related video having been liked more than 1.9 million times, and the most recent Twitter post having already generated more than 84,000 likes.