Retro arcade game parodying Trump's "insane undeclared war" on Iran appears in Washington DC
Players pick between ordering a Diet Coke or declaring war on Iran in a video game created by artist collective The Secret Handshake, accusing President Donald Trump of treating the deadly conflict as if it were a game.
Three arcade machines running the game, called Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, appeared at the centre of the D.C. War Memorial this week alongside an online game, which has reportedly been downloaded more than 14,000 times.
In it, gamers role-play as the president and battle what The Secret Handshake sarcastically refers to as "threats to American freedom" like the pope, Iranian schoolgirls and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies.
The title Operation Epic Furious is a play on the code name Operation Epic Fury, used by the Trump administration for its joint military operations against Iran with Israel, which the countries launched on 28 February.
The idea for the game was born from the administration's own use of footage from action films and first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo, intercut with videos of real bombings to glorify the war.
"We didn't sit down and decide on a video game as a form," the anonymous collective behind The Secret Handshake told Dezeen. "The real world dictated the form."
"Once we saw that people were being killed on both sides in this insane undeclared war and that it was being manipulated into something fantastical and 'cool' by using real video games, we realised that creating a game as a form of reaction and critique was the perfect vessel."
The arcade games were installed under the dome of the D.C. War Memorial, where they were reportedly played by several military reservists from the National Guard.
To wrap the machines, The Secret Handshake created pixellated graphics showing Truth Social posts about the war alongside cartoonish versions of Trump and key members of his administration.
Among them is a wide-faced, much-memed version of Vice President JD Vance, Russian president Vladimir Putin as a topless centaur and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who kicks off the game with the declaration: "My delts are combat ready. Let's liberate some oil."
A plaque next to the arcade games informed players they were about to embark on a "high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground simulator where freedom isn't debated, it's deployed. No briefings, no hesitation, just pure pixelated patriotism."
Players' ultimate objective is to open the Strait of Hormuz by collecting enough posts on Truth Social – the alternate social network developed by Trump after he was banned from Twitter and Facebook.
Instead of guns, the weapons used in the game are things like Catholic guilt or Truth Social posts, in a bid to prevent any further glorification of the violence involved in the war, which has killed at least 2,100 civilians across the Middle East since 28 February. The conflict has since reached a precarious stalemate.
The video game's flat 2D graphic design was inspired by retro arcade games but also born from necessity, as the whole project was turned around in only three weeks.
"We knew we wanted it on an arcade cabinet, so we went with the general feeling of an 8-bit or 16-bit game from the 80s or 90s," The Secret Handshake said.
"It just felt more appropriate to the style and also to the level of intensity we would have time to figure out how to turn around in three weeks."
This isn't the first time The Secret Handshake has taken over DC with protest artwork critiquing Trump.
Previous interventions from the collective include a giant golden toilet, titled A Throne Fit for a King, and a statue showing Trump and notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein re-enacting the famous embrace from Titanic.
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