But the game’s developer, Danish designer and animator Rune Søgaard, tells me he created the game to criticize Trump’s targeting of religious and ethnic groups:

Trump Escape , an endless runner developed for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac, is a game that plays the way America feels: Pursued by a rocket-propelled Trump and his evil minions, you must guide a surprisingly nimble Statue of Liberty over obstacles and across platforms, deploying an American flag parachute to save her when she falls. Along the way, Lady Liberty frees innocents that Trump has presumably put in cages: A Muslim woman, an African-American woman, a Mexican mariachi, and a hippie with an Earth Day sign, who all leap to help Liberty crash past the grotesque Bannonbot 2000 and the spider-legged Putinator.





“I was watching the election on a bar in Copenhagen with my friends,” he said. “We were all kind of depressed that the most powerful country in the world could choose such an obvious racist and sexist to be the leader.” There and then he vowed to learn enough code to create a game to express this:



“A game where the national spirit of the United States is chased by this guy. My Mexican friend told me he would think it was funny to put a mariachi in there, to help you on your way. Some other friends were talking about how the far right’s Steve Bannon is the mastermind of the whole thing.” So Bannon, who rose to political power by exploiting gamer culture, is now in a game himself -- as a deranged robot with a pulsing human brain. As for the characters in mariachi outfits and Muslim headscarves: “I had to choose some ‘stereotypical’ clothes to make the characters easily readable in a fast-paced game.”

Based on Søgaard’s recollection of a phone call with an Apple representative, all this satirical intent was lost on the App Store review team:



“The rep told me that I couldn't show that Trump has put different minority groups inside of small cages, as many people would find it offensive,” Søgaard tells me. “I then asked him if the Caucasian hippie I also had in one of the cages was a problem as well, and he answered me that it wasn't. Then I asked him if it would be alright if it was only white people depicted as prisoners, and he told me it would probably be alright. That led into a conversation about the problems of not being able to treat the subject of racism in satire on the Apple platform.”



They went back and forth for nearly 20 minutes, during which another motivation for the rejection emerged: “I told him that in my eyes this [game] was mainly offensive to Trump supporters, and he replied that that was a problem as well,” says Søgaard.

Above: Papers, Please

This is hardly the first time that Apple has evinced a literal-minded density over games expressing political themes. The App Store, for instance, initially refused to publish Papers, Please, an acclaimed indie game about police state surveillance, because it supposedly contained “pornographic content” -- really just non-sexualized nudity included to depict the Orwellian intrusiveness of body scanning machines. (Apple hastily changed reversed this decision after it was publicized, calling it a “misunderstanding”.)



So last Tuesday, I reached out to the App Store for their official response on rejecting Trump Escape. I got no reply from Apple, but within a few hours, Rune Søgaard messaged me with this news:



“All of a sudden after one month of waiting, the game has been approved for both Mac, Apple TV and iOS.”

This happened, he tells me, without his changing any of the elements Apple originally objected to. Maybe it was the page-length appeal he had wrote weeks ago, maybe it was interest from the media. Or maybe Apple just changed its mind. For whatever reason, Trump Escape is now available in the App Store.



“I still think it raises some good topics about the way our media platforms today (and the way they are organized) handles satire and free speech,” says Søgaard, and this is true. As with Papers Please, other developers who believe that games should express political opinions however brashly must wonder how much is too much on the world’s largest game platform.



Thanks to Eric Chance for the tip!