The Game That Almost Was

 

 

I’ve often believed that games are more than just entertainment—they’re a mirror to society, a playful lens through which we process the absurdity of the world around us. But as I’ve discovered recently, creating a game can also shine a harsh light on bureaucracy, human fallibility, and the crushing indifference of massive corporations.

The idea a friend and I came up started a simple concept: a super simple, casual game that might appeal to Trump supporters. Not as an endorsement, but as a sort of satirical, playful commentary on the polarized world we live in.

The premise was absurd. You’d play as a pixelated airplane version of Trump, shooting down enemies in a chaotic arcade-style game.

But as the game took shape, it started to feel wrong. Glorifying one side in a fractured world—no matter how playful—didn’t feel right. I wanted something more balanced, something less... one-sided.

So I introduced some changes to the game: instead of glorifying Trump (or anyone else, for that matter), I created a game where players could choose their side: Right, Left, or an anarchist cat (didn't finish the artwork of the cat in time so I dropped it at the end).
It now felt a more balanced game: It wasn't a "play with an airplane version of Trump and shoot all your enemies", it was a "pick a side, and everyone else is fair game". It was satire, it was silly, and it was fun.

The game was ready (Barely). We polished, tweaked, and put together promotional videos with avatars of Trump and Harris playing the game together in hilariously inappropriate scenarios. They were in Pikachu costumes. They were on the toilet. They were in bed. It was absurdist gold, the kind of absurdity that demands you laugh, roll your eyes, or both. And we hoped we could ride the wave of the upcoming election with it.

Submitting a game to the iOS App Store usually is easy and smooth (at least from my previous experience submitting other apps). This time, it felt like playing a game of its own—a slow, agonizing waiting game. But when our app moved from “waiting for review” to “in review” a few days before election day, we dared to hope. Timing was tight, but we could still make it. Right?

Nope. A day later, the app was rejected. The reason? It had been flagged as a “spam app.”

How? Well, in my mad rush to meet the self imposed deadline, I’d left behind some unused assets from a previous game I developed and added it to the build. Apple’s bots flagged it as a near-duplicate—a lazy rehash. It stung. And worse, it wasn’t true. It wasn’t just frustrating. It was humiliating. Nights and weekends work (this is a side gig outside my "9 to 5" job) reduced to a single, automated rejection.

Fair enough, though. Mistakes happen. I scrubbed every last trace of the old assets and resubmitted the game with a friendly note to the reviewers explaining the situation. Surely this would clear things up.

Days passed. Then a week. Nothing. In the past, all my apps were reviewed in less than 48hs. One week was odd. I reached out. Their response? Corporate nothingness: “Your app is in review, and we don’t have anything to share at the moment.” No details. No explanation. Just a wall of vague politeness (we had about 4 emails back and forth, always with the same "empty", sort of canned response).

Frustration doesn’t cover it. I started cycling through possible explanations, not because it would change anything, but because I needed to make sense of it. My first theory: maybe the initial “spam” flag escalated the review process to a smaller, slower team. That seemed logical, until two weeks passed.
What if the political tone of the game raised red flags? Maybe Apple doesn’t want anything remotely tied to politics on their platform, satire or not. Or worse—what if someone at Apple stumbled across the game’s original webpage? It still had remnants of our first concept, the more Trump-specific one. If a reviewer hated that, could they have buried our game in some limbo queue? I changed the webpage to something more neutral, but by then, it felt too late.

And then there’s the conspiracy theory: What if Apple just doesn’t want anything Trump-adjacent, no matter how tongue-in-cheek? It’s absurd, sure, but after two weeks of silence, absurd explanations started to feel plausible.


The election came and went, and with it, our perfect launch window. But the game still exists. And damn it, I want it to see the light, even if the only one downloading it ends up being me and my cat.
After weeks of waiting, I deleted the entire app entirely and resubmitted it from scratch. It’s been a few days, and it’s still "in review". Maybe it’s the weekend. Maybe it’s something more insidious. Either way, I’m powerless to do anything but wait.


This whole ordeal has been a stark reminder of how small creators—hell, regular people—are up against systems that don’t care about them. Apple doesn’t care about my game, my vision, or the effort I put into it. To them, it’s just another app in an endless sea of submissions.
 But to me, it means a lot. It’s satire, creativity, and a chance to laugh at a world gone mad. Or to have some trolls complaining about how bad the game is.

Will this game ever make it to the App Store? Who knows? What I do know is this: I will keep trying to publish it, because maybe, just maybe, someone out there needs to blow up pixelated politicians on a tiny airplane.