Operation Epic Furious: Video Game Satire on Trump and the War in Iran

On March 6, 2025, the official White House account published a video on its social media channels that mixed real footage of bombings in Iran with gameplay sequences from the popular video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This confirmed a communication strategy that has tragically transformed war into a video game, where weapons can be used remotely as if wielding a joypad from the comfort of one's couch.

That video became the unstated premise for Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, the satirical video game created by the anonymous art collective Secret Handshake. It was installed on May 11, 2026, at the DC War Memorial in Washington in the form of three fully functional arcade cabinets and simultaneously made available for free as a browser version on epicfurious.com. Fourteen thousand games were played in the first hours of launch, according to the Washington Post, a number that is surely destined to increase in the coming days, partly due to articles like ours that have chosen to cover it.

Where to Begin

The name obviously spoofs Operation Epic Fury, the name of the joint US-Israeli military offensive against Iran, announced by President Trump on February 28, 2025, with the goal of neutralizing Iranian missile and naval infrastructure and long stalled in an attempt to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic.

The chosen aesthetic is that of an 8-bit Japanese JRPG: pixelated sprites, explorable maps that open to new locations, dialogue in text windows, mono music, side quests galore. The player takes control of the chief-in-commander himself, with the journey beginning none other than from the White House, where the first available choice leaves no room for interpretation. One must choose whether to order a Diet Coke or begin the invasion of Iran. From there, the game opens up to an architecture of objectives that, as a whole, constitutes a fairly precise map of the geopolitical and communicative priorities of the current American administration, which naturally includes its main exponents.

Laughing to Keep from Crying

The various objectives scattered throughout the levels will see Trump intent on collecting oil barrels, accumulating posts on Truth, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. All this while conversing here and there with key figures in the president's circle, such as War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President J. D. Vance, and many others, also initiating battles in RPG style. In one of the first, a tragicomic counterpoint to a more dramatic reality, players find themselves facing Iranian schoolgirls, recalling the brutal bombing of the school that cost the lives of over 150 children.

It's easy to think that Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell is a simple parody, for some even in bad taste, but in reality, we are faced with something much more lucid and unsettling. The decisions the player makes are, in fact, those that have found actual resonance in reality, however paradoxical this may seem. That same reality has now largely surpassed satire itself, transforming the fate of millions of people into a large-scale video game, where life and death are decided with a click or a post on the web.