Game show Jeopardy! falls for online fake news

ByCraig Haley

Long running game show Jeopardy! has fallen foul to some Internet fake news relating to the popular block building game Tetris this week.

Many will know Tetris from the famous handheld games console Gameboy, but the game has appeared on a number of platforms throughout the years.

What happened?

Back in February 2019, Twitter user “vecc hitto” posted a series of photos (below) of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Tetris instruction manual – a manual that no doubt dates back a number of decades now.

On one of the manual’s pages was a page claiming that the seven Tetris blocks each had their own name. Orange Ricky. Blue Ricky. Cleveland Z. Rhode Island Z. Hero. Teewee and finally Smashboy.

Only that isn’t true. And that page of the manual had actually been spoofed, presumably by the Twitter user who posted it, vecc hitto.


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So believable was the spoof page, however, that many other Twitter users took it at face value and began retweeting the obscure “fact”. Soon after that, other online memes began popping up online, all unwittingly promoting the hoax.

The whole episode was certain to be nothing more than your average Internet hoax, but fast forward several months when a researcher for the Jeopardy! gameshow stumbled onto one of the memes and – seemingly without proper fact checking – included the fake fact as one of the questions host Alex Trebeck was to read out in an episode of the show.

And read it out he did, asking the three contestants “the 7 rotatable blocks used in this video game have names like orange ricky, hero and smashboy”.


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Funnily enough, one of the contestants actually did answer the question correctly, despite the question itself being fake. Possibly the contestant worked out the answer from the “rotatable blocks” portion of the question, or perhaps she too saw the fake claim online as well. We may never know.

To confirm, the Tetris blocks do not have any official names. Since the hoax went viral, other Twitter users have dug out their own NES Tetris manuals and discovered that the page about the block’s names doesn’t really exist.

Twitter user “vecc hitto” has since changed their Twitter name to “vecc ‘trebek fooler’ hitto”.

Meanwhile the rest of us are asking if even Jeopardy! is falling for online fake news, is there really any hope left?

See Alex Trebek asking the flawed Tetris question below.