Jeopardy! Aired a Bogus Tetris Question

A recent episode of Jeopardy! presented a gaming question to its contestants where they had to figure out which game some blocks belonged to. The answer was Tetris, an answer many people could probably guess correctly just from seeing the blocks. The issue with this question was that it wasn’t based on facts at all and instead came from a photoshopped image of a Tetris handbook which claimed that the seven blocks in the game had some interesting names.

The fact about the game to which people were supposed to respond “What is Tetris?” can be seen in the image below which was shared by the official Jeopardy! Twitter account. It says “The 7 rotatable blocks used in this video game have names like Orange Ricky, Hero & Smashboy. It also included images of the seven blocks with arrows indicating which ones of them owned those names.

The official Tetris account responded to the tweet with its own reaction that showed it wasn’t too sure about the validity of this question. Sure enough, the question made it onto the actual show, though it didn’t have the blocks in the image to give away the answer. The contestant got it right regardless even if question itself didn’t have all the facts right.

It appears that the question was based off the tweet below which showed someone who supposedly found a Twitter handbook that gave the blocks names. The names used in Jeopardy!’s tweet above appeared in that booklet among others, but it turns out the book had been photoshopped and never actually had that information at all.

It’s unclear right now whether Jeopardy! has any plans to resolve the error seeing how the person got it right anyway even if they did seem like they were caught a bit off guard by the question’s phrasing. Perhaps people will adopt the new names for the blocks now more than ever since it’s become canonical in the Jeopardy! universe.