In another box, I found an ancient top-loading VCR. I figured out how to hook it up to the small TV in my bedroom and started watching his old videotapes, one after the other, in whatever order I pulled them out of the box. Most of them contained old science fiction movies and TV shows, along with a lot of science programs taped off of PBS.
There were boxes filled with my father’s old clothes, too. Everything had been way too big on me, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying on every last stitch he’d owned, breathing in the smell as I stared at myself in the dusty attic mirror.
I got really excited when I found a box of old cards and letters among his things, along with a shoebox overflowing with carefully folded love notes my mother had passed him during their classroom courtship. I shamelessly read through them all, gulping down new details about the man who had sired me.
The last box I’d looked through had been the one that contained all of my father’s old role-playing game materials. It was filled with rulebooks, bags of polyhedral dice, character sheets, and a large stack of his old campaign notebooks, each one outlining the minutiae of some fictional reality intended to serve as the setting for one of his role-playing games—and each one providing a small glimpse into my father’s famously overactive imagination.
But one of those notebooks had been different from the others. It had a worn blue cover, and my father had carefully block-printed a single cryptic word in the center of it: PHAËTON.
The yellowing pages within contained a strange list of dates and names, followed by what appeared to be a series of fragmented journal entries, which outlined the details of a global conspiracy my father believed he’d uncovered—a top-secret project involving all four branches of the US military, which he claimed were working in collusion with the entertainment and videogame industries, as well as select members of the United Nations.
At first, I tried to convince myself I was reading an outline for some role-playing game scenario my father had concocted, or notes for some short story he’d never gotten around to writing. But the further I read, the more disturbed I got. It wasn’t written like a piece of fiction. It was more like a long, rambling letter written by a highly delusional mental patient—one who happened to have contributed half of my DNA.
The journal had helped shatter the idealized image I’d constructed of my young father. That was one reason I’d vowed never to look at it again.
But now, the same thing that had happened to him was happening to me. Videogames were infecting my reality too. Had my father also experienced hallucinations? Was he—was I—schizophrenic? I had to know what he’d been thinking, had to dive back into his delusions and learn how they might be linked to my own.
WHEN I FINALLY worked up the courage to open the attic door and step inside, I spotted the boxes right away. I’d restacked them in the dusty corner where I’d first found them. They were unlabeled, so it took me a few minutes of shuffling them around before I found the one filled with my father’s old role-playing games.
I put it down on the floor and began to dig through it, pulling out rulebooks and supplements for games with names like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, GURPs, Champions, Star Frontiers, and Spacemaster. Beneath those was a stack of about a dozen of my father’s old campaign notebooks. The notebook I was looking for was at the very bottom—where I’d hidden it from view over eight years earlier. I pulled it out and held it in my hands and looked at it. It was a battered blue three-subject notebook with 120 college-ruled pages. I brushed my fingertips over the name my father had written on the cover—a name that had haunted me ever since I’d first looked it up: PHAËTON.
In Greek mythology, Phaëton, aka Phaethon, is an idiot kid who guilt-trips his dad, the god Helios, into letting him take his sun chariot for a joy ride. Phaëton doesn’t even have his learner’s permit, so he promptly loses control of the sun, and Zeus has to smite him with a thunderbolt to prevent him from scorching the Earth.
I sat down cross-legged and placed the notebook on my lap, then examined its cover a bit more closely. In the bottom right corner, very small, my father had also printed Property of Xavier Lightman, followed by his home address at the time.
Seeing that address triggered another flood of memories, because it was the same tiny house on Oak Park Avenue where my Grammy and Grampy Lightman had lived. The same house where I used to visit them almost every weekend when I was growing up. I would sit on their ancient sofa, eat homemade peanut butter cookies, and listen raptly as they told stories in tandem about their lost son, my lost father. And even though these stories they told about their only child were always laced with an undercurrent of sadness and loss, I still kept coming back to hear them again and again—until they both passed away, too, within a year of each other. Since then, my mother had been forced to bear the terrible burden of being my main living link to my father.
I took a deep breath and flipped the notebook open.
On the inside of its front cover, my father had created some sort of elaborate timeline—or as he’d labeled it, a “Chronology.” This densely packed list of names and dates filled up every centimeter of the cover’s white card-stock backing, and it looked as if my father had created it over a period of months or years, using a variety of pens, pencils, and markers. (No crayons, thankfully.) He’d also circled some of the entries before connecting them to other entries elsewhere on the timeline, using an overlapping web of lines and arrows that made the whole thing look more like an elaborate flowchart than a timeline:
CHRONOLOGY
1962—Spacewar!—First videogame (after OXO and Tennis for Two)
1966—Star Trek premieres on NBC TV (airs from 9/8/66–6/3/69)
1968—2001: A Space Odyssey
1971—Computer Space—First coin-op arcade game—port of Spacewar!
1972—Star Trek Text Game—BASIC program for early home computers
1975—Interceptor—Taito—combat flight sim with 1st person perspective
1975—Panther—First tank sim? PLATO network
1976—Starship 1—earliest FPS space combat videogame—Trek inspired
1977—Star Wars is released on 5/25/77. Highest grossing movie in history. First wave of brainwashing in prep for invaders arrival?
1977—Close Encounters released. Used to program the populace not to fear their impending arrival?
1977—Atari 2600 video computer system released, placing a combat training simulator in millions of homes! Ships with the game COMBAT!
1977—Starhawk. First of many videogames inspired by Star Wars
1977—Ender’s Game short story. First instance of videogames as training simulators in SF? Published same year as Star Wars—coincidence?
1978—Space Invaders—inspired by Star Wars—first blockbuster game
1979—Tail Gunner, Asteroids, Galaxian, and Starfire all released.
1979—Star Raiders—released for Atari 400/800—ported to other systems.
1980—Empire Strikes Back released in movie theaters.
1980—Battlezone by Atari—first realistic tank simulator game
1981—March—US Army contracts Atari to convert Battlezone into “Bradley Trainer,” a tank training simulator. Army claims only one prototype was ever made, but control yoke design used in many future games including Star Wars and PHAËTON!
1981—July—First Polybius sightings at MGP in Beaverton. Mid-July.
1982—E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial—out-grosses Star Wars.
1982—The Thing, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan
1983—Return of the Jedi!
1983—Starmaster—space combat simulator for the Atari 2600
1983—Star Wars: The Arcade Game by Atari & Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator by Sega—cabinets simulate cockpit
1984—Elite—released on 9/20/84
1984—2010: The Year We Make Contact—sequel to 2001
1984—The Last Starfighter released on 7/13! Videogame tie-in canceled?
1985—Explorers, Enemy Mine
1985—Ender’s Game (novel) published—same premise as ’77 short story
1986—Iron Eagle, Aliens, Flight of the Navigator, Invaders from Mars
1987—The Hidden, Predator
1988—Alien Nation, They Live
1989—The Abyss!
1989—PHAËTON cabinet sighted at MGP on 8/8/89. Never seen again.
1989—MechWarrior released—another training sim for military use?
1990—Wing Commander—released by Origin Systems—training sim?
1991—Wing Commander II
1993—Star Wars Rebel Assault, X-Wing, Privateer, Doom
1993—The X-Files—fictional alien cover-up created to conceal real one?
1994—Star Wars: TIE Fighter, Wing Commander III, Doom II
1994—The Puppet Masters, Stargate
1995—Absolute Zero, Shockwave, Wing Commander IV
1996—Marine Doom—Doom II modified for use by the USMC
1996—Star Trek: First Contact, Independence Day
1997—Men in Black, Starship Troopers, Contact
1997—Independence Day videogame tie-in released—Playstation and PC
1997—X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter
1998—Dark City, The Faculty, Lost in Space
1998—Wing Commander Secret Ops, Star Wars Trilogy Arcade