1999—Star Wars: Episode I
1999—Galaxy Quest
The release of the first Star Wars film in 1977 seemed to be the timeline’s focal point. My father had circled that entry several times and drawn a series of arrows linking it to at least a dozen other items further down the timeline—including a bunch of videogames that the Star Wars franchise had helped inspire, like Space Invaders, Starhawk, Elite, and Wing Commander.
Armada wasn’t listed on my father’s timeline, of course—nor was any other game released in the past eighteen years. His final entry was the one noting the release of Galaxy Quest in 1999. I was born a few months later, and by the time I reached my first birthday, my poor father was already fertilizing daffodils at the local cemetery.
I spent a few more minutes puzzling over the timeline before turning my attention to the notebook’s first page, which contained a pencil drawing of an old-school coin-operated arcade game—one I didn’t recognize. Its control panel featured a single joystick and one unlabeled white button, and its cabinet was entirely black, with no side art or other markings anywhere on it, save for the game’s strange title, which was printed in all capital green letters across its jet black marquee: POLYBIUS.
Below his drawing of the game, my father had made the following notations:
• No copyright or manufacturer info anywhere on game cabinet.
• Reportedly only seen for 1–2 weeks in July 1981 at MGP.
• Gameplay was similar to Tempest. Vector graphics. Ten levels?
• Higher levels caused players to have seizures, hallucinations, and nightmares. In some cases, subject committed murder and/or suicide.
• “Men in Black” would download scores from the game each night.
• Possible early military prototype created to train gamers for war?
• Created by same covert op behind Bradley Trainer?
Back when I’d first discovered the journal, I’d done a quick Internet search and learned that Polybius was an urban legend that had been circulating on the Internet for decades. It was the title of a strange videogame that only appeared in one Portland arcade during the summer of 1981. According to the story, the game drove several kids who played it insane; then the machine mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again. In some versions of the story, “Men in Black” were also seen visiting the arcade after closing time, to open up the Polybius machine and download the high scores from its data banks.
But according to the Internet, the Polybius urban legend had already been debunked. Its origins had been traced back to an incident in the summer of 1981, at a now-defunct arcade right here in Beaverton called the Malibu Grand Prix. Some kid collapsed from exhaustion after an Asteroids high score attempt and got taken away in an ambulance. Accounts of this incident were apparently conflated with another rumor circulating in the arcades at that time, about how the Atari arcade game Tempest caused some of the kids who played it to have epileptic seizures—which was actually true.
The Men in Black part of the urban legend also appeared to have roots in reality. In the early ’80s, there had been an ongoing federal investigation into illegal gambling at various Portland-area arcades, and so during that time there really had been FBI agents spotted around local game rooms after closing time, opening up game machines—but this was to check for gambling devices, not to monitor gamers’ high scores.
Of course, none of this information had come to light yet when my father had drawn his sketch of the Polybius game in his notebook sometime in the early ’90s. Back then, Polybius would’ve just been a local urban legend—circulating around the very arcade where it had been born, Malibu Grand Prix. The same arcade my father had frequented when he was growing up.
On the second page of the notebook my father had drawn an illustration of another fictional arcade game, called Phaëton. My father’s sketch of its cabinet was far more elaborate and detailed than his sketch of Polybius—perhaps because he claimed to have seen the game in person. Across the top of the page he’d written: “I saw this game with my own eyes on 8-9-1989 at Malibu Grand Prix in Beaverton, Oregon.”
Then he’d signed his name.
According to his drawing, Phaëton had a sit-down cockpit-style game cabinet, which was sort of capsule shaped, like a TRON light cycle, with fake laser cannons built into each side of it, making the game itself look like a starship. Weirdest of all, it had doors. According to my father’s sketch, the cabinet had two clamshell-shaped hatches made of tinted plexiglass, one on either side of the cockpit seat, which opened straight up, like the doors on a Lamborghini, and sealed you inside while you played the game. He’d also drawn a schematic of its control panel, which featured a four-trigger flight yoke, buttons mounted on each armrest, and another bank of switches on the cockpit ceiling. To me, it looked more like a flight simulator than a videogame. The entire cabinet was black, except for the game’s title—printed in stylized white letters across its side: PHAËTON.
I hadn’t been able to find any mention of a videogame by that name when I’d tried looking it up on the Internet eight years ago. I took out my phone and did another quick search on it. Still, nothing. According to the Internet, there had never been a videogame called Phaëton released anywhere, for any platform. That name had been appropriated for lots of other things, including cars and comic book characters. But there had never been an arcade game released with that title. Which meant the whole thing was probably a figment of my father’s imagination—just like the Glaive Fighter I’d seen just half an hour ago was a figment of mine.
I glanced back at my father’s illustration of the Phaëton cabinet. He’d drawn an arrow to the umlaut over the capital E in the word PHAËTON printed on its side. Next to the arrow he wrote: “Umlaut conceals hidden data port plug for downloading scores!”
As with his Polybius drawing, he’d made several bulleted notations down below—an apparent list of “facts” about the fictional game:
• Only seen at MGP on 8-9-1989—removed and never seen again.
• No copyright or manufacturer information anywhere. Plain black game cabinet—just like the eyewitness descriptions of Polybius.
• First-person space combat simulator—gameplay similar to Battlezone and Tail Gunner 2. Color vector graphics.
• “Men in Black” arrived at closing time and took game away in a black cargo van—also very similar to Polybius stories.
• Link between Bradley Trainer and Polybius and Phaëton? All prototypes created to train/test gamers for military recruitment?
I studied both the Polybius and Phaëton illustration for several more minutes. Then I flipped ahead to the journal entry describing Battlezone.
1981—US Army contracts Atari to convert Battlezone into “Bradley Trainer,” a training simulator for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It was unveiled at a worldwide TRADOC conference in March 1981. After that, Atari claims project was “abandoned” and only one prototype was ever produced. But the new six-axis controller Atari created for Bradley Trainer was used in many of their upcoming games, including Star Wars.
This part of my father’s conspiracy theory, at least, was true. From what I’d read online, a group of “US Army consultants” really had paid Atari to rework Battlezone into a training simulator for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the United States Army really had pursued the idea of using videogames to train real soldiers, as early as 1980. As my father had also noted on his strange timeline, the Marine Corps had run a similar operation back in 1996, when they’d modified the groundbreaking first-person shooter Doom II and used it to train soldiers for real combat.
If he’d lived to see it, my father’s timeline probably would have also listed the release of America’s Army in 2002, a free-to-play videogame that had been one of the US Army’s most valuable recruiting tools for over a decade now. An army recruiter had even let us spend a half hour playing it at school, just after we’d finished taking the mandatory ASVAB test—the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. I remembered thinking it was pretty weird that we were being encouraged to play a videogame simulation of warfare, right after being tested on our aptitude for it.
I continued to flip through the faded pages of my father’s notebook, marveling at the time and energy he’d spent researching and puzzling over the details of the elaborate conspiracy he’d believed he was uncovering. Lists of names, dates, movie titles, and half-formed theories were scribbled across every page. But, I realized now, my ten-year-old self had been too hasty in dismissing it as gibberish. There was at least a hint of method lurking behind his seeming madness.
It looked as though the existence of Bradley Trainer and Marine Doom were two of the key pieces of “evidence” behind his vague, half-formed conspiracy theory, along with the classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game, and two old movies, The Last Starfighter and Iron Eagle. My father had highlighted the release dates of these items on his timeline, and later on in the notebook he’d devoted several pages to describing and dissecting their storylines—as if they held crucial clues about the grand mystery he was trying to solve.