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 seven 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 Pha?ton 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 mean 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.
I glanced back at my father’s illustration of the Pha?ton cabinet. He’d drawn an arrow to the umlaut over the capital E in the word PHA?TON 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 Pha?ton? All prototypes created to train/test gamers for military recruitment?
I studied both the Polybius and Pha?ton 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.
I smiled down at the list. I’d never even heard of Iron Eagle until I saw it mentioned in my father’s journal and watched the VHS copy of it I found among this things. The film had instantly become one of my go-to guilty-pleasure movies. The hero of Iron Eagle is an Air Force brat named Doug Masters who learns to pilot an F-16 by cutting class to sneak into the base flight simulator—really just an incredibly expensive videogame. Doug is a natural pilot, but only if he’s rocking out to his favorite tunes. When his dad gets shot down overseas and taken captive, Doug steals two F-16s and flies over to rescue him, with a little help from Lou Gossett Jr., his Walkman, Twisted Sister, and Queen.