The result was a cinematic masterpiece—although sadly, it appeared to be recognized as such by me alone. Cruz and Diehl had both vowed never to sit through another screening of it. Muffit was still always happy to curl up and watch it with me though, and our repeated viewings of the film, along with the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron album my mother insisted on playing every Christmas, had served as the inspiration for my Armada pilot call sign: IronBeagle. (When I posted in the Armada player forums, my avatar was an image of Snoopy in his World War I flying ace getup.)
I glanced back at his timeline once again. My father had drawn circles around the entries for Iron Eagle, Ender’s Game, and The Last Starfighter; then he’d added lines connecting them all to each other—and now for the first time I finally understood why. All three stories were about a kid who trained for real-life combat by playing a videogame simulation of it.
I kept flipping pages until I came to the journal’s second-to-last entry. In the center of an empty page my father had written the following question:
What if they’re using videogames to train us to fight without us even knowing it? Like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, when he made Daniel-san paint his house, sand his deck, and wax all of his cars—he was training him and he didn’t even realize it!
Wax on, wax off—but on a global scale!
The journal’s final entry was an undated, rambling, half-illegible, four-page-long essay in which my father attempted to summarize the threads of his half-formed conspiracy theory and link them together.
“The entire videogame industry is secretly under the control of the US military,” he wrote. “They may have even invented the videogame industry! WHY?”
Aside from his fictional Polybius and Pha?ton drawings, he never gave much in the way of evidence. Just his own wild theories.
“The military—or some shadow organization within the military—is tracking and profiling all of the world’s highest-scoring videogamers, using a variety of methods.” Then he detailed one example—Activision’s high-score patches.
Back in the ’80s, the game company Activision had run a popular promotion in which players who mailed in proof of a high score—in the form of a Polaroid of the high score on their TV screen—received cool embroidered patches as a reward. My father believed Activision’s patch promotion had actually been an elaborate ruse designed to obtain the names and addresses of the world’s highest-scoring gamers.
At the end of the entry, using a different-colored pen, my father had added: “Much easier to track elite gamers now via the Internet! Was this one of the reasons it was created?”
Of course, my father never actually got around to specifying exactly what he believed the military was going to recruit all of the world’s most gifted gamers to do. But his timeline and journal entries were filled with ominous references to games, films, and shows about alien visitors, both friendly and hostile: Space Invaders, E.T., The Thing, Explorers, Enemy Mine, Aliens, The Abyss, Alien Nation, They Live. …
I shook my head vigorously, as if it were possible to shake out the crazy.
Nearly two decades had elapsed since my father had first written all of this stuff in his journal, and in all that time, no secret government videogame conspiracy had ever come to light. And that was because the whole idea had been a product of my late father’s overactive—perhaps even borderline delusional—imagination. The guy had grown up wanting to be Luke Skywalker or Ender Wiggin or Alex Rogan so badly that he’d concocted this elaborate, delusional fantasy in an attempt to make it so.
And that, I told myself, was probably the exact same sort of starry-eyed wanderlust that had triggered my Glaive Fighter hallucination. Maybe the whole incident had even been inspired by the contents of the very journal I now held in my hands. Maybe the memory of my father’s conspiracy theory had been sitting up in a forgotten corner of my brain all these years, like a discarded crate of dynamite sticks sweating drops of nitroglycerine onto my subconscious.
I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, comforted by my half-assed self-diagnosis. Nothing but a mild flare-up of inherited nuttiness, brought on by my lifelong dead-dad fixation and somewhat related self-instituted overexposure to science fiction.
And I had been spending way too much time playing videogames lately—especially Armada. I played it every night and all day on the weekends. I’d even ditched school a few times to play elite missions on servers in Asia that were scheduled in the middle of the day over here. Clearly I had been overdoing it for some time now. But that was easy enough to remedy. I would just go cold turkey for a while, to clear my head.
Sitting there in the dusty attic, I made a silent vow to quit playing Armada entirely for two full weeks—starting right after the elite mission scheduled later that night, of course. Bailing on that wasn’t even really an option. Elite missions only rolled out a few times a year, and they usually revealed new plot developments in the game’s ongoing storyline.