Armada Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 December of 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:
    â€¢No copyright or manufacturer info anywhere on game cabinet.
    â€¢Reportedly only seen for 1-2 weeks in July 1981 at MGP.
    â€¢Gameplay was similar to Tempest. Vector graphics. Ten levels?
    â€¢Higher levels caused players to have seizures, hallucinations, and nightmares. In some cases, subject committed murder and/or suicide.
    â€¢â€œMen in Black” would download scores from the game each night.
    â€¢Possible early military prototype created to train gamers for war?
    â€¢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 with his own eyes. 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,