Oregon.â
Then heâd 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 fatherâs 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. Heâd 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 gameâs titleâprinted in stylized white letters across its side: PHAÃTON.
I hadnât been able to find any mention of a videogame by that name when Iâd 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 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 mean the whole thing was probably a figment of my fatherâs imaginationâjust like the Glaive Fighter Iâd seen just half an hour ago.
I glanced back at my fatherâs illustration of the Phaëton cabinet. Heâd drawn an arrow to the umlaut over the capital E in the word PHAÃTON printed on its side. Next to the arrow he wrote: âUmlaut conceals hidden data port plug for downloading scores!â
As with his Polybius drawing, heâd made several bulleted notations down belowâan apparent list of âfactsâ about the fictional game:
â¢Only seen at MGP on 8-9-1989âremoved and never seen again.
â¢No copyright or manufacturer information anywhere. Plain black game cabinetâjust like the eyewitness descriptions of Polybius.
â¢First-person space combat simulatorâgameplay similar to Battlezone and Tail Gunner 2. Color vector graphics.
â¢âMen in Blackâ arrived at closing time and took game away in a black cargo vanâalso very similar to Polybius stories.
â¢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.
1981âUS Army contracts Atari to convert Battlezone into âBradley Trainer,â 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 âabandonedâ 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 fatherâs conspiracy theory, at least, was true. From what Iâd read online, a group of âUS Army consultantsâ 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 theyâd modified the groundbreaking first-person shooter Doom II and used it to train soldiers for real combat.
If heâd lived to see it, my fatherâs timeline probably would have also listed the release of Americaâs Army in 2002, a free-to-play videogame that had been one