Ready Player 1? Because The Paranoid Style is back! And we’re blowing the dust out of our game cartridges for an episode about Video Game Conspiracies. From the Killswitch to the Killer Pokémon, from Warcraft to football, from gamespiracies to propagaming… We’re even bringing back the greys, the CIA, and the Men in Black for good measure!
Thank you for listening! And please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
If you have any topic suggestions for the show or any tales to share, please email us at theparanoidstylepod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram @theparanoidstylepod or on twitter @style_paranoid.
Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/
Ready Player 1? Because The Paranoid Style is back! And we’re blowing the dust out of our game cartridges for an episode about Video Game Conspiracies. From the Killswitch to the Killer Pokémon, from Warcraft to football, from gamespiracies to propagaming… We’re even bringing back the greys, the CIA, and the Men in Black for good measure!
Thank you for listening! And please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
If you have any topic suggestions for the show or any tales to share, please email us at theparanoidstylepod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram @theparanoidstylepod or on twitter @style_paranoid.
Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/
ARK: Hey, Sister!
CCK: Hey, Sister!
ARK: Hey, Listeners! If this is your first time joining us, welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast. And if you’re a returning listener, thank you for joining us once again!
CCK: We are a sister duo that likes discussing conspiracy theories and strange mysteries.
ARK And then we fucked it all up by recording it and releasing it as a podcast and now we’re trapped. Trapped for all eternity in this endless purgatory of content creation. My name is Amanda, and I play a Night Elf Hunter in World of Warcraft.
CCK: I’m Christine. And I play a Draenei Paladin in World of Warcraft.
ARK: Please follow us on Twitter at Style_Paranoid, and make sure you reach out to us if you have any questions or topic suggestions or any tales to share. We’d love to hear from you… To kick off our season two episodes, we’re assembling our raiding party, checking our stats, and clearing space in our bags of holding. Christine, tell me what you know about video game conspi-
CCK: LEEEEEROOOOOY JENKINS!!!
ARK: and now… FOR THE ALLIANCE!
CCK: Sister, remember when we tried to finish the Stormstout Brewery 5 person dungeon in World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria with just the two of us and the giant monkey boss kept murdering us while screaming that he was going to Ook us in the Dooker?
ARK: Good times.
CCK: World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, MMORPG for short, released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. Players create a character avatar and explore the game world in third- or first-person view, exploring the scenery, fighting monsters, performing missions, and interacting with NPCs, non-player characters and other players. The game allows for group or solo play and players earn experience points to level up their characters. You can also buy and make a lot of stuff. One of my favorite world of warcraft activities was flying around collecting herbs to make potions.
ARK: LADY NERD!
CCK: Says the woman who had a giant turtle friend named Ron Perlman.
ARK: No comment.
CCK: Well, our first conspiracy concerns hidden locations within World of Warcraft, specifically a dungeon in Deadwind Pass, one that was coded but then abandoned, the Karazhan Crypts.
ARK: The crypt wasn't hidden exactly, but was blocked by a gate. In the early days of World of Warcraft, some players figured out how to access it via an in-game glitch. The simplest way to get admission to the dungeon was to die on one side of the level's walled door and resurrect on the other. Since then, Blizzard has made the gate solid and placed an invisible wall there for good measure. But not before players who made it through were able to screen-cap the scenery.
CCK: And what was in there was pretty frickin' creepy, even for a game that has a whole region called the plaguelands. Inside the crypt, is a room called the Well of the Forgotten with a large round hole at the far left. It isn't possible to see what is at the bottom, unless you jump. If you did jump, your fall would eventually be broken by a huge pile of bones.
ARK: Cheery!
CCK: It gets even cheerier as you explore the labyrinthine crypts which house corpses in various stages of decomposition. Eventually, after many dead ends, literally and figuratively, you come to a set of stairs going down to a deeper level, but they are flooded.
ARK: Here's where you should take a sip of an underwater breathing potion so you can take your time to enjoy the flooded dungeon and meet the upside-down sinners.
CCK: No thank you!
ARK: Good choice. The underground pool is criss-crossed with heavy, rusted chains and dozens of bloated and waterlogged corpses linked to the chains. So why would WoW hide this festive little location away from the general public? One theory that sounded plausible is that the inclusion of this dungeon would have caused the game to exceed a PEGI 12+ rating in Europe.
CCK: Yeesh…that sounds almost, but not quite as bad as the Goldshire Inn BDSM sex parties. Do not go into Northshire on Friday night without some VVD potions.
ARK: VVD?
CCK: Virtual venereal disease potion. Two parts pygmy suckerfish, one part eternal air and a splash of penicillin.
ARK: Now, I admit, this next theory is about a game that I have personally never played. Pokemon.
CCK: Yeah, I also have never played Pokemon, but it is so entrenched in our culture that even I know the basics of the game. The player’s goal is to collect Pocket Monsters, shortened to Pokemon. You train your Pokemon, help them evolve, and pit them in battle against other Pokemons. And the face of Pokemon is the adorable, yellow character Pikachu… which I believe is some sort of rodent. Oh! Maybe a Pika.
ARK: I know that podcasts are not a visual medium, but I am doing shocked Pikachu face right now. It’s hard to believe that something so adorable could have been responsible for mass suicides in children under the age of 13.
CCK: Ok. Now I’m doing shocked Pikachu face.
ARK: In 1996, the first installments of the Pokemon games series were released in Japan under the titles Pocket Monsters: Red and Pocket Monsters: Green. They were developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy handheld game console. You make your way around the game map visiting such places as Cinnabar Island, Diglett’s Cave and Fuchsia City, and everything is going great. But then situated on the east coast of the map, down route 10 from the Power Plant is Lavender Town.
CCK: Lavender Town includes a large tower which is said to be haunted by the ghost of a Marowak who died in battle. And as such this tower has become a sort of cemetery for the fallen Pokemon, where trainers go to mourn. That is dark.
ARK: It gets darker. You see, there is a theory that the music that played in Lavender Town in the original Japanese release of these games, includes extremely high-pitched frequencies that only young people can hear and that exposure to these frequencies caused something that came to be known as Lavender Town Syndrome. The children that had been exposed to these tones in Lavender Town, especially when using headphones, suffered from headaches, vomiting, in explicable and unusual behavior or mood swings, and in the most extreme cases, were compelled to commit suicide, especially by either hanging or jumping from a great height.
CCK: There was a theory that the frequencies used in the musical score could have employed the science, question mark, behind binaural beats which is said can affect human behavior by synching with the listener’s brainwaves.
ARK: Part of this story claims that there were over 200 suicides by children between the ages of seven and 12 due to the Lavender Town Syndrome, and that these were quietly covered up by the Japanese government, Game Freak, and Nintendo. The score for Lavender Town was remixed into a new version with lower frequencies and without the tone that possibly caused this deadly outcome, and two years later, these games were released in the United States as Pokemon: Red and Pokemon: Blue.
CCK: Despite great personal risk to ourselves, for the podcast, we did listen to the original Japanese version of the Lavender Town score, which is recklessly available on YouTube. And I must admit it is eerie… and super annoying. But, luckily, our ears are so old that we can no longer pick up on the soul-shattering screams of cursed Pikachu that surely play throughout that haunting score.
ARK: And although, I don’t believe this theory is true, it is not without a sliver of possibility… In 1997, an episode of the Pokemon cartoon translated as “Electric Soldier Porygon” was aired only once in Japan in December. The episode included a scene with visual effects of quickly alternating screens of blue and red. This scene induced epileptic seizures in several hundred Japanese viewers, including 685 children that needed to be hospitalized. Nintendo had the episode pulled from rotation, the show went on a months-long hiatus, and that episode has never aired in any country since. The incident came be known as the Pokemon Shokku or the Pokemon Shock. Pokemon causing dangerous, physical reactions in the people, mostly children, consuming the media… if it’s happened before…
CCK: Shocked Pikachu face…
****Video Game Sound Transition****
CCK: Amanda, not to bring up a sore subject, but as the outgoing champion slash incoming loser of our family Fantasy Football league this year, I thought you might be interested to learn, you’re not the only one who has experienced a curse on the gridiron.
ARK: I’ll show you cursed!
CCK: Whoa whoa whoa! Touchy touchy! I’m not talking about your crushing loss to the Ray-Ray Express, I’m talking about the curse of EA Sports’ Madden NFL game. *Curse sound effect* Our story begins in 1984, when Trip Hawkins, founder of the Electronic Arts video game company, approached John Madden to get his input and endorsement for a new video game.
ARK: John Earl Madden was born in 1936 in Austin, Minnesota. He played both high school and college football and was drafted by the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles in 1958. Unfortunately, he suffered a knee injury in his first training camp, ending his playing career without ever having had a chance to play professionally. However, he went on to coach at both the college and pro level. As the head coach of the Oakland, now Las Vegas, Raiders
CCK: RAAAAAAAAIIIDERS!
ARK: between 1969 and 1978, he helped the Raiders get to the playoffs in every season he coached except for the last one and the team won the super bowl in 1976 against the Minnesota Vikings. He was the youngest coach to reach 100 career regular-season victories and is still the coach with the most wins in Raiders history. He was humble about his achievements though and said about being a coach:
Madden: “A coach is just a guy whose best class in grammar school was recess and whose best class in high school was P.E. I never thought I was anything but a guy whose best class was P.E.”
ARK: Our apologies for that impression to John Madden who died on Dec. 28, 2021 at the age of 85, RIP.
CCK: HEY! In 1984 when Trip Hawkins approached him, Madden was working as one of the main on-air analysts for CBS Football and he would go on to have a broadcast career that lasted over 30 years. He had an extremely animated announcing style that featured exclamations like "Boom!", "Whap!", "Bang!", and "Doink!"' and his use of the telestrator, a device which allowed him to superimpose light-penned diagrams of football plays over video footage helped to popularize the telestrator technology, which is now widely used in television coverage of all sports.
ARK: Madden agreed to lend his name to EA's video game, but asked that it be made as realistic as possible. Madden envisioned a game that could be used as a teaching tool and also for possibly testing out game plays. This realism mostly jibed with what Hawkins wanted as well. Hawkins stated at one point that the whole reason he created EA was in order to develop computerized games that were like the complex paper and dice based football simulation game created by Strat-o-matic in 1968. But the road to release for the game wasn't smooth, and it almost wasn't Madden NFL at all as he was not Hawkins' first choice. First choice was America's Sweetheart and former San Francisco 49er, Joe Montana, but Montana already had an endorsement contract with Atari at the time.
CCK: Part of what delayed the development of the initial release of the EA game was Madden's insistence that the teams have the correct number of players, which is 11. EA had planned on having only 6 or 7 players, because the full 11 created a level of complexity that overwhelmed computer systems at the time. The game took over three years to develop and was finally released in 1988 as John Madden Football. A quote from Madden on the back of the game said: "Hey, if there aren't 11 players, it isn't real football."
ARK: That initial game was not made with NFL endorsement, so no real NFL team or player names were used. The game sold moderately well, hampered somewhat by the complex interface and complaints that those 11 players caused the game to run slowly.
CCK: In 1993, EA reached a deal with the NFL to use real team names for the 1994 Madden NFL release and in the '95 release, real player names were used. There have been over 30 different Madden NFL releases on multiple gaming platforms and as of 2018, EA had sold over 130 million copies to the sweet sweet tune of $7 billion US dollars.
ARK: Fascinating. But aside from the trauma caused to the pocketbooks of millions of parents forced to buy Madden games for their children, where does the curse come in?
CCK: What now? OH YES! THE CURSE! (SOUND EFFECT) Before 1998, all versions of the Madden games had John Madden himself on the cover, but starting in 1998, all releases of the games featured one of the league's top players against Madden's wishes. In 1998 that top player was Garrison Hearst, an All-American during his college years and a top draft pick in the NFL, Hearst was playing for the San Francisco 49er's in '98 and having a banner year. His total rushing yards placed him third in the NFL and he set a then franchise record for rushing yards in a season. He also had the longest running play in the NFL that same season, running 96 yards for a game-winning touchdown in overtime on Opening Day versus the New York Jets. That play was later featured on NFL Films as one of the best two running plays in NFL history.
ARK: Okay…so what happened.
CCK: The Madden Curse! In the Divisional Playoffs against the Atlanta Falcons, on the first play from scrimmage, Hearst broke his ankle when his foot was caught in the Georgia Dome turf. The break was so bad, doctors said he might not play again, and then things got worse. Hearst suffered complications following surgery on the ankle which choked off the blood supply in the area, leading to Avascular Necrosis, which caused the talus bone in his foot to die.
ARK: Doink!
CCK: He did manage to come back to football two years later after extensive rehab and was named the NFL Comeback Player of the Year in 2001. But the injury was severe enough to get the curse ball rolling and since then, many of the players who have appeared on Madden NFL game have sustained an injury following their cover shots. Daunte Culpepper, a quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings suffered a knee injury after his appearance on Madden 2002 and was never the same. Rob Gronkowski, at the time a tight end for the New England Patriots appeared on the cover of Madden 17 and that same year had a hamstring injury, a pulmonary contusion and a herniated disk.
ARK: Now that’s a Gronking to Remember! Which coincidentally is the title of book 1 in the Rob Gronkowski Erotica Series by Lacey Noonan. Or maybe, the real curse is just football. John Madden himself said, "Football is my life. It’s something I say proudly. But, it’s complicated." And part of that complication is the extreme risk of injury that football players face.
CCK: An analysis of all injuries during the 2015 NFL season showed that among the 1495 players who were active for all 16 regular season games, 688 of them, 46%, experienced 882 separate injuries that caused them to miss at least 1 game. So really your chances of being cursed with an injury is pretty close to 50/50 in any given year, whether or not you appear on the cover of Madden NFL.
ARK: This is summed up pretty well by running back Shaun Alexander, who was featured on the cover of Madden NFL 07 and said "Do you want to be hurt and on the cover, or just hurt?"
ARK: This next theory is also about a game that comes with a curse.
CCK: Like eye strain and carpal tunnel syndrome?
ARK: No. This is the Berzerk High Score Devil Murder!
CCK: oh, yeah. That’s sounds as bad as if not worse than carpal tunnel…
ARK: To begin this story, we must head back to the heady days of January 1981.
CCK: Oh, boy.
ARK: The Iran hostage crisis ended 25 minutes after Jimmy Carter’s presidential term had ended. Ronald Regan was sworn in as the 40th president of the United States. The Oakland Raiders became the first wild card team to win a Super Bowl.
CCK: RAAAAAAIDERS!!!
ARK: And Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love” was on endless repeat of the top 40 music charts. What were we talking about again?
CCK: It was 1981. And Berzerk was an Atari maze game where you had to make your way through the maze, while also being shot at by killer robots. Touch the walls of the maze, death. Get shot by a robot, death. Touch a robot, instant death. But there was another element to this game that lends itself to the creepy legends that popped up around it. Evil Otto. Evil Otto is a smiley face that shows up when a player is taking too long on a maze. Evil Otto cannot be killed, can move through the walls of the maze and if he touches you, you die. In the game.
ARK: But, what if the curse of Evil Otto had an impact IRL (in real life).
CCK: Yeah, I got it.
ARK: A small, independent video game magazine published a story about a young man that had dropped dead while playing Berzerk. According to this magazine, the 19-year-old died of a heart attack after playing the game for hours, and that his score at the time of his demise was 16,660… the number of the beast! Well, I mean it contains the number of the beast.
CCK: From the Book of Revelation: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”
ARK: My main source of research for this story an essay written by historical researcher, Cat DeSpira, in which she includes a quote from Berzerk champion, Grant Theinemann, quote: “There is no way possible to play hours on a game of Berzerk on one quarter and only get 16K.”
CCK: But perhaps more importantly she also points out that everything about this story is a fabrication. The young man written about in this article did not die while playing Berzerk or any video game. He died in a car accident. And the magazine that published this story went belly-up after just two issues.
ARK: It seems that this was an attempt to grow the myth around the Berzerk curse, which got started with a real death that did really have an eerie connection to the game Berzerk. Let’s go back to the thrilling days of April 1982…
CCK: NOPE.
ARK: Ok. Fine. Mood killer… In April of 1982 in Calumet City, IL, a young man named Peter Bukowski arrived at his local arcade, Friar Tuck’s Game Room. According to witnesses at the scene, Bukowski played a few games of Berzerk, even managing to enter his name a couple of times in the top ten high score board. He was about to put another quarter in the game when he collapsed.
CCK: A Friar Tuck employee performed CPR on Bukowski until the ambulance arrived, but the young man was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. It was discovered that he had an undiagnosed heart condition, Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia or ARVD. And the autopsy had determined that he may have even had a mild heart-attack just a few weeks before his death. If Berzerk and Evil Otto had been implicated in the deaths of two young men from heart attacks, I would definitely begin to question the amount of stress a game like that could put on the human heart. But while Peter Bukowski’s death was tragic, it does not sound like a curse.
ARK: True. But, Evil Otto’s killing spree is not done yet… On March 20th, 1988, once again in Calumet City, IL, and strangely enough, once again at Friar Tuck’s Game Room, Edward Clark, Jr., 17 years old, entered the arcade with a few friends. After playing a few other games, Clark stepped up to the Berzerk cabinet. There was no one around, but there were two quarters leaned against the glass of the game.
CCK: The international symbol for “I got next game.”.
ARK: Clark took one of those quarters and began his game of Berzerk. Within a few seconds, another young man stepped out from behind another row of games and started yelling at Clark that those were his quarters. That young man was Pedro Roberts, just 16 years old. Roberts continued to yell threats at Clark about getting off the game and returning the quarter. Clark exchanged some shouts back, but ultimately refused to move from the machine. It was then that one of Clark’s friends stepped up to Roberts and those two boys ended up getting into a shouting match. A few punches were exchanged. An employee stepped in, broke up the fight and kicked Roberts out. He intended to kick Clarke and his friends out too, but made them wait a few minutes in order to keep the fight from escalating outside. Ten minutes later, Clark and his friends were also asked to leave Friar Tuck’s and were advised to walk in the opposite direction that Roberts had left in. They did not take this advice. Roberts was hiding in an alleyway at the edge of the arcade’s parking lot waiting for Clark and his friends to walk by. When they did Roberts ran out and stabbed Clark in the chest. Clark initially did not think he was that badly injured but collapsed just moments later. He was rushed to the hospital and was pronounced dead shortly after arriving. Edward Clark, Jr. died as a result of a stab wound to the heart. Pedro Roberts was tried and sentenced to prison for 11 years, of which he served three, it was ruled that Roberts had stabbed Clark in self-defense.
CCK: Is it just me or should we actually be looking into a Friar Tuck’s Game Room curse?! Or maybe that specific Berzerk cabinet was cursed.
ARK: Yes! You make an excellent point. Berzerk is a game that we’ve played. I believe we had it for the Atari 2600. And if I recall I was terrible at that game. And the worst part was always when Evil Otto’s glided onto the screen and would just head straight towards you, ceaselessly, undeviating… smiling death.
****VIDEO GAME NOISE TRANSITION****
CCK: Karviná is a city with around 50,000 inhabitants in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. It is an industrial city, known as one of the main coal mining centers in the country, though coal production has been greatly reduced as alternative energy sources replace the use of coal. And it may have also been, possibly, or not, the headquarters for the Karvina Corporation gaming company.
ARK: May have been, possibly, or not?
CCK: Exactly. The following gamespiracy story is either 100% true or partially true or totally made up!
ARK: Like 99% of our content here at The Paranoid Style Podcast.
CCK: The majority of this information is from a nicely summarized 2017 NorthAtlanticBlog post on WordPress.
ARK: In 1989, the Karvina Corporation allegedly released 5000 copies of a PC based game called Killswitch. It was a monochrome game with grey and white shapes on a black background, set to groovy Czech folk songs. Players could be one of two avatars, an invisible demon, named Ghast, with the ability to breath fire or cool steam, who was basically unplayable on account of the invisible part, or a human woman named Porto, who could grow bigger or smaller.
CCK: The game starts when Porto wakes up in a coal mine and attempts to make it to the surface, fighting her way past coal-golems, un-dead mining co-workers, demons like the invisible Ghast and super evil inspectors from the Sovatik Corporation, who were clad in red robes, the only color in the game.
ARK: Players needed to collect iron axes in order to decipher a code, the solution to which was allegedly posted online by a user named, Port881 who was also, the person who figured out that in order to get to the final level of the game, Porto had to eat the coal to maintain a normal body size and escape the mine.
CCK: Now here comes the best part if you want to ensure that no one will know for sure if the game really ever existed. When you emerge as Porto from the final tunnel, the screen went white and the game deleted itself entirely.
ARK: Great sales technique! Karvina was said to have released the following statement in answer to the uproar over the self-deleting files:
“Killswitch was designed to be a unique playing experience: like reality, it is unrepeatable, unretrievable, and illogical. One might even say ineffable. Death is final; death is complete. The fates of Porto and her beloved Ghast are as unknowable as our own. It is the desire of the Karvina Corporation that this be so, and we ask our customers to respect that desire. Rest assured Karvina will continue to provide the highest quality of games to the West, and that Killswitch is merely one among our many wonders.”
CCK: There is no evidence that Karvina ever published any other wonder. And since Ghast is as far as anyone knew, an invisible demon like any of the other demons in the game who attacked Porto, referring to him as "Porto's Beloved" only amped up the confusion and desire to find additional copies of the game.
ARK: In 2005, Yamamoto Ryuichi (reo-ichi), a Tokyo-based Japanese businessman, supposedly paid $733,000 for a copy of Killswitch on auction at ebay. Yamamoto planned to videotape his progress as he played Killswitch and publish it to YouTube, as it was widely assumed that this was the final copy of the game. The only video that was ever uploaded was a not quite 2 second clip of Yamamoto sitting at his computer, crying, with the game at the avatar selection screen.
CCK: There is a profile for the Karvina Corp on YouTube, created in 2012, with the description: "Providing you with the best entertainment since 1989!" It features four videos, possibly of Killswitch game play and the About section states: We do not provide answers under any circumstances, however, if you must ask, you can contact one of our many employees on Twitter at KarvinaCorp. The Twitter profile still exists but has not had a post since 2014. The Paranoid Style twitter has followed that account and will let you know if any additional posts are made.
****VIDEO GAME NOISE TRANSITION****
ARK: On August 20th, 2013, a third-person tactical game was released by 2K Marin, called The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. The game takes place in Cold War era United States, and you play as Special Agent William Carter, a new recruit to a top-secret government unit known as The Bureau.
CCK: As an agent of the mysterious Bureau, your objective is to overcome an enemy threat while simultaneously taking steps to coverup said threat from the public. The enemy in this case are extraterrestrial beings known as The Outsiders. The low-level outsiders are your standard, big-headed, almond-eyed, spindly-bodied greys. And as you defeat your enemies, you confiscate, reverse engineer, and use their own technology and weapons against them.
ARK: Sister, if you recall all the way back to 2021, in our Titanic episode, we talked about the concept of Predictive Programming.
CCK: Yes. The theory that by showing people certain scenarios, usually within popular entertainment, like television or movies, it can condition the masses to be more accepting of future planned events.
ARK: There were some people that thought XCOM Declassified might be a way to climatize the public to the inevitable confirmation that we do have galactic neighbors, and that maybe they have been visiting us all along. And the biggest piece of evidence they have to back-up this theory is the person that was hired to handle the public relations for the release of the game. Nick Pope, the former head of the British Ministry of Defense’s UFO desk, which was shut down officially on December 1, 2009, after 50 years of being an official reporting mechanism for public sightings of UFOs.
CCK: The choice does seem odd, but then again, lots of former government bureaucrats look into getting into the private sector. Although, the various statements that Pope made while promoting the game certainly didn’t make him NOT seem like a government flack. During one interview with MSN, Pope said that while Britain did not have a specific war plan in place in the event of an alien invasion, they had the weaponry and aircraft necessary in order to defend itself. And when asked if aliens could be a security threat, Pope said, quote:
POPE: "My colleagues and I said, whatever our official position - the one we gave to the public, media or parliament, - privately, where five per cent of UFO sightings remained unexplained, at the very least there has to be a potential threat."
ARK: So, maybe Pope was no longer working for the British government to collect people’s UFO sightings, but some habits are hard to kick, and as part of the promotion leading up to the release of the game, Pope himself released a YouTube video requesting that people share their UFO stories on social media using the hashtag Erase the Truth.
CCK: I could see video games being used as a desensitizing technique. Get people used to shooting aliens in the face, in case one day they are called upon to do just that. And it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility, afterall, it’s a technique that has been used before. In 2002, the United States Army developed and published “America’s Army” the most successful government-based video game of all time. The game’s intention was to recruit prospective soldiers by giving people a sanitized glimpse into the life of a soldier. It’s propaganda in game form… propagaming, if you will.
ARK: I WILL allow it. But, what if unlike “America’s Army”, XCOM was not trying to entice their audience into a future of killing aliens, but rather trying to lessen the blow of revelations of past events. For instance, let’s just say that aliens had in fact crash landed somewhere here on earth and let’s just say that the powers that be decided that information needed to be kept secret from the public. And so various government bureaus, much like the one in the game, took steps they deemed necessary to hide this fact. Then you play the game, as one of these agents and you come to find out that the only way to win the game is, in fact, to take steps to make sure that the knowledge of alien visitation on earth is kept secret. By stepping into the digitally rendered shoes of a government agent facing this exact decision, you can come to understand why they might make certain choices.
CCK: Like an empathy gym.
ARK: This is such a deep cut, inside, joke that not even I got it… and I wrote it! But, back to XCOM and how this game could come to act as an empathy gym or why. Well, the game’s release, after many long and mysterious delays, was eventually slated for the same week in which several Area 51 documents were finally declassified by the federal government. It was in these documents that the CIA publicly acknowledged the existence of Area 51 for the very first time.
CCK: Although, anyone expecting that FOIA request to produce XCOM levels of disclosure, was probably disappointed, as it mainly detailed the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.
ARK: But, that document was over 400 pages, maybe there were other breadcrumbs to be found within it… so, actually, maybe XCOM’s true purpose was to muddy the waters a bit. Make it so in that week back in 2013, if one were to go looking for information about a government bureau’s cover-up of alien presence on earth and all they find is marketing material for a middling strategy shooter game instead of the declassified documents acknowledging the existence of Area 51.
ARK: And finally, a video game conspiracy episode would not be complete without talking about our next topic. Undeniably the most famous and intriguing of all video game legends, that of Polybius. So, once again, let’s hop into our time machines and venture back to 1981.
CCK: Not again.
ARK: To Portland, Oregon, where it was said that in a few select arcades, some non-assuming cabinets showed up for a game called, Polybius. The game was inexplicably popular, some might say addictive, resulting in long lines for the game and even fights breaking out over who got to play next. It’s hard to imagine why so many people were interested in playing the game, since players allegedly suffered from migraines, seizures, night terrors, insomnia, hallucinations, and even amnesia, as a result of game play. And then there’s the matter of the men in black.
CCK: Not those freaking weirdoes again.
ARK: The legend claims that the machines would be checked on periodically by men in black suits. But, those men did not appear to be emptying the machines of their coins, but rather collecting data about the machine’s use. It was therefore theorized that this game was part of a government run experiment. Something like MK Ultra 2.0, a brain-washing, mind-controlling, Manchurian Pac-Man for the modern 80’s teenager.
CCK: This game does have a lot of the touchstones that scream “This is a government plot.”. For instance, the name of the game itself. Polybius was the name of a Greek historian. In addition to his work, The Histories, which covered the period of 264 through 146 BCE, specifically the Roman Empire’s rise to power, he is also credited for his analysis of the separation of powers in government. But back to the name. Polybius. Poly meaning “many” and bios meaning “life”… many lives, sums up the experience of playing a video game quite nicely. And there’s the fact that Polybius was born in Arcadia. Many Lives… from Arcadia. There is something else that Polybius is credited for that also lends itself very well to the idea of a cryptic game that may be hiding some other mystery within. The Polybius square. This is a simple cypher where letters of the alphabet are arranged top to bottom in a 5x5 square, with five numbers aligned outside the top and left side of the square. By cross-referencing the numbers along the grid, a letter can be deduced.
ARK: There are other strange name associations with the Polybius game that comes from what is purported to be the actual title screen from the game itself, more on this later… The name is of the alleged game developer. Sinnesloschen (zin-lotion). This is kind of a German word. Rather, it’s a grammatically incorrect compound word made of “sinne” meaning senses and “loschen” meaning “to erase”. To erase senses… There have never been any other games released by Sinnesloschen, and in fact, there has never been any proof that this company every actually existed. But, as we learned from MK Ultra and the totally fabricated Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the US government is not unschooled when it comes to cover stories.
CCK: There has never been any physical evidence of this game having existed. But, courtesy of the internet, there are two pictures that some people find convincing, and most people accept as being at least canon to the urban legend. One is a dark, grainy, black and white photo of the alleged Polybius cabinet. The photo itself is so low resolution, that it’s nearly impossible to really say for sure that it’s a photoshop job, but it could just as easily be a real picture of a cabinet that was custom-made by an enthusiast of the Polybius tale. And the second is that title card you mentioned.
ARK: Yes, this picture has been around as long as the legend of Polybius itself. The picture shows what is supposed to be a screenshot of the title screen of the game. It’s a simple, black background, with the Polybius logo in turquoise bubble letters, the Sinneloschen copyright, 1981, and the game credits. It looks pretty convincing for the games of the time, with the colors and fonts used, but there’s still one huge glaring issue. If someone owned the ROM from which they took this screenshot, then why not show the gameplay.
CCK: There’s no physical evidence. If the machines ever existed then perhaps they were destroyed when they were removed from the arcades after a month. There’s no anecdotal evidence, although, if amnesia was a side-effect of playing the game, I suppose it’s not hard to imagine why there haven’t been more first-hand accounts of playing the game in the 80’s. So, where does the story even come from?
ARK: The earliest recorded version we have of this story comes from 1998, from an online arcade game resource, CoinOp.ORG. This is the first time we get the story about a very limited release of the game and the reports of kids falling ill after playing it. It is also the first time that we hear mention that this game could be some sort of CIA developed mind control experiment. It is believed that the person that wrote this page is the person that owns coinop.org, Kurt Koller, although, Koller has never confirmed either way whether these rumors were true or of his own design. But, in 2003, the gaming magazine, GamePro, picked up the story in an article called “Secrets and Lies”; they only came to an “inconclusive” verdict about Polybius.
CCK: On the CoinOp.org page comments, there were comments left by username Steven Roach. Roach claimed to be part of the game’s development. Per Roach: “We were approached around 1980 by a Southern American company that shall remain nameless for legal purposes to develop an idea they had for producing an Arcade Game with a puzzle element that centered around a new approach to Video Game Graphics.” Roach also goes onto claim their game would receive a temporary, limited release, but then shortly afterwards they were told the game was being pulled immediately and indefinitely after a 13-year-old boy in the Lloyd district of Oregon, suffered an Epileptic seizure while playing the game. Also, per Roach, quote: “As far as I'm aware, no ROM's or otherwise exist unless they remain in the bowels of the company that distributed it.”.
ARK: But, Steven Roach’s story was pretty quickly debunked. And I believe the person claiming to be Roach was eventually tracked down and admitted that his entire story was made-up. Just his little attempt to add to the legend. Speaking of which… are there any non-recorded versions of this story? A true urban legend origin? Some people think there might be. According to author, Brian Dunning, there was a case of a young man in Beaverton, Oregon, developing a sudden migraine while he was playing Tempest with some friends. And in another area of Portland on the same day, another man was taken ill after 28 hours playing Asteroids in an attempt to break a world record. As for those mysterious men in black. Dunning also states that there were FBI agents monitoring arcades in the area during this period of time. And as part of their surveillance, they were sometimes even coming into the arcade to check cabinets for signs of tampering. This was all leading up to an FBI raid just a few days later. The raids occurred in arcades where the owners were suspected of using machines for gambling. It’s easy to see how these stories can become conflated into a tale in which arcade games that are being monitored by the FBI are making kids sick.
CCK: Ironically, one of the things that Polybius the Greek historian was notable for was his belief that one should not report or write about an event unless they were a eyewitness to the event or have testimony from an eyewitness. But this legend, whether based on misconstrued events surrounding Oregon arcades at the time or purely just an invention by Kurt Koller to promote his website, has taken on a life of its own. It has appeared as an easter egg in The Simpsons, and other television shows, A Nine Inch Nail music video, and most recently in Disney Plus series Loki, and it has been the subject matter for several documentaries, investigations, and podcasts.
ARK: Not to mention the many, many times it has become an actual, playable game, free of mind control… probably. Developers Rogue Synapse created and distributed a game that attempted to recreate the gameplay as it was described in the legend, complete with subliminal messages. And a version was released by Llamasoft for the Playstation 4 in 2016.
CCK: Ok, you walk into a dank, dark arcade and you make your way all the way to the back, and there it is. A plain black cabinet, with a joystick and a single red button, and there on the marquee it says, POLYBIUS. And what do you know? There’s even a quarter waiting for you on the glass… do you play it and risk total mental annihilation?
ARK: Honestly, yes. I’m not that worried. I have always been so terrible at cabinet arcade games that I don’t think I’ll be able to play long enough to worry about any long-lasting brain washing effects.
CCK: Polybius wins… flawless victory… fatality.