Speaker 1: Hey guys, Steve here, you are listening to one of
Speaker 1: our original twenty six episodes. If you listen to any
Speaker 1: of our new episodes, you're gonna notice that we're sounding
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Speaker 1: remastered because they had a really annoying hum. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean a huge thanks to listener James for doing almost
Speaker 1: all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice
Speaker 1: if you had listened to what we're calling the last
Speaker 1: twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the
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Speaker 1: little different today than we do in what you're about
Speaker 1: to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Thinking Sideways. I don't
Speaker 1: under say you never know the story is of things
Speaker 1: we simply don't know the answer too. Well. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and thanks for joining us again. And this is Thinking
Speaker 1: Sideways the podcast, and I am Steve, as always joined
Speaker 1: by and this week we're going to take on yet
Speaker 1: another thing that I don't quite understand. Yeah, well this
Speaker 1: one I don't quite understand. Because ladies and gentlemen we
Speaker 1: haven't quite gone in this territory before, but we're gonna
Speaker 1: do it anyway. Is what a lot of people believe
Speaker 1: to be an urban myth? Yeah, and it's hot. Well
Speaker 1: this one when you when and we'll get into the
Speaker 1: details of it in the name of but when you
Speaker 1: get into a lot of things on the net, it
Speaker 1: seems like you find a pretty solid opinion one way
Speaker 1: or the other. It's you know, oh, let's real or
Speaker 1: oh no, total urban myth. Even Snopes on this one
Speaker 1: is said, oh no, this is a total urban myth.
Speaker 1: Except my problem is as I read it, I thought that,
Speaker 1: and then I came across some details it started making
Speaker 1: me think that maybe there's and gems of truth in it.
Speaker 1: So what the heck we're going to run down that road.
Speaker 1: I'm really this is like opening up new territory for us.
Speaker 1: This is like nothing like we've done yet where show
Speaker 1: has gone before, but this show has gone before. I
Speaker 1: listened to that, so no show ever, So no show
Speaker 1: has ever done this before. Awesome. Yeah, all right, Well
Speaker 1: tonight we're going to talk about Polebius. If you wait,
Speaker 1: like the Greek philosopher. No, no, no, no, not that guy.
Speaker 1: Polebus which is supposedly a arcade game that came out
Speaker 1: in We're going to step into a little time machine
Speaker 1: here because not everybody understands this, and we're going to
Speaker 1: go back to one. And when you played a video game,
Speaker 1: you had to go to an arcade because they were
Speaker 1: the stand up machines. It was pinball and stand up
Speaker 1: arcade games. There's almost no home video games. Hardly anybody
Speaker 1: out a home computer. Well in Atari had been I
Speaker 1: don't even know that the Atari gaming system had come out.
Speaker 1: If it had, it was still in its infancy. They
Speaker 1: were really expensive. They were very exc and to hook
Speaker 1: it up to your TV to have a TV that
Speaker 1: was compatible with something like that also crazy expensive because
Speaker 1: on tube TVs did not have a bazilion ports on
Speaker 1: the back well, and they also were they weren't digital,
Speaker 1: so you had to get a demodulator and or modulator
Speaker 1: or whatever to you could actually interface those things. But
Speaker 1: you had to buy this box to do it with.
Speaker 1: Some had It was kind of fuzzy and crappy looking too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't easy to do. Playing video games meant
Speaker 1: you had a roller cords in your pocket and you
Speaker 1: went down to the arcade that's just how it happened.
Speaker 1: I remember many a time begging money off of my
Speaker 1: parents could have a couple of books so I can
Speaker 1: go play video games. Yeah, yeah, go go. I mean
Speaker 1: that's just the way to So we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: Polebous and let's go ahead the story. Because it's considered
Speaker 1: an urban legend or an urban myth, there are all
Speaker 1: lot of variants and versions of it out there, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do my best to try and wade through those.
Speaker 1: But let's just get the basic story to start with,
Speaker 1: and then we'll build from there. All right. So, according
Speaker 1: to this story, an unnamed arcade here in Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 1: in one got a new game one or was it several?
Speaker 1: I heard it was several, you you just right off
Speaker 1: the bat. I've heard both ways. I've heard it was
Speaker 1: one arcade. I've heard it was multiple arcades in this city.
Speaker 1: I've heard that they were all in the suburbs. And
Speaker 1: I've heard that there was a couple that showed up
Speaker 1: in other towns on the other side of the country. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we should, you know, make a point of saying this.
Speaker 1: It was like an unknown game, but that was really rare.
Speaker 1: Then I mean, you know, if you were going to
Speaker 1: get a new Arcade game, you were telling everybody about it.
Speaker 1: You're saying, oh, yeah, we're finally going to get this.
Speaker 1: You know that you kind of you wanted to build
Speaker 1: hype around it. Yeah. But I also got the impression
Speaker 1: that this might have been a beta test situation. If
Speaker 1: they only build a certain number of game cabinets, then
Speaker 1: that would explain, you know, well, we've just got to
Speaker 1: try it out and see how it does, and then
Speaker 1: we'll take it back to the shop and and make
Speaker 1: our changes and then do our big marketing dump. Probably
Speaker 1: not a bad idea to just sticks them out there
Speaker 1: and see how people like him or not. I guess
Speaker 1: I just feel like, I mean, even at that in
Speaker 1: beta testing, you as an Arcade kind of say we're
Speaker 1: getting this beta. You know, the amount of people that
Speaker 1: would come out for this thing. You say, this is
Speaker 1: one of four units in existence. Come play this game
Speaker 1: before anybody else, you know, So to have it just
Speaker 1: kind of appear mysteriously is is like the first little
Speaker 1: question mark exactly exactly. Uh so let's keep going here.
Speaker 1: It turns out this game was super popular and from
Speaker 1: many accounts, almost addictive. People were lining up, playing it
Speaker 1: like mad NonStop, and at least one arcade, according to
Speaker 1: these accounts of it being released, the owner of that
Speaker 1: arcade said that he noticed, and I'm using air quotes,
Speaker 1: men in black hanging around, watching the players, watching their reactions,
Speaker 1: going to the machines, not collecting money, but doing something
Speaker 1: on the inch side of the machine, and then walking away,
Speaker 1: which is weird. Well, you know, and I gotta say,
Speaker 1: I really have a hard time believing that, because I mean,
Speaker 1: are you really going to send some guys like, you know,
Speaker 1: with porked by hats and black suits and skinny times
Speaker 1: to an arcade full of teenagers and people? I mean,
Speaker 1: come on. And of course this is a government, so maybe.
Speaker 1: But still throughout history you get these reports. A lot
Speaker 1: of conspiracy theories or urban legends have these like mysterious
Speaker 1: men in black characters, and I think that it's often
Speaker 1: used as a term, not as like an actual description,
Speaker 1: so as possible, yeah, that these guys were actually casually dressed, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it could be that they just they weren't in
Speaker 1: jeans and Randy T shirts and yeah, thirty five year
Speaker 1: old FBI agents, you know, in sweatshirts. Yeah, I picture
Speaker 1: the like Steve Bushemy as a teenager in that episode
Speaker 1: where Steve Bushey plays a um personal investigator private eye,
Speaker 1: and he says something about, you know, he was doing
Speaker 1: an undercover thing in high school, and its just like
Speaker 1: it just like you know, shows him in a high
Speaker 1: school like literally just Steve Bushemy, but like wearing kids
Speaker 1: clothes with skateboard like hey dudes, and dude debts like
Speaker 1: what are we doing tonight? So I feel like that's
Speaker 1: like also totally feasible men in black, right, It's just
Speaker 1: like dudes who are like, oh no, we're thirteen, clearly
Speaker 1: in their thirties. Yeah no, no, no, I chaved my
Speaker 1: hair this high up on my fore Yeah no, I
Speaker 1: diet gray man. It's cool, but it could have been.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily been men in black, but just men
Speaker 1: from the corporation that built these things. Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: want to see what it could be, some kind of
Speaker 1: businessmen of some kind. Again, this is as with this,
Speaker 1: it's rife with possibilities for plausible reasons or yeah, if
Speaker 1: you've built these machines, you've got them out there for
Speaker 1: testing purposes to see how people like them. It makes
Speaker 1: sense to go by the arcade and just see what
Speaker 1: what people are doing. You absolutely, so this is where
Speaker 1: things go a little sideways. No pun intended for this
Speaker 1: particular show. Uh So. Evidently, according to the allegations in
Speaker 1: the multiple versions that you come across, the machines were
Speaker 1: having psychoactive effects on players. So they were they were
Speaker 1: having amnesia, insomnia, night terrors, suicidal tendencies like all this
Speaker 1: easy behavior. I feel like it should also be mentioned
Speaker 1: that in every account that happens, right, that's consistent throughout
Speaker 1: almost every account it is, except here's here's why I
Speaker 1: don't put a lot of credence in It's in every
Speaker 1: account because the order of those things written is always
Speaker 1: is always identical. It's abc D. You think there's a
Speaker 1: little cutting and paste going on there, Yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of that on the internet. But again, and this is
Speaker 1: this is one of the things that makes me scratch
Speaker 1: my head is how did they find out that these
Speaker 1: people suffered from, say, amnesia. That's a very good question, dude,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know where I am. Where am I? Well,
Speaker 1: I'm missing ten dollars in quarters where I don't know.
Speaker 1: You know, you know, the crowd, the crowd pulls the
Speaker 1: kid away, right, because they're like, they all want to
Speaker 1: play the game too. It's finally he's died like a
Speaker 1: million times in a row and he like wakes up
Speaker 1: from a trance and it can't remember doing it. That's
Speaker 1: I mean, quantifiable reportable asia. Right, Yeah, that's absolutely possible.
Speaker 1: Insomnia ssomnia. Again, it's a it's a kind of kind
Speaker 1: of a tricky one. Unless they did interviews with these
Speaker 1: with these kids, I assume that these are all just
Speaker 1: like accounts, right, like kids being like I couldn't sleep
Speaker 1: last night. That game is messing me up or whatever.
Speaker 1: Absolutely correct. So here's where things really go bad is,
Speaker 1: according to the story, it was the game was pulled
Speaker 1: out of the arcades within weeks of having been installed
Speaker 1: because one player of it's supposedly a boy, had an
Speaker 1: epileptic seizure from playing the game, which might not even
Speaker 1: be related to the game. I mean, maybe he was
Speaker 1: just you know, just passed out. Yeah, it's possible, and
Speaker 1: we'll get into some descriptions of what happens on screen
Speaker 1: as to why it could have caused a seizure. But
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's believed that basically he had a
Speaker 1: seizure and whoever made the game just in a panic
Speaker 1: pulled it and disappeared, and it's going there's there's never
Speaker 1: been a cabinet, you know, physically inspected, and people like,
Speaker 1: look right here, this is plevious. We've got it. There's
Speaker 1: some photos on the net. Again, we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: some of that stuff, but the story itself is really
Speaker 1: the main basis we've got to operate from. Yeah, but yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that's that's one of the reasons I'm kind of doubting
Speaker 1: this story, just because the people that made this thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know what what somebody would have held
Speaker 1: onto it a souvenir or whatever, um you know, or
Speaker 1: maybe all of it. Some one of those machines should
Speaker 1: have showed up on eBay by now if there were
Speaker 1: like seven, right, I mean you assume if if you
Speaker 1: have decided as a game manufacturer, no, we're pulling this
Speaker 1: for good. Right, they made their cabinets, but the cabinets
Speaker 1: all kind of looked the same, and if they are
Speaker 1: making other games, they either repurpose it or are motherboard
Speaker 1: in it. And the way you go, because I think
Speaker 1: that saves a lot of money on yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it would, but you know, and I'm assuming if these
Speaker 1: were prototypes, they were probably in generic boxes. But the
Speaker 1: thing is, somebody would have saved all the guts and
Speaker 1: they would have shown up somewhere. Like one time, for example,
Speaker 1: I bought it. I bought an Asteroids machine years ago,
Speaker 1: and it was this guy who had everything but the box.
Speaker 1: He had like the power supply and the motherboard and
Speaker 1: the control ward and the monitor and everything except the
Speaker 1: box the cabinet, and I bought it from this guy,
Speaker 1: and I played Asteroids for years on this thing. I
Speaker 1: built a crude box to put it in. So somebody,
Speaker 1: you know, somebody still has those guts somewhere if the
Speaker 1: game ever existed. Maybe, I guess. I just think that,
Speaker 1: like if if you have a game that causes seizures
Speaker 1: and maybe a bunch of other stuff, you maybe just
Speaker 1: destroy it. I mean, again, you want to recoup your cost.
Speaker 1: You repurpose it, like you said. So it's it's hard
Speaker 1: to say, but again you real story says that this
Speaker 1: happened in the story itself didn't surface until August, so
Speaker 1: that's what Seventeen years later, suddenly the story just pops
Speaker 1: up on the Internet. The story comes up on a
Speaker 1: forum which is coin op dot org, which evidently is
Speaker 1: a big gaming forum. I looked around a little bit
Speaker 1: on it, but I'm not a forum guy, so I
Speaker 1: didn't really know what I was doing it. It's a forum,
Speaker 1: not a repository of any kind. Again, I'm not positive
Speaker 1: it might be. I think that in the reading like
Speaker 1: coin op got bought by somebody else, and so I
Speaker 1: think that, like the old archives are held, I wasn't
Speaker 1: clear and I couldn't get a direct line aside. Well,
Speaker 1: and to be fair, you know, the Internet is way
Speaker 1: different than the Internet now, and you know, I think
Speaker 1: it's likely right it may have been a forum, but
Speaker 1: they're just like really basic forums. But I guess the
Speaker 1: impress and I kind of have, is that it's just
Speaker 1: like a repository of Rom's Basically, you know, you download
Speaker 1: the game you want to play, and you just play
Speaker 1: it on your computer. That's well, though, I got the
Speaker 1: impression that coin op was originally basically a BBS old
Speaker 1: school BBS. Again, I don't know, but here's here's what
Speaker 1: happens is this original story comes out. There's almost no
Speaker 1: information about the history of the game. They just say
Speaker 1: that it's a space shooters slash abstract puzzle game. It's
Speaker 1: named after a Greek historian Um and I mean, honestly,
Speaker 1: it doesn't lend itself to a whole lot of credibility
Speaker 1: right off the bat. From that, and everybody on the
Speaker 1: Internet from day one has ripped this thing to shreds,
Speaker 1: and that's continued to happen. I mean, if you do,
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen, if you go out and you search
Speaker 1: for information on this game and you type it into Google,
Speaker 1: you're gonna come up with a gazillion hits on it.
Speaker 1: And you're gonna find people who say it's fake. You're
Speaker 1: gonna find people who say it's real. You're gonna find
Speaker 1: some guy who says it's he's got it in his
Speaker 1: mom's basement. I mean, it's everywhere. Okay, well, the forums aside.
Speaker 1: Let's and let's just walk through some of the details
Speaker 1: that have been put out out there. And again I'm
Speaker 1: putting air quotes around the word details. But the things
Speaker 1: that I have found that people say about the game,
Speaker 1: and we'll start with how does the game work? Is
Speaker 1: the game? It's the game. That's kind of the first
Speaker 1: thing is there's some conflicting data on that too. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: there's data all over the map on every point that
Speaker 1: I'm gonna bring up in here, and that's that's the
Speaker 1: hard part. And bear with us, folks, because there are
Speaker 1: some things that we are hanging on till the end
Speaker 1: that maybe tie some of this together. But okay, So,
Speaker 1: according to the information that I've come across, the game
Speaker 1: was either a an action puzzle game that had a
Speaker 1: rotating three D puzzle that had it had logic puzzles
Speaker 1: in it, and it had a maze built in it,
Speaker 1: kind of like do you remember pac Man, the original
Speaker 1: pac Man, how you had to run through the maze.
Speaker 1: That's what they mean by a maze. Um not you
Speaker 1: know in these new games where your your first person
Speaker 1: shooter going through these crazy mazes where you can only
Speaker 1: see ahead. Yeah, we're still probably look at graphics and
Speaker 1: very simple. It's absolutely simple graphics. The second b is
Speaker 1: that you're flying through a tunnel and you have to
Speaker 1: dodge things that are in your path, and as you
Speaker 1: get farther through the game, things start going faster and
Speaker 1: lights on the screen began to flash, almost in a
Speaker 1: strobing effect. So not like that. One that reminds me
Speaker 1: a lot of um Space age and Dragon Quest or whatever, right,
Speaker 1: that like stuff and Dragon Slayer. Yeah, Dragon Slayer that
Speaker 1: where you like just go through and dodge stuff. We're
Speaker 1: talking something like that. Are we talking, No, we're talking.
Speaker 1: We're talking generations before that that came out much later.
Speaker 1: We're talking about more of you know, it's you've got
Speaker 1: a T junction head and you've got to hold the
Speaker 1: joystick to the left until you get to that junction
Speaker 1: and then it's upper down right. I think that this,
Speaker 1: like the graphics on the screen maybe are rotating that
Speaker 1: this is this is my gas. This is kind of
Speaker 1: almost three D graphics. It's in some of the some
Speaker 1: of the stuff that I came across most video games
Speaker 1: of the time. If you think of everybody's seeing Super
Speaker 1: Mario Brothers and the original arcade of Super Mario Brothers
Speaker 1: or Donkey Kong, and they were in raster graphics, which
Speaker 1: is just little pixels that turn on to paint an image, right,
Speaker 1: little bit images. Well, there is discussion that Polybius was
Speaker 1: a vector graphics game, which is more along the lines
Speaker 1: of if you remember, like you said, Joe Asteroids. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was a game and we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: later on, but battle Zone battle Zone is what I
Speaker 1: was thinking of, because that was also Antari game, which
Speaker 1: came out not too long after Asteroids, and that was
Speaker 1: actually a three D game. Yeah, and if if you
Speaker 1: haven't heard of any of these games, take a minute
Speaker 1: and just do a Google image search and you'll see
Speaker 1: what we mean by simplistic line graphic work and vector graphics.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of a computer thing in terms
Speaker 1: of how things work. But vector graphics are smaller and
Speaker 1: easier to render than rester would be. So if your
Speaker 1: game can do these in vector, then it's faster, especially
Speaker 1: with the processor in one which is compared to today's
Speaker 1: standards a snail, it's going to be able to go faster,
Speaker 1: which is going to be revolutionary for anybody. They've never
Speaker 1: seen this happen before, so I've heard discussions that it
Speaker 1: was some experiment to use the vector graphic form. If
Speaker 1: that's right or not, I don't know. So we're not
Speaker 1: talking like just an animated sequence, because that's all that
Speaker 1: like Space Age was was really. I mean, in terms
Speaker 1: of programming, it wasn't much more complex than pac Man
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It was just that they had
Speaker 1: done these like full animated scenes. So we're talking like
Speaker 1: like really basic, extremely basic. Again, Pong was kind of still,
Speaker 1: you know, the grandfather of all of these games at
Speaker 1: that time. I'm still waiting for the movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Speaker 1: Another game that was kind of vector based, and this
Speaker 1: comes up in the research saying that maybe this was
Speaker 1: based upon it is Atari put out a game called Tempest,
Speaker 1: and I know that we watched the video of how
Speaker 1: Tempest works, which is, you know, it's vector graphics and
Speaker 1: you're kind of sliding around the edges of a maze,
Speaker 1: avoiding things and shooting stuff. People say that it could
Speaker 1: have been based on that, or a beta version of that,
Speaker 1: because Tempest, according to everything, came out about four to
Speaker 1: six months after this supposedly hit Portless. So now the
Speaker 1: image that I have in my brain is you know
Speaker 1: in Star Wars when he like has his like like
Speaker 1: a little guiding thing come down or he's like gonna
Speaker 1: do and it's like that there, Yeah, when he's in
Speaker 1: the trench. That's now in my brain, and that's that's
Speaker 1: that's basically what the graphics. Yeah, that it's that level
Speaker 1: of sophistication and it's moving quote unquote right past you
Speaker 1: and I guess if that were going fast enough and
Speaker 1: you're trying to dodge things and there were lights flashing
Speaker 1: at you. Okay, I'm getting a good picture here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sounds like a fun game. And none of these games
Speaker 1: that we've talked about so far are anything that would
Speaker 1: give someone a seizure. But I did watch and I
Speaker 1: know again I put this up, and I know you
Speaker 1: guys have watched it. There's a current game out there
Speaker 1: was that Super Hexagon. It's a game that basically flash
Speaker 1: is and your everything's rotating and spinning. If it was
Speaker 1: in line with that, And again, ladies and gentlemen, you
Speaker 1: might want to google this. You might want to kind
Speaker 1: especially pause this, go watch it for a minute and
Speaker 1: a half and then come back to us. Actually, for anybody,
Speaker 1: if if you do have epilepsy, you probably don't want
Speaker 1: to go to watch that one because that would be
Speaker 1: a bad thing. Yeah, everybody else go look, so welcome back. Yep.
Speaker 1: That was crazy to watch. I know now you kind
Speaker 1: of get how somebody could have a seizure because it's
Speaker 1: not easy to watch that stuff flashing around. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then imagine playing it like you're just passively watching it.
Speaker 1: Imagine like trying to be in charge of that thing. Oh,
Speaker 1: I would imagine that you'd be like seasick after a while. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't. I can't imagine that going on. It's not
Speaker 1: just watching it makes me dizzy. Yeah, So let's let's
Speaker 1: move forward into the actual person. Polibius the Greek historian. Yes,
Speaker 1: because the name of game is based upon a real person,
Speaker 1: and Polybius lived the actual guy. He was a Greek historian,
Speaker 1: lived in two sixty four to one forty six b c.
Speaker 1: He was a historian. He had some views on how
Speaker 1: things should be recorded, which is fine. But really, what
Speaker 1: I like about this guy, and I didn't really know
Speaker 1: about it until I started doing the research, is he
Speaker 1: was one of the first He came up with an
Speaker 1: early cryptographic system to use for communications over long distance.
Speaker 1: So it's called the Polebia square. And what it is
Speaker 1: is you take a grid of five across and five
Speaker 1: down and you start in the upper left hand square
Speaker 1: and you put A B, C, D, and E, and
Speaker 1: then you go down in the next line and there's
Speaker 1: twenty six letters in the alphabet. So he combined I
Speaker 1: and Jane in the same one. Yeah, if you're communicating
Speaker 1: over a long distance. You can use flashes of some kind,
Speaker 1: and you know that the first number is going to
Speaker 1: be the top of the grid and the sex second
Speaker 1: number is going to be on the vertical access of
Speaker 1: that grid, and then you put them together and you
Speaker 1: know it's B and then E and so want to
Speaker 1: and you can build sentences so that great distances, which again,
Speaker 1: I mean, it would have taken me a week to
Speaker 1: write over there, but it took me an hour to
Speaker 1: transmit the message using Flare, much simpler, So I thought
Speaker 1: that was cool. I don't know why he's referenced. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's because of the fact that this is supposed to
Speaker 1: be some kind of puzzle game. But I couldn't really
Speaker 1: make the tie together myself. Didn't They say on one
Speaker 1: account of it that it was like a rotating square.
Speaker 1: That was like, yeah, yeah, so maybe it was a
Speaker 1: reference to that. But the other reference that I was
Speaker 1: thinking about was that he was also besides being a cryptographer,
Speaker 1: he was an historian, and one of his things was
Speaker 1: he felt that any historian should never put anything into
Speaker 1: the historical record without actually interviewing somebody and finding out
Speaker 1: if it was true or not. You know, what do
Speaker 1: you think about it? It might be, you know, like
Speaker 1: like this whole thing, this whole story exactly exactly. Oh man,
Speaker 1: So okay, already even in the name, right, we're like
Speaker 1: we've got two different directions, right. I have found a
Speaker 1: way that this reference is what the game is, and
Speaker 1: it totally makes sense. And Joe has found a way
Speaker 1: totally discount the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, somebody was somebody
Speaker 1: was playing a joke, and and and the name of
Speaker 1: the game is itself part of the joke. It's a
Speaker 1: broad hand as to you know what this story is
Speaker 1: all about. Really well, and that's that's a great segue
Speaker 1: into the next bit of data that I want to
Speaker 1: go into, which would be who made the game. We
Speaker 1: never know. We we don't know who made it. A
Speaker 1: Tari and Sega. We're kind of the big boys on
Speaker 1: the block when it came to video games at this time.
Speaker 1: They were the superpowers. They also would have been the
Speaker 1: ones that would have had the resources to say, here's
Speaker 1: seven boxes, let's call beta testamon or and to develop.
Speaker 1: I mean, they had the R and D money they
Speaker 1: were creating all of these games, so they totally had
Speaker 1: the money to just as opposed to a small indie
Speaker 1: label that's just going to do the one thing that
Speaker 1: they know work. And plus they had the money to
Speaker 1: sand x marines and sweatshirts around to watch the Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. So there's a lot of conjecture that
Speaker 1: one of these two major labels made it. There is
Speaker 1: a image going around on the Internet of the title
Speaker 1: screen of the game, and actually, I'll be honest, I've
Speaker 1: seen three different images of the game. I've seen the
Speaker 1: title screen, I've seen a black and white of the
Speaker 1: cabinet itself, and I have supposedly seen images of the
Speaker 1: City of Portland's what is it the licensing stickers for
Speaker 1: it to be put into an arcade and play. I
Speaker 1: feel like I want to see these pictures. Also, I
Speaker 1: want to talk to the person who licensed, did you.
Speaker 1: I wasn't even aware that you have to have a
Speaker 1: license like a licensed stick so people don't have eplectic fit.
Speaker 1: I have seen stickers on games. I'm assuming it's licensing. Again,
Speaker 1: here's the problem. I don't know if it's from this game.
Speaker 1: I don't even know if it belongs to a video game,
Speaker 1: and I don't even know if they're real. I've just
Speaker 1: seen these. But I've got to go to an arcade
Speaker 1: and arcade now and check out the machines, because I'm
Speaker 1: not finding what. Yeah, there's I know, I know the city, like,
Speaker 1: you know, they licensed things like cigarette machines. I know
Speaker 1: they do that kind of stuff, But I'm not sure
Speaker 1: about arcade games. I mean, actually, I wouldn't put it
Speaker 1: past them. You know what, I've seen stickers on games.
Speaker 1: It looks like they're they're officially issued. So I'm presuming
Speaker 1: that at least in this city that happens. But I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what they're for. But what I'm saying
Speaker 1: is that I cannot say these real because they're the
Speaker 1: same three ones over and over people have tried to
Speaker 1: check for photo shopping and all this stuff. The title
Speaker 1: screen of Polibius, it is eight bit graphics, so it
Speaker 1: is from that era. It looks like it's from that era.
Speaker 1: On the title screen there is a name from a company,
Speaker 1: and Joe, You're gonna have to help me out with this.
Speaker 1: How do you how do you say this German? And
Speaker 1: in German that means deletion or a rature of senses,
Speaker 1: as in your senses of the world. So actually I
Speaker 1: think sorry, okay, okay, So there's there's that, but there's
Speaker 1: no record of this company. We don't know who this
Speaker 1: company is. Nobody can find them. They don't seem to
Speaker 1: exist currently, and there's no records of them, you know,
Speaker 1: putting out other games or anything like that. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to find my German dictionary. But I can, I can.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing right now that this word means men in
Speaker 1: black or give him a conspiracy. I'm not sure one
Speaker 1: of the other. There is another direction that we can
Speaker 1: take for who created it, which is there supposedly is
Speaker 1: a guy named Cybernogi. Cybernogy, I'm not exactly positive again
Speaker 1: on the annunciation of the Cybernogi is according to use
Speaker 1: net members, which using net remember you using that? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: according to us net, Cybernogi created and Cybernogi is a
Speaker 1: German programmer, and people believe that he created he or
Speaker 1: she I should say, created the game as in April
Speaker 1: Fools joke. Evidently Cybernoggi has been known to put out
Speaker 1: April Fool's jokes. Two people on the net, So cyber
Speaker 1: he created the game or he created the legend of
Speaker 1: the game, created the whole thing, as in made the
Speaker 1: whole thing for April fools. But here's the problem is
Speaker 1: that Okay, well people say, okay, well I think he
Speaker 1: did it, and then here's the stories. But I haven't
Speaker 1: seen any research and I couldn't find anything that would
Speaker 1: link the two together. So it's kind of, oh, that
Speaker 1: jerk does that stuff all the time. I'll about that
Speaker 1: jerk did this. Does usually take credit for his April fool, Frank,
Speaker 1: I don't believe. So that's the thing is that people
Speaker 1: will eventually come back and say, we're out in you
Speaker 1: is the one who did that whatever? Maybe yeah, yeah, size,
Speaker 1: which it's not exactly an arrestable offense. Okay, Okay, So
Speaker 1: so next week this will be a two part episode.
Speaker 1: We are going to fly to Germany personally and subjects
Speaker 1: I Gnocgie to some intensive interrogation. Yeah, we can do that,
Speaker 1: or we can just keep going. Okay, we should probably
Speaker 1: just keep going. Okay, I want to go to Chairmany.
Speaker 1: I know you do. I really want to let you
Speaker 1: keep somebody no no battery. Okay. We're gonna move forward
Speaker 1: into the places that it could have been released, where
Speaker 1: the game cabinet actually go. I've come across a couple
Speaker 1: of bits of information that say there was an arcade
Speaker 1: here in Portland called Backwater Alleys, which evidently is closed
Speaker 1: down long ago. They're reported as one of the places
Speaker 1: that supposedly got the game cabinet. Another one is Blue Diamond,
Speaker 1: which is still around. But Blue Diamond is actually a bar. Now,
Speaker 1: I mean it's possible, but I mean that place is
Speaker 1: a bar restaurant. It's got a full kitchen and a
Speaker 1: full bar and everything. And I suppose at some point
Speaker 1: some he might have Supposedly the building was renovated in
Speaker 1: the nineties and that's when it became a bar. So
Speaker 1: we got Blue Diamond. I've seen reports that say that
Speaker 1: it was in Gresham, Oregon, which is just outside of
Speaker 1: the city of Portland, because again the story says it
Speaker 1: was released in suburbs, so Gresham could be a plausible candidate.
Speaker 1: But then again, I've also heard that it was released
Speaker 1: in Kansas, which is not a suburb of Portland. Shockingly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're so close together. Yeah, so I don't know where
Speaker 1: it's at. Well, I thought about Blue Diamond. No, I'm
Speaker 1: saying that I don't know where it was released at. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't know exactly where this thing was at. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they didn't say suburbs, and I don't know why. I
Speaker 1: don't know why they picked the suburbs. Don't either. It's
Speaker 1: it's kind of an odd place to say. Well, think
Speaker 1: about it is, if you put it in various suburban
Speaker 1: places and your your men in black are going to
Speaker 1: have to drive farther distances to go out there and
Speaker 1: monitor the teenagers playing it, I would think you'd want
Speaker 1: to keep them close. In suburbs makes sense because that's
Speaker 1: where the kids are at. That's where the kids are,
Speaker 1: that's where the board kids are. But it's also you know,
Speaker 1: if you do want to keep it under wraps, right,
Speaker 1: it's not like the most central hub. You know, there's
Speaker 1: not as many kids around. So if you decide to
Speaker 1: pull it after a couple of weeks, you can just
Speaker 1: pull it and it won't be like this massive outcry.
Speaker 1: Not that Portland was giant in the eighties, but it'd
Speaker 1: be less of an outcry late, right, And I want
Speaker 1: to jump to a point that we've talked about before,
Speaker 1: which I know we were talking about the pictures of
Speaker 1: the cabinet and the title screen and all that, because
Speaker 1: that's how we got the name of the company. One
Speaker 1: of the things that I couldn't ever come to grips
Speaker 1: with when it came to this title screenshot is how
Speaker 1: did somebody get it? Yeah? Absolutely, Here's the thing. Remember
Speaker 1: these cabinets. It's a glass face with a video monitor
Speaker 1: underneath the case. And it's a CRT monitor. It's old
Speaker 1: school monitor. So even using thirty five millimeter film, the
Speaker 1: screen roles, you're not going to get a good clear image.
Speaker 1: And these images that are put up of this title
Speaker 1: screen they look like screenshot. They look like screenshots. How
Speaker 1: did somebody get the screenshot if the machine was only
Speaker 1: out there for a very short time? Although I guess
Speaker 1: to like counter that, you know, like just in terms
Speaker 1: of things that are coming up in my brain right now,
Speaker 1: why choose Portland for your hoax place? Like? What a
Speaker 1: weird place to pick as a hoax place? Really? You know,
Speaker 1: like okay, some like tiny town in the middle of Kansas, Okay, sure, right,
Speaker 1: or some like really big metropolitan hub, but like Portland,
Speaker 1: Oregon in the eighties is like the weirdest, like literally
Speaker 1: the weirdest spot that you could pick. I feel like
Speaker 1: it still is even even I guess more now you
Speaker 1: know there's more people here, but it was it was
Speaker 1: a bit more of a backwater back in but it
Speaker 1: wasn't like totally backwar. So it's just to me, it's
Speaker 1: such a weird, it's unusual place. It's not where you
Speaker 1: would normally want to go to market something. So that,
Speaker 1: but it's also not the kind of place that you
Speaker 1: would pick as like a hoax, right, if you were
Speaker 1: going to like pick a place to start a hoax.
Speaker 1: That that is an interesting point, is that, like you
Speaker 1: would think that people generally, when they're making up stories
Speaker 1: about America, the story is said in New York, Chicago,
Speaker 1: San Francisco, or Los Angeles or some tiny place nobody,
Speaker 1: or maybe Miami or yeah, or some some some strange,
Speaker 1: some squirky little town called Silent Hill or something like
Speaker 1: that from a creepy little place. Yeah. OK, so that
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of interesting. Another question mark on this
Speaker 1: whole Yeah, this whole thing so far. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if YouTube have gotten this impression, but there's just
Speaker 1: question marks all over the place written read ink for Yeah.
Speaker 1: I totally agree with that, and I think, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like as for as much evidence that I feel
Speaker 1: like disproves it, there's also like it's almost the exact
Speaker 1: same amount of almost enough to yeah, see it actually happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're like halfway through, right, got halfway through? Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we've got and we've got ways to go, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna move on to Joe's favorite subject, which is the
Speaker 1: supposed Men in Black. So here's the thing is that
Speaker 1: it was. It is not unheard of for the government
Speaker 1: to get involved with games, to use them as a
Speaker 1: way to find people with abilities to try to recruit them.
Speaker 1: Battle Zone that we talked about there, which anybody who
Speaker 1: doesn't know what battle zone is, it's this old cabinet
Speaker 1: game where you put your your face into a periscope
Speaker 1: and you drove a tank around and you were blasting
Speaker 1: enemy tanks and driving around. Yeas would also swoop in
Speaker 1: and you have to blast them to So do you
Speaker 1: know what that thing was before it became a video game.
Speaker 1: I heard it was a Bradley Bradley troop carriers. It
Speaker 1: was a training module for Bradley carrier tanks. So this
Speaker 1: is what soldiers did for before they went out in
Speaker 1: the field, as they learned to drive the tank in
Speaker 1: a VR situation. Well, I mean airplane pilots do it
Speaker 1: to this day, they use flight simulators that are open
Speaker 1: to the public. You know, people do use them in
Speaker 1: like a less sophisticated sense. But this has been a
Speaker 1: thing forever. Is that that's how you train Rainbow six
Speaker 1: When that first came out, Evidently the scores and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, we're being fed back to the army or
Speaker 1: the military heard. And again I can't validatee game. No
Speaker 1: it was it wasn't gosh, what was that on It
Speaker 1: was a PlayStation game or something like that. It came
Speaker 1: out a good number of years ago. But supposedly you
Speaker 1: could register scores. So I don't know, and I just
Speaker 1: hear these things. Yeah, it's a weird thing. And there's
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of creepy stories. If oh, I played
Speaker 1: the sniper game. When I got to the end, the
Speaker 1: phone number came up, and I called the phone number
Speaker 1: and it was a secret Nervously they offered me a job. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I tend, I tend to, you know, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm totally on board with the sinister government theory. At
Speaker 1: the same time, I'm totally on board with the incompetent
Speaker 1: government theory. And I don't I don't think they had
Speaker 1: the brains to come up with ideas like this. Well,
Speaker 1: but here's the thing. Okay, let's just say that somebody
Speaker 1: was collecting data out of the machine. What could you
Speaker 1: get out of a nine video game processor besides the
Speaker 1: high score? Well okay, and not that sophistic record video.
Speaker 1: They can't record audio. So I mean, is it just
Speaker 1: they're doing duration and score? I mean, yeah, you could
Speaker 1: get that. The data, the data you could get out
Speaker 1: of it would be like, you know, maybe how often
Speaker 1: it was played and how much it was played. You
Speaker 1: can get that kind of stuff. But of course, if
Speaker 1: you're sending men in black around and just like skulking
Speaker 1: skulk in the shadows and watch the kids play, and
Speaker 1: they're noticing the kids lining up around the block to
Speaker 1: play this game, they don't really need to download the
Speaker 1: data about how frequently the game was played. Yeah. Actually,
Speaker 1: you know, to me, the idea of them school I
Speaker 1: just like hanging around makes way more sense than the
Speaker 1: idea of them like, you know, coming to collect data.
Speaker 1: I guess maybe if they saw someone that was like
Speaker 1: playing it a lot, they would want to know what
Speaker 1: your high score was or something like that. But I think,
Speaker 1: you know, this seems much more like a situation where
Speaker 1: they would want to know how it was affecting people
Speaker 1: more than they would want to know about high scores
Speaker 1: or how long it's played or anything like that. The
Speaker 1: machine itself wouldn't give you that information. Now it's plawed. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's go with the sins for government again, and let's say, okay,
Speaker 1: it's plausible that they had some kind of video recorder,
Speaker 1: and it would have been a video recorder would have
Speaker 1: been on tape in the box, filming everybody who was playing.
Speaker 1: And so we're going and changing the tape, literally changing
Speaker 1: the tape I could have been to They might have
Speaker 1: been like the handles that we used for playing the game.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe they had galvanic response mechanisms built into them,
Speaker 1: so they could actually probably download what is that they
Speaker 1: could like actually from the from what's going on in
Speaker 1: the electric currents in your skin, they can tell what's
Speaker 1: going on with your nervous system, and so in the
Speaker 1: eighties they can Yeah, I'm not so sure about that,
Speaker 1: but again, these are men in black, so they probably
Speaker 1: had some sophisticated tools that the rest of us didn't
Speaker 1: have back in there. I guess, you know, I think
Speaker 1: what it really was. Should I save my my my
Speaker 1: summation of what I think it really was until the end? Okay,
Speaker 1: I think I think it makes sense to me that
Speaker 1: if you're going to send some agents to like stand
Speaker 1: and watch behavior, if they say, oh, yeah, we're text
Speaker 1: for this thing, and we're going to have to go
Speaker 1: in like once a day just to make sure it's working,
Speaker 1: that's a great cover story for why they're hanging out
Speaker 1: all day instead of like we're just here watching the kids, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, so, yeah, we have to open it up
Speaker 1: once a day, you know, for no good reason except
Speaker 1: to like have a good cover story. I don't know
Speaker 1: her government, there's all this, yes, I mean all right,
Speaker 1: so the machine disappeared. Yeah, it was taken away. It
Speaker 1: was taken away and probably executed and probably had a
Speaker 1: blindfold cigarette. Yeah you suck. Well, now everybody is saying, well,
Speaker 1: where's the ram of it, which, if you don't know rams,
Speaker 1: where you only memory. It's a game you can download
Speaker 1: and play on your computer, and they do remakes of
Speaker 1: all these old games. Dude, this is my favorite thing
Speaker 1: in the entire world. MS. Yeah, I spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time playing my all time favorite game, which is
Speaker 1: a sn S game that you can only play on
Speaker 1: your computer. Now, I mean unless you have an S
Speaker 1: n S. So which one Earthbound one? Oh it's so
Speaker 1: good you should. We'll have this discussion, like I need
Speaker 1: to get the wrong for Asteroids. Yeah all right, Well anyway,
Speaker 1: so a ROM is a recreation of the game, and
Speaker 1: there have been just like everything else, a bunch but
Speaker 1: oh I've got a wrong of the game. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: see it. I lost it, it got deleted or the
Speaker 1: most famous one out there is everybody would get this
Speaker 1: wrong and it would load the title screen that was
Speaker 1: on the internet. It would make this weird noise and
Speaker 1: then it would crash. I okay, So I have a
Speaker 1: big problem with this again saying you know, I love rams.
Speaker 1: There aren't a lot of ROMs for things that have
Speaker 1: been only arcade games because it's really hard to translate.
Speaker 1: So you know, I guess this is made up statistic,
Speaker 1: but the majority of the ROMs out there are games
Speaker 1: that have been on console translated by the company that
Speaker 1: of any kind, um, so, games that exist solely in
Speaker 1: arcade box format. I know this because that I have
Speaker 1: an arcade game that I'm obsessed with and like literally
Speaker 1: can play for hours. And I wanted to find the
Speaker 1: RAM of it one time, and I do this a
Speaker 1: bunch of research, and it you know, comes out that
Speaker 1: unless it's been released on a console, your likelihood of
Speaker 1: finding a ROM of it is like none. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just not going to happen because it's so hard to translates.
Speaker 1: I'm sure somebody's just like totally reprogrammed. I'm sure, I'm
Speaker 1: sure somebody, because I mean it's so freaking classic. I mean,
Speaker 1: how could it not well, and it's easy. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty simple of the game. Yeah. So but with something
Speaker 1: like this, you know, my belief of a ROM existing
Speaker 1: in any capacity is very low. Ladies and gentlemen. I
Speaker 1: would to apologize quite obviously we're geeking out on video. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we are. Sorry. I've been holding back not to just
Speaker 1: run down that road. Here's the thing. If this is
Speaker 1: a wrong, it should work, and there is, and we're
Speaker 1: going to go back to the big bad government conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: People have said, well, it's a direct translation, but of
Speaker 1: course the hardware in a PC doesn't work like the
Speaker 1: hardware in the actual machine does, so it can't do
Speaker 1: the mind control voodoo. That's the thing I've ever heard
Speaker 1: that anyone. It doesn't it. It does not hold water
Speaker 1: for me. But it is funny that I see this now.
Speaker 1: I also will say that there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who say they have ROMs that aren't actual wrongs,
Speaker 1: because what they've done is they've taken the descriptions of
Speaker 1: the game and then they've recreated it the way they
Speaker 1: think it would have been. Yeah, which is really interesting
Speaker 1: to me. Actually, it is interesting, and I've watched them,
Speaker 1: and I gotta be honest, it looks like a lame
Speaker 1: game based on the way people built it. And also
Speaker 1: again I can see why you get a seizure because
Speaker 1: nothing but flashing lights and more. Yeah, And you know,
Speaker 1: and that's that's the other thing too, is that perhaps
Speaker 1: this game actually existed, perhaps they did put some beta
Speaker 1: versions in in our cades, and perhaps it was just
Speaker 1: so lame that told what he played it and that's
Speaker 1: why it disappeared forever. Yeah, And that the whole urban
Speaker 1: myth of like people lying it's just kind of been
Speaker 1: the built up version of it. Yeah, could have been
Speaker 1: just a really lame game, or it seems lame to us,
Speaker 1: because like you know, our games now are super right,
Speaker 1: but like you know, and again we were talking about
Speaker 1: like this whole introduction of vector graphics and maybe you know,
Speaker 1: it was super flashing lights and everything, and you just
Speaker 1: kind of like got carried away with it. And the
Speaker 1: reason it was addictive was because you were so busy
Speaker 1: like paying attention to flashing lights that like you sucked
Speaker 1: at the game. Right, It's just like these graphics are
Speaker 1: so cool, what's going on here? And then you die
Speaker 1: a million times. It's so far. We have a lot
Speaker 1: of information that basically is uncorroborated, and at this point
Speaker 1: in my research, I would have dumped this story, except
Speaker 1: there's one character that we haven't talked about, not Santa.
Speaker 1: It's a guy by the name of Steven Roach, Stephen Roach.
Speaker 1: He is based out of the Czech Republic. In March
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, he went on a bunch of
Speaker 1: forums and he made a post and it's the same
Speaker 1: post he he literally cut and paste. He wrote this
Speaker 1: thing up and cut pasted it every time. He claims
Speaker 1: that he was involved in the creation of Polybius and
Speaker 1: has a bunch of details about the game and its
Speaker 1: history in terms of how it was made, why it
Speaker 1: was made, where all of this stuff which we're gonna
Speaker 1: go into, I will say right know that there is
Speaker 1: a lot of doubt cast upon the validity of this
Speaker 1: guy's story. People have picked it apart. He's done some
Speaker 1: interviews and people have turned around and said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's pretty funny. His answers almost exactly match what was
Speaker 1: on the Wikipedia page about this. Okay, Well, you know
Speaker 1: the problem is Wikipedia is constantly changing, and he could
Speaker 1: have updated or somebody could have read his details put
Speaker 1: them on the wiki page, and then everybody asking, well,
Speaker 1: that's weird, they Matt almost word for words. He could
Speaker 1: he could have actually he could actually have edited the
Speaker 1: wiki page of himself and stuff. Yeah, he could have
Speaker 1: been an updator on it. I guess my My big
Speaker 1: question is like, why wait till two thousand six. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll get into that, okay, So let's let's just start
Speaker 1: at the beginning. So Joe helped me again. What is
Speaker 1: the name? How do you pronounce this? Actually, that's spelling
Speaker 1: it differently now since slosa and actually this is the
Speaker 1: spelling is different. Well that's fine, that's fine because this
Speaker 1: is how he pronounces it versus the internet. Um, but
Speaker 1: he said This was a company that he and a
Speaker 1: couple other amateur programmers had put together in eight and
Speaker 1: they were approached in nineteen eighty by a South American
Speaker 1: company that he wouldn't give the name of for legal reasons.
Speaker 1: I guess they paid him. He probably signed an NDA
Speaker 1: and non disclosure agreement, so he's you know, he's keeping
Speaker 1: his mouth shut on that, which is understandable. Uh. They
Speaker 1: came and said that they wanted an arcade game made
Speaker 1: that was going to use puzzle elements, but as we
Speaker 1: talked about before, they wanted to use vector graph Okay, well,
Speaker 1: this all makes sense so far. So they make this, uh,
Speaker 1: this puzzle game and it's it's got all this different
Speaker 1: and stuff going on, things that haven't been seen in
Speaker 1: video games, and they're all agog, they're really excited. And
Speaker 1: then the game gets released by this company. One of
Speaker 1: the places, he says that there were seven cabinets made. Okay,
Speaker 1: one of the places here in Portland, Oregon that he
Speaker 1: says it was released was the Lloyd District. Okay, wait,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go back to my previous statement about
Speaker 1: like Portland being a weird place to pick right, and
Speaker 1: then like furthermore the Lloyd District, especially in the eighties
Speaker 1: was kind of a dump. Trying to find like a
Speaker 1: good word for that. And I feel like I can
Speaker 1: say that. I mean, I was born in seven in
Speaker 1: the Lloyd District, so I you know, in the nineties
Speaker 1: it was a dump. In the eighties it was a dump,
Speaker 1: you know. And and it's not even like a very
Speaker 1: well publicized area of Portland. So for somebody to be
Speaker 1: creating a hoax by saying, oh, it's Portland, and then
Speaker 1: to like further it by saying, oh, and it was
Speaker 1: in the Lloyd district, Like that's such an obscure place
Speaker 1: to say something like that. I just feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: I think, for whatever reason, I feel like it leads
Speaker 1: credence to the story. Interestingly, to the Blue Diamond, which
Speaker 1: is now a bar, is kind of on a southern
Speaker 1: periphery of the Lloyd District. Okay, So again again weird
Speaker 1: things stitched together in the story. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: So he goes on to say that about a week
Speaker 1: or not even a week after the game was put out, evidently,
Speaker 1: you know, the kids were lining up, they were all
Speaker 1: enjoying it. And then a thirteen year old boy has
Speaker 1: an epileptic seizure while playing the game. So all the
Speaker 1: executives are freaking out because they think that, oh god,
Speaker 1: we've we've made the worst thing in the world. We're
Speaker 1: going to give people seizures before they pull it. Of course,
Speaker 1: now word gets out, according to Roach, that word gets out,
Speaker 1: and now it's now this is a fun game to play.
Speaker 1: It's teenage boys daring their buddies to go play it,
Speaker 1: or their buddies going I'm tough, I'll played it will
Speaker 1: be which does not help the image of the sure
Speaker 1: so this this is all bad And he said he didn't.
Speaker 1: He say that they had play tested it for like
Speaker 1: a really long time as adults. All the adult developers
Speaker 1: really enjoyed it but didn't have any of this reaction.
Speaker 1: But they may not have had you know, they may
Speaker 1: not have been epileptic. Well they probably weren't, but you know,
Speaker 1: I think that that's what the question, right, is that like,
Speaker 1: if an epileptic person plays something that's got flashing lights,
Speaker 1: they are probably going to have a seizure. And it's
Speaker 1: probably not the fault of the game, not that, but
Speaker 1: years ago probably well these things were not as well.
Speaker 1: Monitors is the wrong word, but well understood. The tech
Speaker 1: oology wasn't good enough. I know personally, I've been in
Speaker 1: work environments that were kind of high security would be
Speaker 1: a way to say it. And so that you know,
Speaker 1: your monitor was watched and screen captures were remotely taken
Speaker 1: of your monitor. And we had employees who said, listen,
Speaker 1: I have epilepsy. You can't take screen crabs of my
Speaker 1: screen because when the screen capture would cause the monitor
Speaker 1: to do a little flash, and that would be enough
Speaker 1: to set this person off. And so the company couldn't
Speaker 1: do it. So it was you know, I mean, I
Speaker 1: can see if you're not used to it. This rule
Speaker 1: had been made until this one guy came along and said, uh, hi,
Speaker 1: can't do that to me, And so everybody's testing it.
Speaker 1: It's fine, and then oh, we didn't think about that.
Speaker 1: But it's still is a little strange because Okay, what
Speaker 1: happens is the game is very popular. One kid has
Speaker 1: an epileptic seizure, which may or may not even be
Speaker 1: the fault of the game, and they're all like in
Speaker 1: panic mode, and they pull all the machines just like really,
Speaker 1: I guess I just I think it makes sense to me. Honestly,
Speaker 1: you know, the I mean even the scaremongering that happens
Speaker 1: with like current video games where people say like, oh,
Speaker 1: if you play this game that has guns in it,
Speaker 1: you're going to become a murderer, you know, And that
Speaker 1: I think is kind of kind of the same situation
Speaker 1: where you have this game that's out for a week
Speaker 1: and it's technology that people don't really understand, and some kid,
Speaker 1: whether he has epilepsy or not, you know, has a
Speaker 1: seizure or has an adverse reaction to it. The technology
Speaker 1: is so new, people are just gonna say that thing
Speaker 1: did it, that thing's fault. There is always that possibility,
Speaker 1: although at the same time, I know when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, there were always kids that we knew were
Speaker 1: just spazzes. So so it's like out but like everything else,
Speaker 1: it's peppered with doubt. Well of one of the things
Speaker 1: I'm interested in finding out, and I didn't occur to
Speaker 1: me to that to actually check this out, is that
Speaker 1: have there ever been any video game manufacturers based in
Speaker 1: South America? Oh, I'm sure I don't know that. They
Speaker 1: weren't the manufacturer as far as I can tell, it
Speaker 1: sounded like they were. What was it. How did Roach
Speaker 1: put it? Let me grab this. Yeah, well, it sounds
Speaker 1: like was was basically him and some friends who were programmers.
Speaker 1: So it sounds like they developed some software. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't sound it does not sound like they had the
Speaker 1: capability to actually produce hardware. No, but again, if it's
Speaker 1: a South American company, it could have been some group
Speaker 1: that just said an investment group of some kinds. So
Speaker 1: they went to some other country and said I need
Speaker 1: you to make me this hardware. They went another country
Speaker 1: and said I need you to build this. You know,
Speaker 1: it could have been just piecemealed out so that when
Speaker 1: it got time to do it. No, two people that
Speaker 1: were involved in opposite sides knew the other, and that's
Speaker 1: that's how cells work. Absolutely, so it's quite possible. So
Speaker 1: Roach goes on to talk about though, he says, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: this whole thing about men in black, I can tell
Speaker 1: you who that was. That was all the exacts at
Speaker 1: all the investors who were panicking and came flocking to
Speaker 1: the area to deal with this this event, you know,
Speaker 1: this this seizure that this boy had and to try
Speaker 1: to mitigate the impact of it. So now they're all
Speaker 1: hanging around the arcade and they're all nervously staring at
Speaker 1: the machine and talking. Of course, everybody's like, what's that?
Speaker 1: A bunch of dudes do it, So it could be
Speaker 1: as simple as a misinterpretation. They're staring going, oh god,
Speaker 1: don't play it, don't play it. Don't play it. Kids,
Speaker 1: Like why is that guy staring at me while I'm
Speaker 1: playing the game? I mean, if a kid had a
Speaker 1: Caesar in an arcade, there's nothing that anybody could do
Speaker 1: to keep that out of the new pature. And and
Speaker 1: let's face it, this is kind of a slow, slow
Speaker 1: move in towns at that time. Well, but they also
Speaker 1: you know, they were saying that like there was this
Speaker 1: massive fearmongering that happened, right, there was this massive scared
Speaker 1: but I I want to I want to pull back
Speaker 1: on that because it may have been fearmongering amongst the
Speaker 1: company and the investors panicking rather than the public. That's possible. Well,
Speaker 1: and and here's the other problem is that we can't
Speaker 1: find any record of this boy. But a settlement out
Speaker 1: of court was made evidently family, So there's gonna be
Speaker 1: no lawsuit on record because they just did it under
Speaker 1: the table, listening and I'm sure that they signed, do
Speaker 1: not you probably so they've never been able to talk
Speaker 1: about it. Says that they were trying to, you know, basically,
Speaker 1: after that, he and his buddies they disbanded the company
Speaker 1: they made because they just wanted to distance themselves from
Speaker 1: this whole thing fell apart. It was terrible and like, no,
Speaker 1: we don't want to keep making stuff and be haunted
Speaker 1: by this ghost forever. But you know, the thing that
Speaker 1: I found less credible about this is he published his
Speaker 1: little his little thing in two thousand and six. So
Speaker 1: the cultural difference between American two thousand and six in
Speaker 1: N is number one. In ninteen eighty one, we weren't
Speaker 1: such a litigious society. And you know, in in nineteen
Speaker 1: eight one, and I was alive back in those days.
Speaker 1: I know that if you know, for example, I was
Speaker 1: playing a video game and I had an epileptic seizure,
Speaker 1: my parents probably wouldn't think about suing the company that
Speaker 1: made it. They would just assume I had an epileptic fit. There.
Speaker 1: You probably wouldn't find a lawyer to take the case,
Speaker 1: because I mean, the lawyer just say, the jury is
Speaker 1: gonna laugh at your kid has epilepsy, well know, and
Speaker 1: so I mean, I mean, and so to the lens
Speaker 1: of two thousand six Litigious America, this sort of panicking
Speaker 1: on the part of the company of the company makes sense,
Speaker 1: but in n it doesn't make sense, I guess. So
Speaker 1: the counter to that is that, like, so, for instance,
Speaker 1: my brother, who does not have epilepsy, has had two
Speaker 1: seizures in his life, and you know, both of them
Speaker 1: were by outside sources, and that happens to people. So
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, we've been saying it's an
Speaker 1: apple to fit, it's an maybe he just had a seizure.
Speaker 1: Maybe he you know, because some people just that just
Speaker 1: happens every once in a while. You don't have epilepsy,
Speaker 1: but if this game has if something has given something,
Speaker 1: you know. So I think that even in the eighties,
Speaker 1: if your kid isn't sick and then suddenly they have
Speaker 1: something horrible happen to them, maybe they're not gonna, like,
Speaker 1: you know, go through like we're gonna see you for
Speaker 1: a million dollars. But probably the company is going to
Speaker 1: be like, listen, let's just deal with this right now.
Speaker 1: But I don't know, you know, it's hard to tell.
Speaker 1: Again again, the kid is also the kid is in
Speaker 1: an arcade which has got dozens of other arcade machines
Speaker 1: in it, which has obviously been playing one of those.
Speaker 1: And it could have been that, it could have been
Speaker 1: that he just had recently consumed, like just minutes before
Speaker 1: thirty six pop Sickles or something like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it could have been all kinds of things that cost us. See, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: and that's definitely possible. But I think you know, if
Speaker 1: it's the startup like whatever, you know, nobody really knows
Speaker 1: what they're doing. They're experimenting with new visuals that people
Speaker 1: haven't really seen before. I think that the tendency for
Speaker 1: a company to panic is greater when they're kind of
Speaker 1: experimenting in this sort of situation. But you know, again,
Speaker 1: this is we're having exactly the debate that everybody's happen online.
Speaker 1: Well again, and I think I think again, actually, when
Speaker 1: it's not a startup one they're a really big company,
Speaker 1: then then they're typically seen as a deep pocket by attorneys.
Speaker 1: But when they're just a startup with not a lot
Speaker 1: of capital or anything like that, you know, they're not
Speaker 1: they're not really a worthy target because they don't have
Speaker 1: any money to take from. Well, let's let's move farther
Speaker 1: into to the information that we get from Steven Roche.
Speaker 1: So according to a Roach and his explanation is difficult,
Speaker 1: and I'm actually going to try and read this verbatim
Speaker 1: to describe this to everyone. But this is how he
Speaker 1: says the game was played. And again, personally, this game
Speaker 1: sounds lame. But the game is centered around a moon
Speaker 1: base large which he says is largely played darized from
Speaker 1: Star Wars, which displayed a number that doesn't what's what's
Speaker 1: that mean exactly? I'm guessing there was a number in
Speaker 1: the middle of the moon base. Okay, let's get farther in.
Speaker 1: I think this will help clarify a little bit more so.
Speaker 1: There's six sets of different aliens. The firch, which varied
Speaker 1: through six levels, appears as random waves sent out from
Speaker 1: the moon base and need to be destroyed. The others
Speaker 1: were numbered between one and ten, which had to be
Speaker 1: repelled back to the base to lower the total. The
Speaker 1: figure you had to match exactly to clear the level,
Speaker 1: otherwise you lose two lives or just one if you
Speaker 1: have one remaining. So, if I understand the way he's
Speaker 1: saying this, correctly. The moon base, let's say, comes up
Speaker 1: with number fifty five and a shift comes at you
Speaker 1: and it says five, and you bounce it back into
Speaker 1: the base. It sounded to me like you were trying
Speaker 1: to get the moon base to drop back down to
Speaker 1: zero by pushing numbers back into it, like a like
Speaker 1: a mix between a shooter game and a math game. Yes, yeah, ok, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's how he says. And he goes on to
Speaker 1: to give out some more stuff, which makes the description
Speaker 1: even more convoluted and difficult to follow it. I don't
Speaker 1: I just don't want to read it because it doesn't
Speaker 1: logically make sense to me. But what he does say
Speaker 1: is that the longer a specific level goes on, faster
Speaker 1: the game gets, which we've all seen in every video game.
Speaker 1: That what as you go longer the screen, the lights
Speaker 1: begin to flash, and if you beat the game, the
Speaker 1: screen rapidly flashes. Puts up the word polebius and eventually
Speaker 1: says polybius. And I'm guessing it probably isn't that prototypical,
Speaker 1: you know, that deep throated weird voice that they always
Speaker 1: had an old video games, which if this kid beat
Speaker 1: the game and it's rapid flashing could be what caused
Speaker 1: the seizure. Well yeah, I mean you know that makes
Speaker 1: sense to me that they would have rapid flashing. Right,
Speaker 1: you blew up the moon. It's the representation of the
Speaker 1: explosion of said moon. Too sophisticated, So you know, it
Speaker 1: says Plebi. You know, based on that description, I can
Speaker 1: see how somebody could have a caesar from it. But
Speaker 1: I can also you know, it does kind of sound
Speaker 1: like a lame game, but I can also. You know,
Speaker 1: when I was a kid playing like math Rabbit or whatever,
Speaker 1: like get addicted to those things because you know, you
Speaker 1: just in your mind, you just are competitive and you think,
Speaker 1: well if I just played again, maybe this time I'll
Speaker 1: do better, you know, And it's just it just feeds
Speaker 1: on it. I played the crap out of Asteroids. I
Speaker 1: played the Holy Heck out of the Star Wars game.
Speaker 1: It's a total vector base to this game. If I
Speaker 1: to this day, if I see that game, I'll play it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I can't help myself. I gotta drop fifty
Speaker 1: cents in and play. Yeah, listen, there are games. This
Speaker 1: is how. There's that bar downtown called ground Control, which
Speaker 1: is like an adult arcade, and like there are games
Speaker 1: there that like nobody ever wants to play, but I'm
Speaker 1: sitting there playing them like drunk, Like I've got a
Speaker 1: couple of beers in me. I'm just like playing it,
Speaker 1: just shoving quarters in and there's no reason for it
Speaker 1: except for that I can't pass them up because you Yeah,
Speaker 1: by the way, do they have asteroids there? Yeah? Probably
Speaker 1: there's got a long time. I mean, you know, so
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those games that you think you think,
Speaker 1: like empirically, you're like, wow, it sounds boring, but then
Speaker 1: you like get into it and you're like, oh man,
Speaker 1: so fun and so hard. But if you do this,
Speaker 1: it's really good. Yeah, I mean it's completely plausible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know the thing that I always say about like, again,
Speaker 1: i'm a little bit nerding out here, but like video
Speaker 1: games of the past versus video games of now, right,
Speaker 1: video games of the past you had to you had
Speaker 1: to hate before you could love them. And I think
Speaker 1: that's a great thing to say about a game like this,
Speaker 1: where like you would hate this game, you would hate it,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't want it to beat you, so you'd
Speaker 1: go back and play and play and play it. And
Speaker 1: I can see how people would just get or you'd
Speaker 1: watch that one guy who was really good somehow figured
Speaker 1: it out and then you couldn't help but watch him play. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: so you know I can see just based on that description. Actually,
Speaker 1: that description is far more interesting to me than any
Speaker 1: of the other things we've Yeah, I mean really like, okay, cool,
Speaker 1: it's like shooting some asteroids or whatever. Fine, but like
Speaker 1: you have to keep track of the number, and like
Speaker 1: you have to hit the right numbers back and then
Speaker 1: also dodge the ships then also shoot the like waves,
Speaker 1: and also the graphics are really cool and new. Well,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make a lot of sense to me again
Speaker 1: because like you're supposed to knock back the ships. That
Speaker 1: the ships come out with numbers, and not all of them.
Speaker 1: Some come out without and you gotta kill some come
Speaker 1: out with a number, and you got to knock them
Speaker 1: back in there so and you know, and and the
Speaker 1: never has to match exactly, which means that if I say,
Speaker 1: say you're at like the number the random number generated
Speaker 1: was thirty three, and you've knocked back and knocked back
Speaker 1: like five ships to total dirty, so that means the
Speaker 1: number is at three right now, and the ship comes
Speaker 1: out and it's got the number four on it, so
Speaker 1: you dodge it. So you dodge it, But then it
Speaker 1: gets past you, and that doesn't start shooting at you know,
Speaker 1: surely it just continues, right, Those I don't think are
Speaker 1: probably maybe you can destroy them. I don't know. Maybe ye,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe you used to destroy. We don't know. We
Speaker 1: know nothing. We could sit here for another hour and
Speaker 1: talk about that's a good point. We don't know. And
Speaker 1: the worst part is that's the end of the information
Speaker 1: we have. Yeah, we've got the Internet legend, We've got
Speaker 1: some details that people seem to repeat, but I can't validate.
Speaker 1: We've got a story by Roach which sounds plausible, and
Speaker 1: I can see credence in bits and pieces, but I
Speaker 1: can't none of it stitches together. And this is probably
Speaker 1: the loosest bit of This is the loosest story we've
Speaker 1: done yet, because it's all over the map. Yeah, And first, personally,
Speaker 1: I find no reason whatsoever to believe Stephen Roach. And
Speaker 1: also I think we've gone on long enough. It's time
Speaker 1: to solve the mystery. Oh, Joe knows the answer, apparently,
Speaker 1: What is the answer, Joe, Well, it's pretty freaking obvious. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is a the best department experiment to it a
Speaker 1: video game, and the idea was to create a video
Speaker 1: game that would cause people to completely spas, go insane,
Speaker 1: kill themselves. The idea was that once they perfected this
Speaker 1: and tested it, then they would air drop like millions
Speaker 1: of these in the hostile countries like Iran, North Korea
Speaker 1: or whatever and and totally decimate their populations. So they
Speaker 1: put so they put out a beta version in Portland,
Speaker 1: and and the other thing to get is one one
Speaker 1: Katie Spas is out and has an epileptic fit, you know,
Speaker 1: and so a major disappointment. So they pulled it and
Speaker 1: they put him in a huge warehouse somewhere like the
Speaker 1: one you see at the end of Ridges of the
Speaker 1: Lost Art where they still are. And uh, and that said,
Speaker 1: that was the end of the experiment. They decided it
Speaker 1: was like, you know, they just couldn't create a video
Speaker 1: game that would cause people to spas out and kill themselves.
Speaker 1: I I personally, my personal opinion is that I think
Speaker 1: that it may have been real, but I don't think
Speaker 1: it was real in terms of the actual incarnation that
Speaker 1: we hear about you all of the stories. I think
Speaker 1: that it probably is this is an amalgamation of several
Speaker 1: stories of several games that have been merged together through
Speaker 1: the mishmash of the Internet. There's enough concrete or solid
Speaker 1: believable information here that I'm willing to run with it.
Speaker 1: I just don't think that Polebius was real. I think
Speaker 1: that it was beta versions of tempests or battles under
Speaker 1: any of these other games that are out there, or
Speaker 1: games that we don't even know of because they just
Speaker 1: faded from the memory of the social group. Is that
Speaker 1: I think that it was. It's just a bunch of
Speaker 1: them stitched together. I think that you know, actually, if
Speaker 1: you to look for a credible version of the whole thing,
Speaker 1: it's like if you can imagine some nerve that hung
Speaker 1: out in game arcades back in those days, and this
Speaker 1: game shows up and it's it's put out in a
Speaker 1: few places, not just his but and it turns outack, no,
Speaker 1: but what I mean, it's like, so, okay, so this guy,
Speaker 1: this guy is like like witnessing that the arrival of
Speaker 1: this game from nowhere, and it's really popular with him
Speaker 1: and his dorky friends, and it's like they really like
Speaker 1: it a lot. But it turns out it's not it's
Speaker 1: totally a dead letter and every other arcade they put
Speaker 1: it in. So a couple of weeks go by, you know,
Speaker 1: and maybe randomly some kid has an epileptic seizure while
Speaker 1: he's in the arcade. Then the game gets pulled because
Speaker 1: it's obviously a failure because besides, aside from this guy
Speaker 1: is nerdy friends, nobody else likes it or plays it.
Speaker 1: So they pull it and that's the end of that.
Speaker 1: And then this guy like sort of like, you know,
Speaker 1: years later he's like, you know, tax it onto the
Speaker 1: end of the Southern legend. Yeah, it's like this guy
Speaker 1: years later says, you know, I can't believe this. You know,
Speaker 1: this this arcade game shows up and and everybody was
Speaker 1: nuts about it, meeting him and his friends, you know,
Speaker 1: and then somebody has some much somebody like has an
Speaker 1: epileptic fit, and then they pulled the game and and
Speaker 1: and that was it. The whole thing just went down
Speaker 1: the memory hole. But now maybe it was just purely
Speaker 1: a game that sucked and nobody wanted to play it,
Speaker 1: and so they pulled it out. What do you think
Speaker 1: that I honestly, I don't know what I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I do I think that there's Yeah, I really am actually,
Speaker 1: you know, I think that there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that's great in the story, and I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that pure crap in this story. I
Speaker 1: you guys know, when you probably listeners, you now know
Speaker 1: based on my like little rants, I'm really passionate about
Speaker 1: video games. I really like them. And you know the
Speaker 1: fact that there are so many things that I almost
Speaker 1: like want to be true. I just I just can't
Speaker 1: decide either way whether it existed or not, you know.
Speaker 1: And I do think that since we do have the
Speaker 1: you know, pleasure of living in Portland, maybe we can
Speaker 1: find a little more about it, but probably not. You know,
Speaker 1: I think that if that stuff was to be found,
Speaker 1: it would be on the internet already, would be part
Speaker 1: of the story, because I think this is the thing
Speaker 1: about internet. People speculate and and they cut and paste
Speaker 1: and make stuff up. If anybody, any of these people
Speaker 1: are out there that are actually busily obsessing over this
Speaker 1: this topic, they would have done a couple of things.
Speaker 1: They would have looked for a South American software company
Speaker 1: that was specialized in video games. They would have gone
Speaker 1: through the Oregonians archives. They would have looked in German records,
Speaker 1: because there's got to be at least one nerd out
Speaker 1: there in Germany who's following this intensely, who could actually
Speaker 1: look in public records to see if a company was
Speaker 1: ever incorporated called Zinnish Lawson. No, and nobody's done this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's hard to say. Yeah, well, ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: we're gonna leave this one unsolved. That would be permanently unsolved.
Speaker 1: Maybe permanently, but uh, that having been said, if you'd
Speaker 1: like to go ahead and check out some of the
Speaker 1: links for some of the research that we did for
Speaker 1: the show, you can go ahead and check that out
Speaker 1: on our website. The website is, of course, thinking Sideways
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. You can listen to the show right
Speaker 1: there on that website. You can also go ahead and
Speaker 1: listen to the show on iTunes if you want to
Speaker 1: go in and download, and probably most of you the
Speaker 1: download do it through iTunes. Got a couple of minutes,
Speaker 1: go ahead and leave us that comment as well, because
Speaker 1: that's what helps other people find us. Uh. If you're
Speaker 1: on the go and you realize that you know a
Speaker 1: new show has come out and you forgot to download it, well,
Speaker 1: of course, you can find us on Stitcher, which is
Speaker 1: available on just about every internet capable device, and you
Speaker 1: can stream it right there. You can always go ahead
Speaker 1: and send us an email. So if you've got thoughts
Speaker 1: on this particular episode, or stories that we've got on
Speaker 1: the site, or stories you'd like to hear any of
Speaker 1: the above, or anything else, go ahead and you can
Speaker 1: send us an email. Our email address is Thinking Sideways
Speaker 1: Podcast at gmail dot com. And as a matter of fact, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have some listener comments. Well it's it's good. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean basically what it is is, there's this little
Speaker 1: website called Reddit. It's a little tiny um, but we
Speaker 1: actually got a message there from a user anyways, he
Speaker 1: uh really likes our show. He looped us in with
Speaker 1: like a bunch of other really awesome podcasts um and
Speaker 1: also suggested podcast topic for us. Yeah, which we're definitely
Speaker 1: gonna get to. Um. But I just thought we'd give
Speaker 1: him a little shout out, because you know, I like
Speaker 1: hearing great things about our show. I don't know about you, guys,
Speaker 1: I don't care. It's a story to look into it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The mom Talk Project, which is I think going to
Speaker 1: be a lot of research. Okay, Yeah, I've not heard
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah, it's a conspiracy, so Joe might have
Speaker 1: to head So eighteens. Thanks or do that, whatever whichever
Speaker 1: you are, we appreciate it. Yeah. I guess I just
Speaker 1: assumed you were a dude, but you could be a
Speaker 1: check totally okay. Al right, well that having been said,
Speaker 1: once again, thanks for for slogging through this one with us,
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen. I know this. We didn't. We didn't
Speaker 1: think this was gonna be turned into as big of
Speaker 1: an episode as it obviously has. But I hope you
Speaker 1: enjoyed it, and we're gonna go ahead and wrap it
Speaker 1: up and U we'll come back at you next week
Speaker 1: with something completely unrelated to today's show and completely interesting Jo,
Speaker 1: then we'll talk you later. It was aliens. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't want to. I don't want to