1980s Conspiracy: Men in Black Watching Arcades

Story by @GIJoeRepairShop

Before the internet, it was difficult to start a rumor and have a large number of people believe it. Still, there were urban legends that surrounded every aspect of 1980’s culture. One of those urban legends had to do with the FBI monitoring video game arcades all across the country. The story goes that FBI agents, typically dressed in black and maybe with or without trenchcoats, would spy on innocent teenagers who were just trying to get to the next level of Donkey Kong. After the players were done, agents would swarm the cabinet and write down the high scores of the players, capturing their initials so that they could track them down later. The urban legend goes that the FBI used this technique to recruit the best and brightest from around the country. This sounds reasonable, right? A multibillion dollar federal agency recruiting top agents not by interviewing police or ex-military candidates, but rather by hanging out in arcades and trying not to be seen. (For the record, this author did once apply to the FBI for a job as a computer forensic analyst. I received a one-line rejection email. The 1990s were a crazy time.)

In Alex Rubens’ book “8-Bit Apocalypse,” he reveals that Atari would often field-test new game cabinets. Alex Rubens is the chief designer and coder of the game “Missile Command.” New game cabinets (including Missile Command) would be shipped to a few select arcades in Southern California. Atari game designers and quality control engineers would indeed watch the players as they played the unreleased games in order to gauge a range of metrics and to determine any tweaks that needed to be coded before wider release. They would probably also examine the high scores and change any appropriate settings between players.

In 2015, Ernest Cline published the book “Armada.” The plot is very similar. This time, however, rather than recruiting for the FBI or Atari, the protagonist is recruited, along with many other teenage video game wizards, to hone their video game skills for use against an incoming armada of alien ships. “The military is useless here, get some video gamers!” the President probably said.

I think that these urban legends go a long way towards demonstrating just how difficult it was in the 1980s to refute a crazy rumor without access to knowledge to the contrary. It also provides a window into children having very different lives and experiences than the generation before them and hoping that these new skills can be used in the calling to support some sort of higher purpose.