Rohadia - Part One

In 1988, an independent Japanese video game company named Korosoke Dināentāteimento released Rohadia for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a very simple game that failed to make much of a mark. On starting the game, players were met with an image of sand dunes beneath a moonlit sky. The desert is illuminated by a fire in the distance, around which a number of blue robed figures are gathered. The title appears in gold lettering at which point the player is prompted to select “Start”. There are no other choices. The player is not given instructions on how to play, but the objective becomes clear early on. A series of 25 white cards are dealt face down in rows of 5, accompanied by a shuffling noise. Once completed, five icons are placed before the player. Each one bears the mark of a Zener card – a yellow circle, red cross, blue wave pattern, black square and green star. The objective of the game is to successfully predict the image on the face-down cards, by selecting the corresponding icon. After guessing all 25, the face down cards were flipped over one by one and either burst into blue flame if the guess was correct, or turned black and white if incorrect. When all the guesses had been revealed, either correctly or incorrectly, a blue robed figure appeared on the screen and bowed theatrically alongside a message of congratulations, or occasionally mysterious threats.

Despite Rohadia's limited success, the game apparently did well enough to merit a sequel. The sequel was also named Rohadia and was released internationally for the Super Nintendo System. The game play was identical, however the game initially had a far darker tone to it. Gone was the desert of the menu screen, replaced by a wooden table littered with occult paraphernalia – spell books, golden coins, a pestle and mortar filled with green herbs, a blood red pentagram, a dagger and a skull with a black candle atop it. Famously, all these elements were removed for the American release and mysteriously replaced with pictures of animals. The only other change was the absence of the blue-robed figure at the completion of the game. Instead, a scroll unravelled across the screen summarising the percentage of correctly guessed cards and the mysterious message 'Your talents are a blessing and a curse to be used widely.' - apparently a mistranslation of some kind. Rumour had it that the Japanese version of the game also contained music that was removed entirely from the international release. Some claimed this was due to a perception that the peculiar wailing in the music might be mistaken for casting a spell. Others claimed that the music had caused nightmares in children throughout Japan and some were unable to stop singing it.

This continued for the next two decades. Every few years, a new Rohadia game. Every year, the same exact concept – predict the cards in 5 rows of 5 using the icons to say what you thought each card would show. With each release, the imagery would change, updated for the appropriate console generation, but the iconography and aesthetic remained the same – One Thousand and One Nights crossed with Medieval occultism. Reviews of the game were always abysmally low, with more than one reviewer questioning why Rohadia games continued to be made, and who, if anyone, was possibly buying them. In 1997, Korosoke Dināentāteimento closed its doors and it looked as though the story of Rohadia was finally over. Bizarrely, Rohadia enjoyed a strange renaissance on Ebay, with older editions of the game selling for up to $150 a piece.

Then, in 2007, American company Optivactive purchased the licensing rights for Rohadia. They released only one version of the game the following year – a free to play website port that allowed users to track and monitor their stats, and pitted players against one another in complex tournaments where the player to predict the most cards correctly would progress to the next round. Whether due to nostalgia, the quick turn around time on games, or the competitive element, the online Rohadia enjoyed a brief moment of mass popularity throughout high-schools and colleges in America and Europe. Rumours and urban legends continued to circulate about the game, with some claiming to receive strange messages whilst playing, others complaining of headaches and nightmares, and others referring to 'strange episodes' of hallucination in which they inhabited bodies that were not their own.

Then, without warning, the website was pulled down, Optivactive closed up shop, and for the final time Rohadia vanished. Message boards immediately lit up regarding the strange circumstances of the games cancellation. Some claimed that the side-effects had become worse and that the producers feared a class action lawsuit. Others suggested that the circumstances surrounding Optivactive's acquirement of the rights had led to legal threats from Korosoke Dināentāteimento's ex-developers.

However, it wasn't until a post in January of 2015 by user Sinfurio that the truth began to emerge. Sinfurio posted a lengthy description of the game and its history, then continued with the following post:

“Haven't thought about Rohadia for a while, but I can see people are still talking about it. I played a lot of Rohadia back in the day. I don't remember when exactly I first heard about the game, but I know some guys at school used to play it at the computer lab during recess and I think that's how my social circle got into it. I played a lot because I was good at it.

There were lots of bullshit hoaxes about ways to cheat at the game, or things you could do to make certain cards come up more often but I was just really lucky. When they started matching people up to play in competitive mode, I lost a lot of games but I won a lot more. I would see the same names starting to come up a lot, and when people were listing their Facebook profiles in their tags and stuff, we'd sometimes add each other.

That's how I got to know Greg. Greg was a player I ended up matched with a lot. We both had a really good score on Rohadia and tended to do very well. He was at university somewhere in Australia and I was still in high school but we'd play other games on steam and stuff. For me, Rohadia was always something to do in the background, but I think Greg played it more like you'd play a proper game.

I know there are lots of stories about people going nuts playing the thing, but I don't think they were true. I think if enough people are doing something, a few of them are bound to have mental health problems and I think that's probably how the rumours started, but there was definitely something not right about Rohadia. I was too young to play the earlier versions and if I hadn't been, there was no way I would have wasted video game money on that shit. All that spooky bullshit that the old games had is wasted on me, I didn't even see them until last year and no offence but its not scary. So you know I'm not talking shit when I say that there was something sinister about the game.

A few days before the server went down and the game was cancelled, Greg sent me a message that he'd been sent. It went to his email and was from 'The Rohadia' and had a subject something like 'your gift' or 'the gift'. The email said that he was one of the top players in the world and that to win as many games of Rohadia and do as well at the game as he was doing, he must be aware that there was more to the game than luck. It was all really scientifically written and written very professionally, like it had come from a company rather than a person. They said that they were using the game to find people like Greg who over a certain number of games had managed to massively outweigh the average odds. I thought it was all kind of bullshit to be honest, and I think Greg had too, but then they gave the raw data of how many games he'd played and how many games he'd won, and how many cards he had guessed correctly and when it was written down in front of him, it was weirdly compelling. They talked a lot about how probability worked in really mathematical terms that I had no idea about, but that Greg seemed to kind of get, or at least was able to parse. According to his stats, he was guessing the correct card over 60% of the time. Remember, there were 5 different cards to choose from. Probability wise, the average person should guess right about 20% of the time unless I'm missing something. The Rohadia said that the chance of anyone randomly guessing the correct card as often as he did, across the number of games he had played, equated to about a one in 3 billion. The Rohadia said that the game had been an experiment to find people like him.

He told me that him and some other very high ranking players had been invited to attend a meeting by The Rohadia, that his travel and accommodation were being paid for and that he was going to be staying at this really fancy hotel in Seattle in the states for three weeks. Two days later, his facebook was shut down. All sign of him vanished. Apparently, a number of others went missing. Then the whole Rohadia site went down. If anyone knows more about this, let me know.”

It's a cute story, but it's not true. How do I know? None of it is. Rohadia never existed. The post from Sinfurio is the first mention of Rohadia on the internet. Although some stuff has been associated with the story since (urban legends always mutate as they are passed around), all of famous details about the game were included in Sinfurio's post.

In lots of ways, Rohadia is the perfect archetype of a video game urban legend. The details are simultaneously obscure enough to be mysterious, whilst also containing a few concrete ideas that 'anchor' it to reality. The big details are always vague and foggy, whilst the small intricacies are precise. Just like with Polybius, there are certain specific details that everyone seems to recall. Everyone knows its pronounced Ro-har-jia with the soft j of the French j'adore. Everyone knows that the first version of the game was never released outside of Japan. Everyone knows that they had to cut all the occult imagery from the Snes port in America due to overzealous religious censorship laws. Everyone knows that there was a commercial for one version of the game (though which version is a point of contention) that was incredibly trippy and unsettling. I know all these things, despite the fact I also know that none of it is true.

Rohadia is a nonsense word, it means nothing, but it sounds exotic. The word has a Middle-Eastern or perhaps Arabic aesthetic. It sounds as though it could be a word in some occult, long lost language, perfect for a game with vaguely occult and mysterious themes.

Why write about Rohadia then? Why tell this story here if its available all over the internet. If I'm covering Rohadia, why not cover Polybius as well? Well there's another twist to the Rohadia story, a final little detail that makes it interesting to me.

I remember playing Rohadia. I remember it vaguely but clearly, like a second snap-shot of clarity in an otherwise hazy dream. I can feel the thick carpet of my parents' living room and the smell of cooking from the kitchen and the cards on the old boxy television screen lighting up with dancing blue fire as I played. I remember hiding my face in a cushion that smelled of our leather sofa whenever the figure appeared at the end – I can picture his gaunt face and deep blue robes. I remember playing the web version too – guessing randomly game after game after game in boring computing lessons at school, barely bothering to check the results at the end of each game. I even remember bits of the commercial – scratchy white writing on a black background and bubbling sounds. But I can't remember those things. Because it isn't real. Rohadia does not exist, has never existed.

So why, like me, can so many people remember it?

I get asked to write about Polybius a lot, but the complete and comprehensive piece on Polybius has already been created. Youtube user Ahoy has an hour long mini-documentary that I thoroughly endorse which contains a shocking amount of primary research - POLYBIUS - The Video Game That Doesn’t Exist.