The Purge Challenge

If you browse certain channels late at night, or plunge deep enough into the documentary genre on Netflix, one theory that circulates the airwaves is the concept of alien intervention on ancient civilisations. The evidence? Pyramids. Egypt, Mezo-America, China ; civilisations that had no contact, yet all built their most important structures as pyramids. Could it be a coincidence? Or is it evidence of alien intervention?

From January to March of 2020, an idea circulated three distinctly different areas of the internet. In each region, seemingly disconnected and independent of one another, an internet phenomenon enjoyed a brief, yet brutal reign of terror before the worsening Covid-19 pandemic put an early end to its popularity. In the United States, Estonia and Argentina, a game was being played using the internet as a platform. In Argentina, its name was Ultraviolence, a phrase taken from English used in the 1962 Burgess novel, a Clockwork Orange. In Estonia it went by two names, initially 'Kesköö mäng' or the 'midnight game' and later 'Koputama koputama' or knock knock.

In the United States, it was known as The Purge Challenge.

Finding the genesis of The Purge Challenge is difficult. It seemingly started earlier than initially believed, a small cell of players active in late 2019. There are forums which contain information regarding the game with posters from several colleges across the mainland USA, but the vast majority of information has been stripped in the intervening months. The earliest post I can find that seems to be a confirmed link to The Purge Challenge is from January 23rd and exists on a local Intranet message board for the University of Pittsburgh. The post is short, to the point and written in a code that only players of The Purge Challenge are likely to be able to fully parse.

A user going by the name 'S.Mirin' writes:

“LTHPurge. T4-6. NF. CTF. FFO.” Beneath this, a date – January 25th, a time – 20:00, and an address in the student housing district near to the university.

“Okay, so obviously this is a code.”

His name, or the name he has given me, is Cyclops Rock. When I went delving into the history of The Purge Challenge, his name was mentioned several times as one of the earliest adopters. Cyclops Rock sits on a large bed with a poster for Quentin Tarintino's Kill Bill in a frame behind him. He is athletically built with a broad chest and muscular tanned arms. His physique, his accent and his mannerisms make me think of Lacrosse. On Skype, he wears a pair of dark sunglasses and a motorcycling snood that covers the lower half of his face. He is, naturally, keen to maintain anonymity.

“LTHPurge is simple, its 'looking to host'. This guy is saying they'll host rather than invade, which means they'll be defending. T4-6 is an indicator of team number, see if this was me I wouldn't like that range. I didn't like playing without a solid number, but you know college students, they're hard to get to commit. NF is non-fatal, that's always good. CTF is capture the flag which some folks started doing instead of the normal game and FFO isn't something we saw in California, but I think it's like 'for fun only'. Basically, you're not making any bank off of this.”

After chatting for a while, he relaxes. Talking about The Purge Challenge fills him with a strange nostalgia for a time that existed mere months ago, but seems entirely removed due to the global pandemic.

“I didn't invent the game,” he says, “and the people who introduced it to me didn't invent it either. But I've played more than anyone else I know. In February, I was playing it four, five times a week.”

He lifts his shirt and reveals a network of scars. Rolling up one sleeve reveals a chunk of gnarled flesh that looks like a tree branch and doesn't seem to have healed quite right. He lowers his sunglasses for a moment to show a bisected eyebrow where stitches have stopped the hairs growing. A week later he emails me a collection of photos taken in February and March – the handsome, athletic young man looks as if he has been hit by a train.

“I got really into it,” he says.

The game is simple. One party act as a host. The other party are invaders. At an agreed time, on an agreed day, for an agreed period, the players job is to invade the house of those hosting. There hosts job is to stop them. There are variations; individual house rules that quickly spread and became their preferred rule sets of different teams.

“Up in Canada, they called it Home Alone, like the movie, you know?” Cyclops Rock says, miming the classic Macauly Culkin scream. “Originally, the point was to steal whatever you could from the hosts and make off with it before you got hurt. Sometimes, you'd get a laptop or a couple of cellphones, cash, sometimes you'd find someone's stash and make off with their medicine cabinet or whatever. Problem was, nobody wanted to host because although you get an advantage, there's nothing in it for you. Nobody invading was bringing their wallet or cellphone with them.”

I feel the urge to ask why they played, but I can tell it wouldn't lead anywhere. I'm too old, too out of touch and too square. The Purge Challenge was intrinsically a Zeitgeist for a specific demographic – college age kids, younger teenagers wanting to emulate those college kids, adults in out of the way places where there was nothing to do. The Purge Challenge enjoyed a surprising popularity outside of college towns, in quiet lifeless suburbs and off-the-beaten track towns in the south. Instead of asking why he played, I ask him the worst injury he ever sustained.

Cyclops Rock clucks his tongue and thinks for a moment, then he turns and parts his hair. There is a scar across the crown of his head that turns my stomach. Perhaps seeing my reaction in the webcam, he laughs.

“I was playing some 3 v 3 up with some high school buddies at Chicago U. We were players and raiding some off campus dorm room in the nice part of town. It was NF – so that means nobody wants to do anything that's going to end up with a body to take care of, you know? It got violent but at the end of the day, it was supposed to be a game. They were a good host team, they'd done some clever shit and my buddy was out because he'd trodden on some nails that came up through the carpet and was worried he'd slow us down too much with his limping. I know they're in the house, but they're hiding, I sneak up the stairs and see an empty bedroom. All of a sudden this huge meat-head drops through the ceiling and catches me in the back of the skull with a hammer.”

“He hit you in the back of the head with a hammer?” I ask in disbelief.

Cyclops Rock laughs and waves me away with one hand.

“It's cool man, that kind of shit happened. Suddenly my legs are going and I can't see straight. I'm trying to talk and I can hear this slurring coming out of my mouth and homeboy has gone white as a sheet. Next thing I know, the lights are all on and everyone's crowding round me and talking. Then it was the next day and I was in hospital.”

I ask him if he knows anyone who has died.

“Personally? No. Does it happen? I'm sure it did.”

Whilst Cyclops Rock and others like him were playing The Purge Challenge across the United States, just under five thousand miles away, a woman named Juula was playing Knock Knock. Juula is older than her American counterpart. She is petite and pale with tight muscular arms and a flat stomach. Her steel-coloured eyes watch me intently from beneath the rim of a baseball cap.

“I don't know when I started playing,” she says with a deep, level voice. “Not until after Christmas.”

In Estonia, the game is different. It is more serious. There are less rules. Perhaps most dangerously of all, it is a solo sport. All games are one on one.

“I don't know what it's like in America,” she says, staring out across the street from the café where her laptop is propped on a table. “It was on the news here very quickly. People started worrying a lot. Kersti Kaljulaid called it a national emergency or a national disease or something. It was played very quietly after that, very sneaky.”

“It must have been very dangerous,” I say and she nods emphatically.

“Very dangerous,” she confirms.

Strangely, in Estonia it was not hidden internet forums where contact was made, but across a range of pre-existing social media platforms. Weirdly, it was the internet dating app Tinder that served as the primary method of players meeting one another.

“There is a joke that Tinder doesn't work in the Baltics,” Juula says. “Estonia has some of the best internet services in the world and was one of the first countries in the world to have widespread free wireless internet in most places, but app dating never took off here in the same way it did in other countries. Estonian women don't want to meet strangers to date, we want to date people we know. It's a stereotype, but it's true. I met my boyfriend through my sister. She met her husband at work. All my friends have boyfriends they met through other people or maybe at a party. We don't really use the internet for love so much. For some reason though, Tinder became the go-to contact method for Knock Knock. People would put in their profiles that they weren't looking for a relationship, just looking for a game to play.”

I ask her how many times she played Knock Knock.

“Probably ten times,” she says. “Maybe a little bit more. I defended my place five times and won all of those because I was sneaky and made good traps. When I was the person trying to get into the other persons house I was good because I would always climb the house instead of trying to get in through doors or windows. Sometimes I'd manage to rob the upstairs and then escape before they'd even know I was there. One guy had cameras up around his place so he saw me climbing the wall and he waited at the top.”

She undoes a couple of buttons of her blouse and reveals a patch of discoloured skin across her chest.

“He threw a bowl of boiling water at me as I reached the window. I was wearing a motorcycle helmet so my face didn't get burnt, but I panicked and fell all the way to the ground. He threw a bunch of carving knives and butcher knives at me whilst I was laying there trying to catch my breath. He missed and I managed to run away but I was really pissed because that had not been anything to do with what we had agreed.”

I ask her if people used the game to scam a lot.

“I had friends who went to the house and there was be a man there who had said they were a woman when they started booking the game. Other than that, people tended to downplay the violence. One of the times I was using my house as the base, a guy brought a stun gun with him and a blowtorch. I was pissed because we'd agreed just basic stuff and here he was trying to burn my house down and paralyse me. That kind of thing happened a lot.”

I ask Juula the same question I asked Cyclops Rock. Does she know anyone who has died as a result of playing the Estonian version of the game.

“Yes,” she says. She refuses to elaborate. A few moments later she tells me she has to go.

Despite reaching out, I didn't find anyone in Argentina willing to talk about Ultraviolence, and with good reason. Ultraviolence had been born out of pre-existing gang conflicts and turf warfare. Whilst it was still played in a very similar way to Knock Knock or The Purge Challenge, it was even more dangerous. Every game had a very high risk of ending in fatalities or serious injury. Drugs were often involved. Those who attempted to play it as they did in America and Estonia often found themselves jumped or kidnapped until their families could pay a ransom. I find a few traces of message boards where games are being talked about, but they're in conversational, internet speak Spanish and I can't decode it well enough to tell the intricacies of what they are discussing. A more fluent contact translates some of the websites for me, but for the most vicious form of the game, they are surprisingly sparse on interesting details. In comparison to its American and European counterparts, Ultraviolence seems more like an excuse for out and out warfare, rather than a fad. It was in fact the Argentinian version of the game that gained the most international attention when 19 murders attributed to Ultraviolence occurred in the city of Rosario within the space of 12 hours.

So there it is. Three games. All different, but all variations of the same. All taking place across the world, seemingly independently, all beginning within the same time-frame. What prompted these three violent, dangerous and occasionally fatal games to spring up from nowhere simultaneously? The American version of the game clearly takes its name from The Purge series of films in which a totalitarian government declares a national annual holiday in which violent crime is entirely legal for a period of 12 hours each year. However, no new films in the series had been released close to the time that The Purge Challenge began appearing on message boards. So why?

The answer, according to Juula at least, is simple – the three games were a response to the global situation of the time.

“I think you see this kind of thing a lot,” she says. “There was this feeling at the end of last year. There was violence all around the world and climate change and international incidents seemed to be happening a lot. The world seemed on the edge of disaster, which is almost hilarious now what with the fact we have the global virus. I think the games were all just people reacting to the world at the time and people tend to react in similar ways wherever they are. Ultraviolence and Knock Knock and TPC are all just the same thing – people responding to the horror of the modern world.”

Maybe there is no coincidence. Maybe humans behave in fundamentally the same manner regardless of where they are from.

When faced with the modern world, perhaps The Purge Challenge is the most logical response.

When faced with building something, perhaps pyramids are just the most sensible way to stack stones.