RABBITS Season Two Episode One BONUS

Hey everyone, it's Terry Miles. Season 2 of Rabbits is now releasing exclusively on Stitcher Premium, but we're releasing the first episode right here for free. After all the episodes have aired on Stitcher Premium, Rabbits Season 2 will release here for free, per usual. So if you want more after you hear this first episode of Season 2, just go to stitcherpremium.com slash rabbits, click start free trial, select a monthly plan, and sign up with the code RABBITS. That'll get you a free month of Stitcher Premium. That's stitcherpremium.com slash rabbits, promo code RABBITS. Right now, enjoy Season 2, Episode 1 of RABBITS. We're going to need to stay sharp if we end up finding the traveler. Do you believe your friend was playing RABBITS? She started seeing mysterious men in gray. What's going to happen then? We're going to play this game. It should be just up ahead. Once you open the door, you can take off the blindfold. The streets were red, then black, with blood. That sounds poetic. Where are you now? The bottom line isn't money or purpose. It's inspiration. Are we still gonna have sex? I'm afraid not. A lot of people don't understand the power they're dealing with. I need you to promise me you'll only use these cards for good. It was around late spring 2010, and I was working as a server at the Original Red Robin in Seattle. One night, it was raining pretty hard. Well, it's Seattle, so it's raining a lot of nights. But I remember it was raining like crazy on this night specifically. The night my friend Dana and I stepped outside the restaurant and ran over to a nearby bus shelter to call a cab. There was a poster for a movie behind the plexiglass of the bus stop wall. That movie was called Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. On the poster were the stars of the movie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jesse Eisenberg. Dana and I both loved the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, and we were looking forward to the movie, but I noticed that something was wrong immediately. Michael Cera was the star of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, not Jesse Eisenberg. I asked Dana what she thought was going on, but she just stared at me, confused. Jesse Eisenberg is Scott Pilgrim. Michael Cera is playing Mark Zuckerberg in that Facebook movie. She shook her head and asked me what the hell was wrong. I felt the world slowly start to spin and realize that something was very wrong. That something was rabbits. From the Public Radio Alliance in Men Who Beats Whale, you're listening to Rabbits. I'm Riley Bennett. Stay with us. It's kind of a game within the game. Welcome to Season 2 of Rabbits. A lot has happened since Carly Parker told us her story. Her search to find out what had happened to her best friend Yumiko Takata had ended with Season 1. But that's not the end of the story of Rabbits. Not even close. After I'd finished listening to season one of the Rabbits podcast, I immediately got in touch with the producers. I sat down with Hollis Adams-Lane, Terry Miles, and Nick Silver and told them a new story. My story. But first, let's get caught up on what happened last season on Rabbits. If you haven't heard season one, it's time to hit stop and go listen to those ten episodes right now. At the end of the first season of Rabbits, Carly Parker ended up in Canada with a man she called Jones. She'd finally found her friend Yumiko, who had disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and Carly discovered that she herself may have actually won the ninth iteration of the game. For those of you unfamiliar with Rabbits, it's a game. It's not actually called Rabbits, officially. In fact, it's not actually called anything. It's just the game. I'm not going to go into all kinds of background details about Rabbits here in this intro. You can learn everything you need to learn by listening to Season 1 of the podcast. But I'll do my best to provide enough context to explain the game's connection to the events that led us to creating this, the second season of Rabbits, as we go along. The first thing I'd like to do is interview the person who brought me into the studio last year, when I called in and asked to talk about Rabbits. Is that chair actually comfortable? It's, uh, yeah, it's not bad at all, thanks. Okay, cool. Are you ready? I am ready. That's Nick Silver, founder of the Public Radio Alliance, cousin of Terry Miles, and close friend of Carly Parker. Well, if you don't mind, I'd like to start with the day we met. Sounds good. Okay, so it was shortly after the first season of Rabbits ended. Right after the final episode aired, if I remember, right? Yeah, I got in touch pretty quickly. You were concerned. I was. You were worried that the podcast might not be real. Exactly. I thought parts of the podcast were fictional, and I found that confusing. Which is most likely because we had to change a couple of the names and adjust locations and situations in order to keep people safe. That makes sense. Do you think that's what was responsible for your confusion? That and something else. What? The fact that I'm pretty sure Rabbits is real. At this point, I have asked Nick to address a few of the events that had allegedly taken place during the final episode of Season 1 of this podcast. Okay, so about the Magician's Arcade. What about it? It's still there. Yeah. It didn't disappear at the end of the first season of Rabbits. No, it did not. What happened? When the first season of the Rabbits podcast was airing live, there was a lot of attention up here in Seattle. People walking around one particular area looking for an arcade. One very specific arcade. The podcast premiered at number one on Apple Podcasts, so that makes sense. Right, and that was great for us that so many people were interested in Rabbits, but it turned out that it wasn't so great for the magician. Why not? You'd think he'd be happy with all the new customers. Oh, you really don't know the magician. Right, I suppose I don't. Yeah, so as part of a deal the magician made with Carly in order for her to use his voice on the podcast, he demanded that she tell the audience that the arcade had disappeared at the end of the show. He was trying to avoid unwanted visitors. That's smart. Mm-hmm. So the arcade is still there? Well, not exactly at the moment. What do you mean? It's, I mean, it's still there, but it's currently locked up. Padlocks and chains have been on the doors for more than six months. Why do you suppose that is? I have no idea, but it sucks because I don't have anywhere to play Robotron anymore. Shit, the magician really does have a Robotron machine? He has everything. The second thing I'd like to discuss connected to the end of the first season of Rabbits is something that's also related to the Magician's Arcade. In the final episode of the first season of Rabbits, Carly Parker claimed that she'd entered the Magician's Building only to discover that the arcade was no longer there. That location was now some kind of convenience store. We know now that wasn't true. It turns out there actually was no convenience store. But what about the other thing that Carly Parker claimed had happened in that location? In the final episode of Season 1, Carly Parker claimed she'd discovered the Circle on a Defender 2 machine. Yeah, that's right. She said the Circle listed Hazel as the winner of the eighth iteration of the game, and somebody named Parker Carlson as the winner of the ninth. Nick? Are you going to explain The Circle and Hazel in case there are listeners here who missed the first season of Rabbits? Good idea. Hazel is allegedly one of, if not the greatest Rabbits player who ever lived, and The Circle is like a list of Rabbits high scores, a living document of the players who have won each of the nine iterations of the modern version of the game. The Circle appears at the beginning and end of each cycle of the game. Exactly right. Thanks. In this case, Carly Parker saw the circle on that Defender 2 machine. Right, except that she's not certain she actually did. What do you mean? I mean, when I spoke with Carly Parker three days after we'd aired the final episode, she told me that she had no memory of finding anything on any Defender 2 machine. But we clearly hear her voice describing that event in her narration section. Yeah. Carly said that she couldn't explain it. Maybe it was due to some lingering effect of the drugs or sleep deprivation, but she claimed that she had no memory of recording any of that audio. So, how would you explain it? Well, maybe like Carly said, it was the drugs. Or maybe somebody manipulated that final audio somehow and then sent it to me or maybe she forgot for some other reason what other reason nick sorry you'll have to ask carly i'm afraid okay so no circle indicating that carly won the game and no disappearance of the magician's arcade Well, the first part remains unclear, but as to the second, like I said, the magician did ask both Carly and myself to find a way to convince people that the arcade was no longer there. So people wouldn't come looking for it. Exactly. And all of this explains why nobody else has reported seeing a version of the circle with Hazel listed as the winner of eight and somebody named Parker Carlson listed as the winner of nine. Yes, I suppose it does. So, the Magician's Arcade, although locked up tight, is still exactly where it was before. It didn't magically pop out of existence and get replaced by a convenience store. And it sounds like the Circle, that mysterious list of winners of the game unofficially known as Rabbits, may not have actually appeared with Carly's name listed as the winner of the ninth iteration. So if that's the case, what the hell happened? I asked Nick if he'd asked Carly if she'd be willing to explain what had happened at the end of the last season of Rabbits in her own words. Sadly, Nick said that at the end of the first season of Rabbits, Carly had told him that she was uninterested in continuing any Rabbits-related exploration or reporting. I begged him for just five minutes with Carly. He told me if I find her, I could ask her whatever I wanted. So far, I haven't been able to track her down. So we're on our own, but we're not without resources. We have the first season of this podcast as our guide, and we have something else. Something that definitely appears to be connected to the game. We have what happened to me. And no, it's not the fact that Jesse Eisenberg was featured in that poster for Scott Pilgrim instead of Michael Cera. The next day, I went back to that bus stop to take a picture, but there was no movie poster. It was an ad for Calvin Klein. I'm going to go further back. I'm going to start with something that happened when I was visiting Korea with my father. He was considering a job over there. It was 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, and the year that YouTube was born. At the time, I was into games in a big way. Obsessed, actually. The PlayStation 3 was still a few months away, but Microsoft was getting ready to release their follow-up to the wildly popular Xbox, imaginatively named the Xbox 360. The promotional campaign for the new platform began months before the official release. The centerpiece of this campaign was an alternate reality game called Our Colony. Similar to the way the wildly successful ARG called I Love Bees was created to promote the video game Halo, the purpose of Our Colony was to promote Microsoft's updated platform. Although not nearly as influential or successful as I Love Bees, Our Colony did have some fun puzzle craft, and it functioned as a gateway into the world of alternate reality games for a lot of young gamers. In the end, however, it was still just viral marketing. Or was it? After our colony, Microsoft commissioned another series of viral marketing campaigns, including something called Hex 168. 168 is 360 in hexadecimal. On October 13, 2005, members of the Team Xbox forums discovered the Hex168 website via strange messages posted by someone called Lutz. The website was filled with images of obscure conspiracy theories, and it was eventually revealed that it was a contest offering people a chance to win one of 300 Xbox 360s. of the viral marketing campaigns connected to the launch of the new Xbox was OriginXbox360.com. This website was, interestingly, hosted by Talking Rabbits. So, what does all of this stuff have to do with me over in Korea in 2005? And, more importantly, what does all of this have to do with rabbits? Well, it was one of the obscure conspiracy theories posted on the Hex168.com website, a conspiracy related to a mysterious underground game. The game didn't actually have a name, but the players referred to it as Rabbits. That trip to Korea with my father was the first time I'd heard the name Rabbits. It was also the first time I heard about something else. Something called the elevator game. Weirdly dangerous paranormal games reputed to open gateways into other worlds have existed forever. Who hasn't stared into a mirror whispering the name Bloody Mary? Or placed their hands next to their friends on a Ouija boards planchette and wondered what was guiding your hands as something seemingly otherworldly and dangerous spelled out the answers to your questions. Well, I didn't believe in the power of Bloody Mary or Ouija boards, but there was something different about the elevator game, something that felt separate from all the rest of those occult games. The elevator game felt real. My friends and I found the elevator game on a Korean website. At the time, nobody I knew in the United States had heard of it. And it would be almost a decade until we'd all see security camera footage of a Lisa Lam acting strange in an elevator, just days before police and maintenance personnel would pull her body from that water tower atop the old hotel in downtown Los Angeles. So, what is the elevator game? Well, I'm not going to go into great detail here. If you're interested, you should go back and listen to the third episode of Season 1 of the Tannis Podcast. Nick Silver goes into pretty elaborate detail about the elevator game there. Or, you can always look it up. The general idea is that you perform a series of moves in order to become what's called a traveler. The Korean website I visited, which most people believe contains the very first reference to the elevator game, describes how it works. Playing the game allegedly brings you very close to another world, and if you perform a series of intricate steps correctly, pressing buttons and avoiding certain floors, you may be able to slip into that other dimension. The website claims young people playing the game have started disappearing, never to be seen or heard from again. The website goes on to say that, yes, deaths and disappearances are likely, but those things only happen to those who play the game incorrectly. Those who step off the elevator on the wrong floor, press the wrong buttons, or follow a mysterious woman who appears on one of the floors. I'm happy to report that I did play the elevator game, and I'm still here. I didn't meet a terrifying mystery woman, and as far as I know, I didn't enter another dimension inside a nightmare world that looked identical to our own, but felt a bit off. But although I didn't find evidence of a map to entering another dimension, I did find something. On that website was a list of similar games. Games that allegedly took place in the real world. Games that reputedly resulted in people dying or disappearing. One of the most interesting of those games was something called Rabbits. There were a few other games listed as well, The Hooded Man, The Closet Game, Bloody Mary, and some others, but the name Rabbits stood out. Like the Elevator Game, Rabbits felt different from the rest. But that wasn't the moment I fell into the world of Rabbits. would come a few days later when I was back at home in Seattle. First, I played another game that I'd found on that list. Something called At Night. Based on my experience, I'd recommend you do not try this at home. The rules are simple. At midnight, you shut off all the lights in your house, blindfold yourself, and crawl into an empty bathtub. Then you wait until 3 a.m. At that point, you step out of the bathtub, dry your feet, and while remaining blindfolded, you begin to move through the house. You're looking for something, but you don't know what it is. All you do know is that you're looking for it in 72 steps. First, you take 66 steps, however you like. Then, you turn in whatever direction you want and take six more steps. Then, you remove the blindfold and discover the secret to entering the next world. I know, 666, it sounds creepy as hell, and it was. Because the thing that I found at the end After that game was the thing that led me to rabbits. It was a doll. When I opened my eyes at the end of the ritual I was staring at a Blythe doll from the 1970s It was on display as always on a shelf in my room For those of you who don't know what a Blythe doll is, Blythe is a big-eyed doll that was manufactured by Kenner in 1972. Kenner stopped making them after only one year for some reason. Blythe made a brief comeback in the late 90s, but the original was only produced for one year, 1972. In 1972, Kenner's original dolls had four hair colors, brunette, dark brunette, blonde, and red, and four eye colors, blue, pink, green, and orange. There were a number of possible hairstyle combinations, but there were only those four eye colors. Although interestingly, all of the dolls had all four different eye colors. You could change the color of Blythe's eyes by pulling a string. On the back of Blythe's head is a string. Pull it, and her eyelids go down. While her eyelids are closed, the round eyeball underneath moves one quarter and changes color. The order is blue, pink, green, orange. Pink and orange stare straight ahead, while blue and green are side glancing. Those are the only four colors, and they're always the same. So, how was I staring at a Blythe doll from 1972 with brown eyes? And more importantly, how was I staring at a Blythe doll from 1972 with brown eyes when the last time I'd looked at her, sitting on that shelf, her eyes were blue. I hadn't pulled the string to change her eye color since my dad bought the doll for me on eBay two years earlier. I pulled the string and went through the cycle of her eye colors. Blue, pink, green, brown. Orange was missing. I felt a rush of something, a subtle shift in the world. Then a dark gray cloud or something seemed to fill the room. I tried to look at the gray cloud, but when I stared directly at it, it just seemed to fade away. When I kept it in my peripheral vision, however, I felt like I could see shapes moving, swimming, dark gray forms. Then I must have fallen asleep. The next day, I did a deep dive into everything Blythe. Absolutely no versions of the doll had been created with brown eyes. This was an anomaly. What was also anomalous was the fact that my doll definitely used to have orange eyes. I remember that very clearly. What the hell was happening? I looked at every website I could find related to Blythe, but there was nothing that helped explain what had happened. On the back of the doll's torso was a bunch of text, Kinner's trademark, made in Hong Kong, and the patent numbers. This was where I eventually found something. While looking at dozens of photographs of people's Blythe dolls from 1972, I noticed a discrepancy. On the backs of all the 1972 Blythe dolls I could find, there were no patent numbers. Only the words patents pending. So, I started looking into the two patent numbers listed on the back of my Blythe doll. Nothing. I left a comment detailing my experiences playing the game called At Night on that Korean website, and didn't think about any of this stuff again for a few weeks. Then, one day, after I'd described what happened to me while playing the game to a friend of mine, she asked to see the Korean website. I pulled it up. The website looked exactly the same. The same games, the same graphics. But I did notice something new. Somebody had posted a comment replying to the comment I'd left describing my experience playing the game called At Night. Right there, beneath the comment I'd left under my favorite username at the time, Biscuthammer85, was a reply. It was written in English. One word. Rabbits. I tried to get in touch with the poster, left numerous replies, but I never heard back. My Blythe mystery was a dead end. I didn't think about rabbits for years after that. High school and college came and went, and although I continued to play video and role playing games, I didn't spend time digging into any more alternate reality games or explore any real-world gaming experiences similar to the elevator game. I remained focused on getting my degree in journalism, and then struggling through a career in indie rock, where I founded a record label, managed a couple of bands, and eventually ended up writing for a very popular music website with a reputation for harsh criticism. It was about two years ago, while I was working at that pop culture vertical, that Rabbits entered my life again. But this time, there would be no forgetting it. I was reintroduced to Rabbits by somebody I'd met my first year out of high school, while I was working on a profile for a terrible EDM artist. I'm using the word artist extremely liberally in this case. Okay, could you please state your name for our listeners? Astrid Nadev. And could you describe how we met? How many listeners are we talking about here? Well, that depends. On what? On how compelling you are. Oh, once again, it's up to me to carry Riley Bennett. Fine. You want compelling? You got it. It's our first episode. We won't really know how many listeners we have until a few episodes have aired. After they catch the dulcet tone of my voice, they're going to have to stick around. They're not going to be able to help themselves. That's science. Oh, yeah, I'll bet. Okay, so what was the question again? How did the two of us meet? Right. So we were working on a profile that... Can I say on the show? You can't say anywhere. Fine. So we were working on a DJ profile together. I was shooting pictures, you were doing whatever it is that you do. Writing. Oh yeah, that's it. Thanks. Now, do you remember the first time you heard the term rabbits related to the game? I do. Right. So we decided to go for a drink one day. This was a year or so ago. St. Patrick's Day. Exactly. You were working on an article about an A-list actor who had just released an album. You kept listening to it over and over like you just couldn't believe it had happened. Oh my God, I blocked that out. And after listening to that guy's... Can you call that music? No. Okay, well, after listening to that guy's stuff for a few hours, we needed a palate cleanser. I suggest we visit my local watering hole. I believe you pitched it as a shitty jukebox and even shittier tequila. Amen. And it was while we were listening to a song on that jukebox, something called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, a number one hit recorded by the Platters and released in 1958, that something happened. Yeah. Jenny fucking happened. Jenny Slater. Oh, yes. She was your roommate at the time. Off and on. Shortly after the song started playing, Jenny Slater jumped up from a booth in the back of the bar and ran towards the jukebox. She jumped over two tables. Could you describe what happened next? She starts smashing her hands against the jukebox. It's like she's trying to break through and stop the music or something. And she was screaming at the top of her lungs. What was she screaming? It's not supposed to be the platters. This song isn't right. None of this should be happening. It's rabbits, it's rabbits, it's rabbits, over and over. And then what happened? While she was being held down by the bartender and two of the servers, the next song started to play. And what was the next song called? It was a song by Jeff Buckley called The Door Is Open. Now, Aster and I were both huge Jeff Buckley fans. In fact, it was one of the things that bonded us together. We'd both dated the guitar player in a semi-famous local band whose biggest claim to fame was that he was Jeff Buckley's cousin. Because the two of us were such big Jeff Buckley fans, we recognized Jeff's voice immediately. Also, because we were such big fans, we knew for a fact that Jeff Buckley had never released or recorded any song titled, The Door is Open. After the incident, Aster and I went to visit Jenny in the hospital. We went up to her room, but she wasn't there. Nobody had any idea what happened to her. She was just gone. Vanished. There was an investigation, and Aster and I both spoke with the police. I didn't have much to tell them. I knew Jenny a little, but only through Aster. She'd lived with him off and on for a couple of years. Apparently, they hooked up once a long time ago. Even though it didn't take, they remained close. Astor told the police that Jenny had been acting very strange before she disappeared, that she'd become obsessed with playing a game. He didn know what the game was called or how it was played only that at least part Part of the game involved following clues in the real world He didn only tell all of this stuff to the police he told it to me as well Jenny's disappearing from that hospital was the wildest thing that had ever happened to either of us. It was all we could talk about for a long time. The chatter about Jenny's disappearance eventually died down. The jukebox in Astor's local watering hole had been replaced by satellite radio the day after the incident, so we had no way of knowing if that impossible Jeff Buckley song was still in there. We checked everywhere online, and that song didn't appear to exist outside of that jukebox. Convinced that we must have experienced some kind of weird mutual hallucination, Astor and I put everything aside and went on with our lives. We didn't think about Jenny Slater for a long time, until Aster found her hidden stuff. While Aster was getting his spare bedroom ready for his new tenant, he found something hidden under a floorboard in the closet. A handful of loose documents and a journal of some kind. The loose documents were research material on a man named Kellen Meacham. Jenny had only filled the first quarter or so of the journal, but what was there was pretty insane. There were wild scribbles, partial paragraphs, symbols, and maps. The journal appeared to be Jenny Slater's notes about the game she'd been playing. The journal opens with the following paragraph. I'm going to start keeping notes here. I've been noticing changes more and more frequently. I don't know what's going on. I'm not sure any of this is actually rabbits. I'm honestly not sure that any of this is actually real. There are a few pages of hastily scribbled maps, seemingly random numbers and symbols, a few more pages contemplating something called the Meacham Radiance, and finally, the last few entries appear to be tracking Ginny's progress as she follows a series of clues. I called Aster and asked if he'd be willing to sit down with me and go over the last few entries of that journal. But Aster was out. He didn't want any part of this investigation into what happened to Jenny. He told me that he'd looked into the game unofficially known as Rabbits and found out that it was dangerous, that people died while playing it. He told me that, and I'm quoting him here, the game you're looking into is haunted as fuck. Thankfully, Aster let me take photographs of Jenny's journal and those documents on Kellan Meacham before he sent them to Jenny's parents. I went through the journal and those pages on Kellan Meacham looking for anything that might shed light on what had happened to Jenny and why. One of the pages in Jenny's journal was dedicated to a group of people Jenny'd met who had apparently dedicated their lives to uncovering something that Kellan Meacham called radiance. These people believed that Kellan Meacham had discovered secret pathways of energy beneath the world. I found all of this stuff extremely interesting, but I didn't find any clue to what had happened to Jenny. Nothing I could use to continue my investigation. As interesting as Jenny's journal was, I'd come to a dead end. That is, until two weeks ago. I was sitting at my desk going over Jenny's journal for the hundredth time when I noticed something. There was a moving truck outside my building. The name stenciled onto the side of the truck was Traveler Moving. I wouldn't have thought much about it, except for the fact that I'd just looked up from a stack of junk mail on my desk. The letter sitting atop the pile was from Traveler's Insurance. I'm not superstitious at all, and I'm not a believer in everything happens for a reason or any of that spiritual new agey stuff. But I was struck by two things in that moment. The first thing was that name, Traveler. It was what people who played the elevator game were supposed to be called. The second thing that struck me in that moment was that the coincidence was even more significant. Not only had I just looked up from a letter from Traveler's Insurance and discovered the Traveler's moving truck, I'd also just purchased a game on eBay. An old role-playing game from the 70s called, you guessed it, Traveler. Now, could all of this be a coincidence? Absolutely. In fact, although I did run out and take a bunch of pictures of that moving truck, I was pretty sure that, as surprising as it was, this was still nothing but a set of remarkable coincidences. That was until my friend Charlie asked me to meet her for a drink Hey, what's with the voice recorder? I'm working on an audio project Cool, what is it? It's a podcast Of course it is What's that supposed to mean? Everybody has a podcast these days, even my massage therapist What's your podcast about? Well, I'm not sure yet, I just started Intriguing Yeah, or a complete waste of time. Well, if it turns into something, let me know. My friend Nick is the boss over at the Public Radio Alliance. He's always looking for new stuff. Thanks, I'll definitely let you know. Do you remember this place? I remember a lot of fuzzy mornings after trivia night. You want to play pinball? Oh, yeah. Charlie and I played pinball almost every night back then. We stuck around and played until the bar closed. It was really nice to just hang out with Charlie again. I'd been feeling a bit stressed, and it turned out that pinball and drinks were the perfect recipe for relaxation. The next afternoon, I was scrolling through a bunch of photos we'd taken the night before. The first photo was a picture of Charlie standing in front of the pinball machine, pointing to her high score. She was giving me the finger with her other hand. I smiled and scrolled through the rest of the pictures. As I went back to look at a few of them again, I swiped past the pinball picture to the last photo I'd taken of the traveler moving truck. I noticed it immediately. The license plate number of the truck. It was the exact same number as the high score Charlie had gotten on one of the pinball machines. Something called Bride of Pinbot. Another coincidence. I put on my coat and walked back over to the pub. There was nobody in there except for the bartender. I ordered a Coke and made my way over to the pinball machines. Standing against the wall, along with three pinball machines, were a number of old stand-up arcade games. Double Dragon, Missile Command, Star Castle, Berserk, and Galaga. I played the pinball machine called The Bride of Pinbot for hours. but nothing happened. I was about to head home, but I had one quarter left. I'd played a bit of Berserk at my old university pub. It was one of the only arcade games on campus, so I played it quite a bit. I slipped my last quarter into the machine and started playing. I did pretty well, considering I hadn't played in forever. When I finally lost, I somehow managed to rack up enough points to make the list of high scores. The screen read, Congratulations, Player One. You have joined the Immortals in the Berserk Hall of Fame. Enter your initials. So I entered my initials, but what happened next wasn't standard. Instead of re-displaying the high scores, which should now include mine, something else popped up. It flashed across the screen for just a moment. It was a four-word message. The door is open. A couple of seconds later, I was looking at another list. There were nine Roman numerals followed by names listed on the screen. It was what Rabbits players refer to as the Circle, the list of the winners of each of the nine iterations of the game. During Season 1 of the Rabbits podcast, Carly Parker claims she'd discovered the Circle on an old Defender 2 machine in a convenience store, located in a building that used to house the Magician's Arcade. We now know that the Magician's Arcade never actually disappeared, that it's still located in the same place. And we now know something else. If the version of the Circle that I'd uncovered on the Berserk machine in that pub was current and legit, there was no winner listed for the 8th or 9th iterations of the game. If that version of the circle was correct, the ninth version of the game wasn't over. It's Rabbits. I'm Riley Bennett. We'll be back again next week. Until then, stay safe. If you enjoy Rabbits, please rate and especially review on Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you found us. Reviews are key to keeping Rabbits on the charts, where people can find our show. Thank you so much for listening. We couldn't make Rabbits without you. Rabbits is produced by Nick Silver, Sadie Robinson, and Mason Wu. Produced, mixed, and edited by me, Riley Bennett. Associate Producers, Tara Pratt, Charlie Williams, and David James. Executive Producers, Nick Silver and Hollis Adams-Lane. As always, listen to Tannis at tannispodcast.com and The Last Movie at thelastmoviepod.com. For legal and safety reasons, we've elected to change some names and leave others out entirely. We don't do this very often, but we're not willing to compromise people's safety for any reason. Thanks again for listening to Rabbits. The Wind