Did You Play Polybius at the Arcade Center?

The apparently official game cabinet.

Polybius is an urban legend about a rare arcade game released in 1981. The game was created by a mysterious company called Sinneslöschen (German for "Sense Deletion") and was a puzzle/shoot-'em-up somewhat like Tempest. It was only released in a few suburbs of Portland, Oregon. 

It was supposedly very popular, with people forming long lines to play it. However, players reported strange things about the game, such as hearing a woman crying and seeing grotesque faces out of the corner of their eyes. Players would also have nightmares, experienced nausea, headaches, blackouts or even develop amnesia. Some even committed suicide. Others stopped playing video games altogether and at least one became an anti-video game activist. According to one owner of an arcade, men wearing black suits would often come to collect "records" from the game. 

They did not take any money, simply data on gameplay. Because of this, the leading theory is that it was some sort of government experiment using subliminal messages. The game remains in obscurity as around one month after its release, all of the cabinets suddenly disappeared. One cabinet reappeared in an arcade 1998, but quickly disappeared again. While some have tried to recreate the game, no one has ever found the original ROM.

Title screen.

The bizarre rumors about this game are that it was supposedly developed by some kind of weird military tech offshoot group, used some kind of proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA or something, kids who played it woke up at night screaming, having horrible nightmares. 

According to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in black coats would come to collect "records" from the machines. They're not interested in quarters or anything, they just collected information about how the game was played. 

The game was weird looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements, the kids who played it stopped playing games entirely, one of them became a big anti video game crusader or something. We've contacted one person who met him, and he claims the machines disappeared after a month or so and no one ever heard about them again. 

Until the apparently original ROM showed up. 

Here's what we've found so far:

• Found English strings "insert coin" and "press 1 player start" and "only" - looks like a 1 or 2 player game. 
• Text in the game says "(C) 1981 Sinneslöschen" Maybe a German company?

Even The Simpsons parodied the game.

If these game consoles were ever actually in Oregon, they must have gone somewhere. Many owners of rare and classic arcade games are members of the Vintage Arcade Preservation Society, which lists exactly one person as the owner of an original Polybius: Robb Sherwin, who lives in Colorado, and owns a dozen or so classic video games. However, Robb's listing there is really just a placeholder for his website, Jolt Country with the Polybius Home Page. He lists most of what seems to be known about the urban legend, including a few photos of unknown origin, and a joke YouTube video he made where they find a Polybius game in a garage, turn it on, and — well, you can guess the rest.

But the bottom line is that there is nobody in the vintage arcade community who openly claims to have, or to have ever seen, an actual Polybius. All the issues of Electronic Games magazine from 1981 through 1984 are available online, and contain not a single mention of the game. In fact, I could find no print references to the game at all prior to 2003, when the urban legend was described in GamePro magazine. This essentially nails the lid on the coffin on the suggestion that Polybius ever actually existed. It did not.

However, saying that is one thing, and concluding that it's therefore just an Internet hoax is another. It turns out that the story of Polybius may indeed have an eerily similar basis in fact.

We do know that at least two people fell sick from playing arcade games in Portland, Oregon in 1981. The Eugene Register newspaper reported on November 29, 1981 that 12-year-old Brian Mauro played Asteroids for more than 28 hours, trying to break the record, as local television crews watched. He finally bowed out with stomach discomfort, attributed to anxiety and all the Coke he drank. Researcher Catherine DeSpira, writing in a 2012 edition of online vintage gaming publication Retrocade, discovered that a Michael Lopez developed a migraine headache while playing Tempest on the same day and in the same arcade where Brian Mauro was going for his record. Lopez was reported to the police when he collapsed in pain on someone's lawn. Two players knocked out in the same arcade on the same day. Stories spread like wildfire in the local middle schools: video games were freaking kids out, possibly even trying to take over their minds.

Anyone looking for corroborating evidence would have found even more frightening facts. Throughout the early 1980s, at least nine cases were reported of epileptic seizures being triggered by video games in the United States. It's called photosensitive epilepsy. It's rare and unpredictable, but very real.

Not only that, but there were, in fact, government agents poking around Portland area video arcades at that very same time. Just ten days after Mauro and Lopez crashed, state, local, and federal agents raided video arcades throughout the region. It turned out that some arcade operators illegally used their video games for gambling, by modifying them with counters that allowed owners to pay out cash to players based on how many points they made in their game, and thus increasing business. In preparation for this raid, FBI agents had been going around to arcades and taking photographs of player initials on high-score screens, hoping to identify potential witnesses. And officers had gone into every business in the city that had video games, and poked and prodded around the back of the machine, looking for these illegal counters.

Arcades had also become a popular place for the sale of stolen goods and drugs, and as a hangout for truants. In fact authorities even set up at least one fake arcade in Portland and filled the game consoles with hidden cameras, similar to today's automated teller machines, hoping to catch criminals in the act.

How much more raw material was needed for teenagers to see a pattern? Games were physically harming players, giving them headaches and nausea; and government agents actually were lurking in every arcade shadow. The Polybius urban legend was hardly fiction; it was nearly a docudrama. 

And there's even more evidence that bolsters its validity. The US government did (and still does) use versions of commercial video games. Battlezone, a tank simulator game considered to be the first first-person virtual reality game, was modified with controls that mimicked those of an M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle in 1980, and sold to the military as The Bradley Trainer. It was intended to train Bradley gunners. One still survives in a private collection.

Most famously, in 1996 the US Marines ordered a modified version of the first-person shooter game Doom II and used it to train ground troops on specific missions. The version has since been made available to the public for download. Today the distinction between games sold to the public and games used by the military has been blurred into virtual non-existence...