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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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...
