Polybius (urban legend)

Polybius is an urban legend that emerged in early 2000, concerning a fictitious 1980s arcade game. The legend describes the game as part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment based in Portland, Oregon, during 1981. Gameplay supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. Eventually, all of these "Polybius" arcade machines allegedly disappeared from the arcade market.
The urban legend has persisted as a topic of interest for video games journalism and through continued interest, it has served as inspiration for free and commercial video games by the same name. "Polybius" is also the name of a classical Greek historian born in Arcadia and known for his assertion that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with witnesses.
Legend.
The story tells of an unheard-of new arcade game appearing in several suburbs of Portland, Oregon, in 1981, something of a rarity at the time. The game is described as proving popular to the point of addiction, with lines forming around the machines often resulting in fighting over who would play next. The legend describes how the machines were visited by men in black, who collected unknown data from the machines, allegedly testing responses to the game's psychoactive effects. Players supposedly suffered from a series of unpleasant side effects, including amnesia, insomnia, night terrors and hallucinations. Approximately one month after its supposed release in 1981, "Polybius" is said to have disappeared without a trace.
The company named in most accounts of the game is "Sinneslöschen". The word is described by writer Brian Dunning as "not-quite-idiomatic German" (a word constructed outside the norms of German-language usage and grammar) meaning "sense delete" or "sensory deprivation"; if it were a German term of actual use, "Sinneslöschen" would be pronounced like . The word's meanings are derived from the German words "Sinne", "senses" and "löschen", "to extinguish" or "to delete", though the way they are combined is not standard German.
Origins.
Due to the viral and anecdotal nature of the legend, an exact origin is unclear. Some anecdotal accounts claim that the legend originated on Usenet in 1994, or earlier through offline word of mouth, though no recorded evidence exists for either claim. The earliest confirmed record of the legend is an entry for the title added to arcade game resource coinop.org on February 6, 2000; although Coinop lists the page as originating in 1998, it appears to have defaulted to that time due to a database error caused by a lack of input. The entry mentions the name "Polybius" and a copyright date of 1981, although no such copyright has ever been registered. The author of the entry claims in the description to be in possession of a ROM image of the game, and to have extracted fragments of text from it, including "1981 Sinneslöschen". The remainder of the information about the game is listed as "unknown", and its "About the game" section describes the "bizarre rumors" that make up the legend.
Some time prior to September 2003, Kurt Koller, the owner of coinop.org (the Web site featuring the earliest known description of the supposed game), submitted a message to the video game magazine "GamePro" about "Polybius". "Polybius" then appeared in the September 2003 issue of "GamePro", as part of a feature story on video games called "Secrets and Lies." This is the first known printed mention of the game, exposing the legend to a mass-market audience. The article declared the existence of the game to be "inconclusive", helping to both spark curiosity and spread the story.
Following the appearance in "GamePro" magazine, a number of people claimed to have some involvement with "Polybius". In 2006, a man named Steven Roach claimed he had been one of its original programmers and that his company developed a game with very intense and cutting-edge graphics. However, according to Roach, a boy experienced an epileptic seizure while playing, and the cabinets were withdrawn by the company in a panic. Although Roach offered no proof for his claims, his story added details on the gameplay, which later inspired Rogue Synapse's game based on the legend.
Analysis.
The original game has not been proven to exist. Snopes.com, a popular Web site cataloguing urban legends, concludes the game is a modern-day version of 1980s rumors of "men in black"—in this case, visiting arcades and taking down the names of high scorers at arcade games. This led to the hypothesis that the government was hosting some sort of experiment and sending subliminal messages to the players. Magazines of the time period dedicated to electronic gaming make no mention of a "Polybius", and mainstream news also fails to note such a game. While a number of mockup cabinets and games inspired by the myth do exist, no authentic cabinets or ROM dumps have ever been located. Ben Silverman of Yahoo! Games remarked: "Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the game ever existed, no less turned its users into babbling lunatics ... Still, "Polybius" has enjoyed cult-like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era."
Skeptics and researchers have differing ideas on how and why the story of "Polybius" came about. American producer and author Brian Dunning believes "Polybius" to be an urban legend that grew out of a mixture of influences in the 1980s. He notes that two players fell ill in Portland on the same day in 1981, one collapsing with a migraine headache after playing "Tempest", and another suffering from stomach pain after playing "Asteroids" for 28 hours in a filmed attempt to break a world record at the same arcade. Dunning records that the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided several video arcades in the area just ten days later, where the owners were suspected of using the machines for gambling, and the lead-up to the raid involved FBI agents monitoring arcade cabinets for signs of tampering and recording high scores. Dunning suggests that these two events were combined in an urban legend about government-monitored arcade machines making players ill. He believes that such a myth must have been established by 1984, and that it influenced the plot of the film "The Last Starfighter", in which a teenager is recruited by aliens who monitor him playing a covertly-developed arcade game. Dunning considers "Sinneslöschen" to be the kind of name that a non-German speaker would generate if they tried to create a compound word using an English-to-German dictionary.
The game "Cube Quest", released in arcades in 1983, is a shooting game with surreal visuals which played from a laserdisc; as such, its visuals were far ahead of typical games of the time, and it would be frequently visited for maintenance (because of frequent breakdowns of laserdisc players in arcade games) and often removed from arcades after a short time for the same reason. Many commentators believe that players claiming to remember having played or seen "Polybius" may actually be recalling "Cube Quest".
However, some skeptics believe that the "Polybius" myth has a far more recent origin. British filmmaker and video game journalist Stuart Brown did not find any evidence of the "Polybius" myth existing until the year 2000. He concluded that "Polybius" was an intentional hoax made by Kurt Koller, owner of coinop.org, in order to drive traffic to his website. The hoax capitalized on the popularity of conspiracy theories and the highly viral nature of other recent Internet hoaxes. In Brown's view, the reasons for a 1980s origin are simply retroactive justifications of the hoax's existence which served as inspiration to Koller to craft his tale. He also theorized that people remembering seeing something about it on Usenet in 1994 were misremembering articles on the Pink Floyd-related Publius Enigma puzzle. Brown also noticed striking similarities between the fonts used on the supposed title screen, provided by the image on coinop.org in 2000, and two Williams Electronics arcade video games such as "Bubbles" and "". He concluded that the 5 pixel text used for the credit counter is similar to that of "Robotron: 2084", and the font that reads "Sinneslöschen" is almost identical to that of "Bubbles", with only the O different and the H flipped. He later stated that this could be a copycat fan of Williams Electronics as both "Bubbles" and "Robotron: 2084" were made by them and that both were released a year later than when "Polybius" was said to first appear.
Legacy.
In popular culture.
The 2006 Simpsons episode "Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em" features an arcade with a "Polybius" game machine.
"Polybius" for PC (2007).
In 2007, PC freeware developers and arcade constructors Rogue Synapse registered the domain "sinnesloschen.com" and offered a free downloadable game titled "Polybius" for PC. The game's design is partly based on a contested description of the "Polybius" arcade machine posted on a forum by an individual named Steven Roach who had claimed to have worked on the original. Rogue Synapse's "Polybius" is a 2D shooter resembling "Star Castle".
To complete the illusion, Rogue Synapse's owner Dr. Estil Vance founded a Texas-based corporation bearing the name "Sinnesloschen" (without umlaut) in 2007. He transferred to it the "Rogue Synapse" trademark and a newly registered trademark on "Polybius". The author does not make any claim that his version of "Polybius" is the authentic original, stating clearly on its page that it is an "attempt to recreate the "Polybius" game as it might have existed in 1981".
"Polybius" for PlayStation 4 (2017).
In 2016, Llamasoft announced a game called "Polybius" for the PlayStation 4 with support for the PlayStation VR. "Polybius" was added on the PlayStation store on Tuesday, May 9, 2017. In early marketing, co-author Jeff Minter claimed to have been permitted to play the original "Polybius" arcade machine in a warehouse in Basingstoke, England. He later acknowledged that the game was inspired by the urban legend, but does not attempt to reproduce its alleged gameplay.
"Less Than" video.
Nine Inch Nails' video for their 2017 single "Less Than" features visuals from a "Polybius" video game throughout; the game visuals featured in the video were designed by Llamasoft's Jeff Minter.
"Cabinet Man" song.
Lemon Demon song based around the urban legends of Polybius. It is never outright said in the song itself that it is Polybius, however a tweet by Neil Cicierega (the only member of Lemon Demon) says that it was a small inspiration.
"Prime Empire" ("Ninjago" season).
The twelfth season of the computer-animated television series "Ninjago" was inspired by "Polybius" and focuses on a fictional video game world named "Prime Empire". The co-creator of the series Tommy Andreasen confirmed that it was the inspiration for the season on Twitter.