Polybius is an alleged 1981 arcade game described in a 1998 urban legend. The original game's actual existence has never been authoritatively proven, but it has served as inspiration for several free and commercial games by the same name.
The urban legend is that the game was part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment, with gameplay producing 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. Finally, all of these Polybius arcade machines allegedly disappeared from the arcade market.
Polybius is thought to take its name from that of the Greek historian Polybius, who was known for his assertion that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with witnesses.
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History
Urban legend
An entry for the title was added to arcade game resource coinop.org on August 3, 1998. 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 rumours" that make up the 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 urban 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. 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."
The company named in most accounts of the game is Sinneslöschen. The word is described by writer Brian Dunning as "not-quite-idiomatic German" meaning "sense delete" or "sensory deprivation". These meanings are derived from Sinne, "senses" and löschen, "to extinguish" or "to delete".
Polybius received some mass-market attention in the September 2003 issue of GamePro magazine, as part of a feature story on video games called "Secrets and Lies". The article declared the existence of the game to be "inconclusive". Snopes.com claims to have debunked the existence of the game as a modern-day version of 1980s rumors of "men in black" 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.
Analysis
American skeptic producer and author Brian Dunning believes Polybius to be an urban legend that grew out of exaggerated and distorted tales of an early release version of Tempest that caused problems with photosensitive epilepsy, motion sickness, and vertigo. 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 FBI 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, as it was referenced in the plot of the film The Last Starfighter, in which a teenager is recruited by a man in black who monitors 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.
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Legacy
Though the original has never been authoritatively located, several video games have been published using the name Polybius, drawing upon the urban legend as inspiration. The claims made in the urban legend of psychoactive or subliminal effects do not apply to these games.
PC game
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 with extremely intense graphical effects. It also exactly duplicates the distinctive title screen and font referred to in the urban legend, and is compatible with PCs mounted inside arcade cabinets. As a result, fans were able to create "playable Polybius arcade machines" using this version, which fueled the popularity of the urban legend. Most people claiming to have found the "lost Polybius arcade machine" are referring to this game.
To complete the illusion, Rogue Synapse's owner Dr. Estil Vance founded a Texas-based corporation bearing the name Sinnesloschen (without accents) 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 1991".
Atari 2600 game
Chris Trimiew, owner of Lost Classics, is the author of a homebrew Atari 2600 game named Polybius. Gameplay is not claimed to be based on the original game, and the author expressed doubt that the Atari 2600 hardware would be able to emulate anything close to the claimed original arcade game. It is a simple crosshair-based shooting game resembling Star Raiders, except that occasionally the screen flashes subliminal messages such as "DEATH", "PAIN", and "SUFFER". He marketed the game on October 5, 2013 at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, as a limited run of 30 cartridges.
PlayStation 4 game
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. He later more realistically stated that the game was inspired by the urban legend, but does not attempt to reproduce its alleged gameplay. He said it was instead based on his interest in the ability of video games to induce the psychological state of flow (also called "being in the zone") and his own observations of positive psychological effects as a result of playing VR games, most notably the unreleased VR version of TxK. Minter also cited influence from multiple other classic games including Space Harrier, After Burner, the 1983 vector game Star Wars, S.T.U.N. Runner, and Zarch.
Llamasoft's Polybius is a fast 3D shooting game with racing elements. The game's play was designed to minimize virtual reality sickness by the use of continuous forward motion with limited abrupt changes, and no interruptions to gameplay other than controlled breaks at the end of each level; however, the game does include intense visuals. Although designed as a VR game, Polybius is fully playable in 2D on a standard PlayStation 4, and also includes support for 3D television output.
Metro awarded Polybius 9/10, calling it "one of the definitive action games of the current generation". Eurogamer awarded it a Recommended trophy, and stated "it is magical".
On July 13, 2017, the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails released a music video for the song "Less Than", featuring a woman playing this game. Llamasoft later described the version of the game used in the video, a custom build running on the PC with user configurable effect sequencing.
In popular culture
Polybius machines have appeared in the background of arcade scenes on television shows and in other media. In the 2006 episode of The Simpsons, titled "Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em", a Polybius cabinet appears in an arcade full of outdated arcade machines from the 1970s and 1980s, bearing a single button and printed with the words "property of US Government". The game also appears in the background of two episodes of the 2014 television show The Goldbergs and a poster advertising the game is present in the local theater, in the comic Batman Inc. No. 1 (2012), and on a T-shirt in Vertigo's 2008 House of Mystery series.
The Polybius legend is an integral part of the plot of Doomsday Arcade, a video series hosted by Escapist. It is also used as part of the plot setup in Armada: A Novel by Ernest Cline.
The short-lived G4 TV series Blister has a story arc centered on the search for Polybius, although the final installment was never filmed due to the cancellation of the series. In the comic book series Hack/Slash, a slasher by the name "Grin Face McGee" was jointly inspired by Polybius and Splatterhouse, according to writer Tim Seeley. A modern-day sequel to Polybius is the central plot point of short story "Out of Order" in the 2016 Portland-themed weird tales anthology City of Weird.
On April 11, 2017, an episode of the show Dimension 404 titled "Polybius" aired on Hulu and addresses the urban legend of the game in a horror sci-fi format.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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