Polybius: The Killer Arcade Game That Got Erased from History

Pronunciation: Poh-li-bee-us

If you ever find yourself stumbling around the cobwebbed corners of a spooky old retro arcade, there are two vintage gaming machines which are to be avoided at all costs.

The first is Space Invaders because it’s absolutely awful and it plays like a pig.

The other is the slightly more obscure 1981 video game Polybius, and the reasons are rather more perilous.

Depending on who you talk to, Polybius was dangerously addictive, could make you seriously ill, infected the player’s brain with subliminal messages, and was capable of producing intense psychoactive effects.

Not only that, it was linked to the mysterious disappearances and even deaths of several children who dared to play it before the plugs were permanently pulled from the sockets just a month after it was launched.

For the next couple of decades, it was difficult to find any reference material for Polybius because the very existence of the game appeared to have been wiped from history.

The presence of men in black suits who had hovered around the cabinets during the game’s brief stint in the arcades sparked speculation that Polybius was actually a cunning façade for either a secret military recruitment drive, or a government-funded mind control experiment that perhaps went slightly wrong as too many players lost all their lives, or at the very least lost their minds.

And it wasn’t until the dawn of the millennium that retro gaming enthusiasts began to publicly ponder what the hell had been going on with Polybius.

Whilst it may be easy to instinctively assume that all this was either just a hoax concocted many years after the supposed event, or perhaps just another example of the cheating memory, the curious thing about The Polybius Conspiracy is that so many elements of the story are based on surprisingly real events.

There was indeed some secretive sinister shit going down in the American video arcades of the 1980s. It’s just a matter of assembling all the correct data and being careful not to shove it all into a conspicuously crooked cabinet of curiosities.

Be warned that you may be subject to some subtle subliminal messaging throughout the course of this article as we attempt to untangle the chaotic snarl of wires around the back of the most treacherous video game in history.

Winners don’t use drugs.

Mystery Island

I can already sense the eruption of frothy outrage from hordes of retro gaming nutters following my slightly facetious dismissal of Space Invaders in the opening paragraph.

Speaking as a retro gaming nutter myself, I of course appreciate that Taito’s 1978 game is one of the most groundbreaking and influential video games of all time.

I was just pointing out that I find it hard to love – or spend more than about five minutes playing – the dreary and sluggish monochromatic snoozefest today.

And yes, that’s easy to say about a 47-year-old video game. But Space Invaders already felt massively out of date following the release of Galaxian just one year later in 1979 which was far more colourful and lively, and is still an entertaining blast today.

The thing is that 1981 was still a primitive era for arcade games, and so nobody could have expected anything too jaw-dropping from Polybius when we were still several years away from games as sophisticated as Paperboy or Bubble Bobble.

This was before the concept of a video game being a challenge you were meant to ‘complete’ with the ultimate goal of reaching the end screen.

Back then, players were shoving their ten pence pieces or quarters into the endless and simplistic scenarios of Asteroids, Pac-Man, Frogger, and Defender with the aim of just trying to stay alive for as long as possible to grab the prestigious top spot on the high-score table.

If you were really good at a particular game, you could potentially be hogging that cabinet for hours on end, and probably wouldn’t be very popular with the owner of the arcades.

But trying to stay alive for as long as possible may have been trickier than usual when you were playing Polybius.

I can already see a good reason why Polybius may have been largely forgotten for so long, and that’s because anybody who lived outside the suburbs of Oregon, Portland would have been unlikely to have ever seen it.

Whilst there are a few rare reports of the machine supposedly turning up in other locations, the general consensus is that it only popped up for a very brief time in 1981 in several arcades scattered around Portland.

It hardly landed with a bang, though. Whilst every other arcade game in the joint would have been plastered with vivid artwork of flying saucers and aliens and giant centipedes, the design of the Polybius cabinet was decidedly minimalist to say the least.

Some recall that it was entirely black with zero branding or imagery or lettering, resembling something along the lines of a mini-monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The same people also tend to claim that even the screen was entirely black and didn’t flicker into life until you rolled in your quarter.

That seems a bit unlikely to me as the cabinet would surely have quickly gathered dust when most people assumed that it must be out of order, and swiftly moved onto Donkey Kong.

A more popular recollection is that whilst the cabinet was indeed mostly black, it did bear the title of Polybius on the marquee at the top. And the sole surviving screenshot of the game widely circulated online is the title screen which again is strangely minimalist.

Whilst other games would have usually fallen into ‘attract’ mode when nobody was playing, showing off a demonstration of the game in a bid to get the next customer digging into their pockets, Polybius just depicted a bland title screen which included nothing more than the name of the game, the copyright date, and the name of the company that produced it.

And we’re not talking about a well-known name such as Nintendo or Sega or Atari here.

The name of the outfit was Sinneslöschen – (pronunciation: ZIN-ess-LERSH-en) – which has a whiff of German about it, a country not usually seen as a major manufacturing hub for arcade machines in the 1980s.

The lack of an attract mode obviously meant that a newcomer to the game wouldn’t have a clue what the game was like until they parted with their quarter. That was a bit of a pocket money gamble for a young kid as you could end up playing something as amazing as Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, or you could end up stuck with educational tripe such as Professor Pac-Man which itself quickly drifted into obscurity for more understandable reasons.

But even 44 years later, we still don’t really have that much of a clue what the game was like.

A few people have suggested that it was a 3D rotating puzzle game with mazes that were similar to the layout of Pac-Man, but the majority of people who have fuzzy memories of the game recall that it was more of a fast-paced psychedelic shooter with dizzying flashing lights, strobe effects, spinning geometric shapes, and hypnotic visuals that were enough to make you hurl all over the control panel.

Whilst there are lorryloads of Reddit users who have strived to give more in-depth details on this admittedly vague premise, the problem is that none of them really match up with each other.

One point that most players can agree on is that the closest comparison can be made with Atari’s revolutionary 1981 classic Tempest which is another example of a vintage title that holds up well today.

If you’ve never played Tempest before, it’s quite tricky to explain. Instead of a joystick, you used a rotary knob to move your blaster around vector-graphic tubes which gave the illusion of a three-dimensional effect as you blasted your enemies to pieces.

Perhaps the best way of describing it is to imagine that you’re whizzing around the edges of a spider’s web and shooting at the targets that are emerging from the centre and coming right at you across the various trails of the web, growing bigger and bigger as they get closer to you.

The game quickly evolved into a pretty frenetic experience and was a major breakthrough for vector graphic arcade games.

And this brings us to another odd point about Polybius.

Vector graphic games – which looked like simple line drawings forming wireframe or geometric shapes – were relatively rare but there are a few cracking examples from this era including Asteroids, the tank simulator Battlezone, and of course, Tempest.

Most games instead made use of Raster graphics which deploy grids of pixels to create colourful but often blocky characters as seen on something like Pac-Man or Burger Time.

The thing is that games were produced from one or the other, as the monitors were manufactured to exclusively handle either Vector or Raster graphics.

And yet many players recall that Polybius somehow used both, as there were some levels which involved hurtling through disorientating vector tunnels at ridiculous speeds, whilst other levels involved swirls of vivid colour and pixelated sprites which could only have been depicted on a monitor that could handle Raster.

If this was true, it would have been a pretty impressive achievement from the little-known manufacturer Sinneslöschen.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, so take plenty of snacks.

But none of this leaves us with a very clear picture of Polybius, aside from a few clues that it may have played a bit like Tempest, and it felt like either a fiercely intense high-octane shooter or a kaleidoscopic and disorientating acid trip through space on a rocket powered by cream of magic mushroom soup, or both.

But however the game played, it certainly proved to be popular. Remarkably popular. Maybe even dangerously popular.

It was said that long queues formed in front of the cabinet, often breaking out into full-scale brawls over whose turn it was supposed to be.

I’m pretty sure that a punch-up in the arcades is nothing unusual in itself – I must have witnessed a few myself – but this felt different. These people were giving each other a proper pummelling whenever they thought that they might have to wait a few more minutes for their turn on Polybius. This might seem to suggest that the game wasn’t just particularly good, it was downright addictive to the point where it was sparking an early example of video game rage from players desperate to score their next fix.

The subliminal messages that occasionally flashed quickly onto the screen may have had a part to play in fuelling the addiction, as one of the more regularly spotted messages was “You love this, you need this” whilst others were said to include “Obey government,” “Follow Orders”, “Never question authority,” and “Join the Navy.”

But addiction was one of the milder symptoms of playing Polybius.

Some of the side-effects of playing the game for too long were insomnia, migraines, night terrors, hallucinations, and amnesia.

It’s not too surprising that the game triggered seizures in players with photosensitive epilepsy, and there’s nothing particularly mysterious about that.

But one of the stranger reported side effects included “The inability to become sad.”

In sharp contrast to this, other players were said to have developed suicidal thoughts or lost control over their own minds. Perhaps the strangest side effect of all was experienced by one guy who became so traumatized by the game that he went on to become an anti-video game crusader which arguably is an illness in itself.

There were also hushed rumours of young players vanishing without trace after playing the game, many of them later presumed dead.

The Radiotopia network’s Showcase podcast produced a seven-part series in 2017 called The Polybius Conspiracy which managed to track down one of the individuals who briefly went missing in 1981.

Bobby Feldstein claimed that he had been suffering some dizzying side-effects whilst playing Polybius at the age of fourteen in the Coin Kingdom arcades in Portland – apparently one of the dodgiest run-down arcades in the region.

He was feeling so weird that he eventually packed it in and set off for home, but he sensed that something sinister was happening to his brain and that he was no longer safe.

He made it to his home in Tillamook State Forest but nobody else was around to save him from getting seized by a group of silent strangers who dragged him out of the house as Bobby blacked out.

He awoke to find himself tied up and trapped in a series of underground tunnels, but he wasn’t alone. His bonds were later broken by a badly bashed-up boy who appeared to be a fellow prisoner.

They tried to make their way out of the tunnels, and Bobby felt that they were being pursued the whole time. It’s not clear what happened to the other boy as he disappeared – or was quite possibly recaptured – before Bobby eventually located an exit and discovered that he was in a forest around sixty miles or so from Portland.

He managed to make the long journey home only to find that absolutely nobody – not even his family – believed his account of why he had gone missing.

Bobby Feldstein told the audience of The Polybius Conspiracy podcast that the experience ruined his life, but he now exorcises his demons by conducting walking tours around Portland in which he recounts his story to anyone willing to listen.

These silent strangers may not have been your run-of-the-mill kidnappers who chase after children and then drop them in tunnels around sixty miles away, which I often felt was incredibly irritating during my own childhood.

There’s a feeling that an organisation with power and influence was working behind the scenes on hiding the secretive ulterior motive that was buried within those Polybius cabinets.

Many players recall that the game regularly attracted visitors who stood out from the usual crowd like a packet of glow-in-the-dark condoms in a claw machine.

These silent men in black suits weren’t there to play the game. They didn’t seem bothered about striking up a conversation with anyone, and they didn’t seem interested in collecting any coins from the back of the machine. They didn’t even bother to intervene when the inevitable fist-fights broke out and everyone started punching each other in the face.

Instead they simply stood there with clipboards, observing the players and the gameplay whilst scribbling down notes, presumably along the lines of “This one shows potential,” “This one will lose his mind,” and “Some idiot just lobbed another hot dog in my direction.”

It was also said that at the end of the day, the men in black suits would open up the back of the cabinet and retrieve a small black device which may possibly have been collecting all the valuable data from the recent playing sessions. By the time the arcades opened up again the next morning, the men were already in position again at either side of the cabinet.

I suppose it’s not out of the question that these men – so vividly recalled by so many players – could just have been representatives from Sinneslöschen and were there to assess the popularity of the game. Their mission may have been to ascertain whether it was worth rolling out the machines beyond Portland, Oregon.

But a more popular theory is that their mission might have been a little more important than that.

It could have been the case that Polybius was actually a covert military endurance test to track down the most promising candidates in Portland. The players who truly excelled at this battering of the senses were later invited to join the U.S military whilst the ones who failed were, erm, dumped in tunnels around sixty miles away.

That might seem like a seriously flawed recruitment process though, bearing in mind that the average regular visitor to the arcades would have been about fourteen years old.

On a more sinister note, the Men in Black could have been working for the infamous Project MK-Ultra program orchestrated by the CIA from the 1950s onwards, in which unwitting humans were used as guinea pigs in a series of shocking mind control experiments that ran for decades.

Polybius itself may have been some kind of brainwashing tool in which the young players – many of whom reportedly lost their minds after playing the game – were handing over quarters to get sucked into a devious operation designed to develop torturous new methods of interrogation.

If that’s the case, we should be thankful that the experiment didn’t last too long.

Just one month after Polybius first landed in Portland and started sending everybody around the bend, the same Men in Black marched into the arcades and removed every machine, quite possibly peeling off the hands of every young player who was screaming out for one last hit.

And from that point onwards, it was if Polybius had never existed at all.

There are some who reckon they’ve seen old Polybius machines in warehouses and storage lockers, with one member of the Vintage Arcade Preservation Society even claiming that he clocked the serial number on the back of the cabinet which just happened to be 666.

But all these claims only really began to surface about a couple of decades later following a period of complete silence. Since then, Reddit has become swamped with the stories of users who remember playing Polybius but it’s hard to take any of them too seriously, particularly the ones that make out that the machine carried on working even after the plug had been pulled from the socket.

And the lack of any contemporary documentation makes it tricky to get a proper grip on this swivelling joystick, as the authorities clearly made a good job of erasing the game from history.

We don’t know exactly how the game played, the true purpose of the machine, or anything about the shadowy company Sinneslöschen who don’t appear to have ever released anything else.

And we don’t know who coded the game, although one likely candidate who keeps popping up in discussion is the Atari designer Ed Rotberg who helped to develop a string of all-time classics such as the groundbreaking vector graphics game Battlezone.

As Ed Rotberg was working exclusively for Atari at the time, this has led some to conclude that Sinneslöschen was actually a secret subsidiary of Atari who didn’t want their real name plastered across a cabinet that was turning players into packs of wild animals.

But I think we’re gonna have to do a little more poking around the back end of Polybius to find out how much fantasy has been blended into some quite surprising truths, and address the question of whether such a game ever made it into the arcades in the first place.

Never burn your bridges unless you’re being chased by a pack of angry Trolls.

Congo Bongo

Here’s a straight answer to a straight question:

Does a game called ‘Polybius’ definitely exist?

The answer to that is an emphatic yes.

In fact, there’s at least two games that go under that title, but the problem is that neither of them are the 1981 original, and are in fact tributes to the legendary game that may or not have been real.

The first one was a freeware game for Windows released in 2007 by Rogue Synapse – a company with a bit of a reputation for turning fantasy into reality as they were also responsible for creating a real arcade cabinet version of the fictitious game at the heart of the glorious 1984 space opera movie The Last Starfighter – 23 years after the film was released.

The owner of Rogue Synapse went as far as to acquire the domain name for ‘Sinnesloschen’ – almost the same as the alleged original manufacturer but missing the funny umlaut – and created a new legal entity under the same name.

The game itself was an attempt to recreate the psychedelic Polybius game as it may have existed in 1981 based on the notes provided by Steven Roach, a coder who claimed to have worked on the original version. More on him in a bit.

But the end result was not so much an enthralling game but just an utterly bewildering experience.

A better known version of ‘Polybius’ was written by the legendary Jeff Minter in 2017 and released for the PlayStation 4 with VR support.

The funny thing here is that Jeff Minter was the first person who popped into my mind as a potential candidate for writing the original Polybius, as the reported trippy nature of the game sounded right up his interstellar highway.

I can remember the hippy Jeff Minter – often nicknamed Yak – from the 1980s when he released a long luminous library of deliciously surreal shooters for the Commodore 64 under his own label Llamasoft.

I was about to say that he was one of the most celebrated coders of the 8-bit era but I might be getting a little carried away there. He very much existed outside the mainstream, and the early days of Llamasoft involved literally just himself and his mother working from home and packing up all the games for distribution.

Jeff Minter’s games were perhaps aimed at a particularly niche market of gamers who enjoyed something out of the ordinary, and were of little interest to the majority of young kids who preferred to buy any old crap with the words Robocop or Knight Rider plastered all over the packaging.

Jeff’s games also had a curious tendency to feature big hairy animals shooting each other to bits across vivid alien landscapes. Some of my own favourite Minter titles include Sheep in Space, Mama Llama, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, and Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time.

In later years, his work has included a highly acclaimed update of Tempest for the Atari Jaguar in 1994, and a game called Space Giraffe for Windows in 2008. He’s still at it today, writing games for modern consoles and devices – and he seemed the obvious choice to code a tribute to one of the most mind-melting games that may never have existed.

When Minter’s version was first announced, he declared with tongue firmly in cheek that he had been able to accurately replicate the original gameplay after he stumbled across a genuine working Polybius machine in a warehouse in Basingstoke, England. But he later admitted that the frenetic 3-D VR shooter – which was also playable in 2D on a standard PlayStation 4 – was more of a reimagining of what Polybius might have been.

The game was incredibly well received, with several critics pointing out that certain elements of it were very similar to Tempest.

And it was nice to see that Minter also inserted a few positive subliminal messages of his own into the game including “Holiday in Basingstoke,” “Scorn lukewarm tea”, and on a more controversial note, “Resist Brexit.”

Of course, it’s not out of the question that some people may indeed have spotted a working Polybius cabinet in recent years, but chances are that they have seen a relatively new custom-built cabinet with either the Rogue Synapse or Llamasoft tribute versions of the game shoved inside.

In order to try and find out if the original 1981 version was ever really doing the rounds in Portland, Oregon, it might be useful to track the exact point at which gamers suddenly started remembering it again after a two-decade memory loss.

It’s often reported that the earliest mention of Polybius online was in a Usenet forum back in 1994, although there’s now no evidence of this at all in the Usenet archives.

It seems more likely that the game’s first online mention was in a brief entry on the video game resource website ‘Coinop.org’ which is an attempt to document every arcade machine ever released. The post was dated 1998 although some have speculated that it was actually posted a bit later in 2000. Another theory is that it really was posted in 1998 but it took a couple of years for anyone to notice it was there.

There’s not an awful lot happening in the entry. We see a single image of the simple title screen including the first online appearance of that 1981 copyright date and the company name Sinneslöschen Inc. Many still believe this to be the only surviving legitimate screenshot from the game.

The entry also briefly describes the game as “weird-looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements” which “had a very limited release, one or two backwater arcades in a suburb of Portland.”

The author admits that the history of Polybius is “cloudy” and is the subject of all kinds of bizarre stories involving kids losing their memories after playing it, guys in black coats collecting data from the machines, theories that it was developed by the CIA as some kind of behaviour modification program, and the sudden disappearance of the machines after just one month.

We don’t know for certain who actually wrote this summary, but the most likely suspect seems to be Kurt Koller, a guy whom you would presume really knew his microchips when it came to video games as he had recently taken ownership of the Coinop.org database.

But the strangest thing about the entry is that at one point, Kurt Koller – or whoever it was – suggests that he owns the ROM image file of the game which would make Polybius playable in an open-source emulator – such as M.A.M.E (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), on which I happily play thousands of old video games today.

Yet the entry gives no clues or details as to the gameplay and seems to have been written by somebody who has never played Polybius in their life.

A few years later in 2003, we see the earliest known reference to Polybius in print, specifically in GamePro magazine which ran an article entitled Secrets and Lies that took a look at the biggest myths and legends in video games – such as the Nude Tomb Raider easter egg in which Lara Croft supposedly got her kit off – and revealed whether they were genuine or fake.

It’s believed that the segment on Polybius may have been a result of Kurt Koller getting in touch with GamePro to tip them off about the game and push for its inclusion.

But the ultimate verdict from GamePro was decidedly inconclusive, and the magazine couldn’t say for sure whether the game ever existed or not.

However, it was this segment in a massively popular magazine which really propelled Polybius back into the public consciousness and led to the game evolving into a major talking point for many years to follow.

Everyone suddenly started remembering a brain-scrambling video game that was quickly pulled from the arcades, and the children of Portland who became violently ill after playing it, and the men in black suits who were regularly loitering around the machine and silently observing the chaos.

There was one comment in particular which sparked more interest than most as it came from a bloke living in the Czech Republic who claimed to have been involved in the development of Polybius.

Well, I say it was a comment. Originally posted on the Polybius entry on the Coinop.org database in 2006 by a user called Steven Roach, the end result was more like a rambling novella riddled with spelling errors and displaying little regard for punctuation.

But Steven Roach had quite a different take on the story which had nothing to do with Men in Black or Project MK-Ultra or mind-control experiments.

He reckons that he and a few buddies set up the Sinneslöschen company in 1978, primarily working on components for printed circuit boards, although they also did a bit of amateur coding as a sideline.

They were approached in 1980 by a large South American company that he declines to name but who were keen to hire Roach and his pals at Sinneslöschen to develop a new arcade game which would make use of pioneering graphics. It was an offer that the team couldn’t refuse as the mysterious big company was offering the modest outfit an absolutely staggering remuneration package.

One of the team came up with the name of the game in tribute to the celebrated Greek statesman and historian Polybius who lived between 200 to 118 BC, give or take a birthday.

But the actual completed game itself was causing a few concerns right from the beginning, as the board of directors over at the South American company were arguing over whether such a revolutionary new style game packed with such intensity might cause troubling side-effects in kids who played it for long periods.

After a brief delay, the arcade machine was given a very limited release of just seven machines in Portland to test the waters.

But just six days later, the news broke that a 13-year old boy had suffered an epileptic fit whilst playing the game, which sent the board of directors into panic mode as they believed that they had unwittingly “created a monster”. They paid a settlement to the boy’s family and swifty removed all the cabinets from the arcades, often battling against the protests of the young players who were now daring each other to have a go on “The nightmare game.”

Some of the men who removed the machines may well have been wearing black suits.

As far as Steven Roach was aware, there are no surviving ROM images of the game unless they’re still buried somewhere in the vaults of the South American company that he refuses to name.

And Roach claims that the whole saga turned out to be a crushing experience for his team. He believed that they had created something which would have changed the face of video gaming – albeit not suitable for people with epilepsy – but the game was buried and Sinneslöschen was disbanded after receiving only a meagre payment on the grounds that the game was so quickly withdrawn.

Whilst quite a few truth-seekers felt that this was the biggest new lead yet on the murky history of Polybius, not everyone was convinced, including the owners of the Coinop.org database.

They gave their own response on the Polybius entry in 2009 which made their feelings clear:

We just wanted to go on record here that Steven Roach is full of himself, and knows nothing about this game. We have it on good authority. We’ve recently received some new information about the game and yes, one of us is flying to the Kyiv, Ukraine area tomorrow and yes, the trip is related to this information. Stay tuned.

I’m not sure how Kyiv suddenly came into the equation, but if anyone did stay tuned, they’re still waiting to hear about the outcome of the trip. I can only assume that they fell under the hypnotic spell of a real Polybius game and never made the journey back.

The owners of the database also pointed out in that same post that Polybius definitely wasn’t some kind of early Tempest prototype as many sceptics had been suggesting, and that it didn’t even use vector graphics.

But considering how much they were supposed to know about the game, the actual entry remained notably sparse of detail.

Perhaps they were just annoyed that this Steven Roach feller had popped out of nowhere and seized control of their own mythical joysticks.

Here’s a strange thing, though. The video game historian Cat DeSpira later discovered that there was a very real Steven Roach who operated a company in Mexico in the 1990s that was meant to be a ‘Child Reform Academy’.

A polite way of describing this outfit would be a ‘behavioural modification program’ but a more accurate description might be a ‘brainwashing program’ in which some kids were brutally beaten and deprived of sleep in an effort to control their minds and dramatically alter their personalities.

As well as the facility in Mexico, Roach also apparently owned a similar facility in the Czech Republic which is where the poster on the database claimed to live these days.

However, his Child Reform Academy didn’t exactly win any awards, and in fact Roach and his wife were arrested in 1998 after three young girls escaped the facility and ran to the police with complaints of abuse. Roach and his wife were later charged with illegal child trafficking, child torture, fraud, unlawful confinement, and a string of other offences to boot, but they fled from justice and have been on the run ever since.

It’s interesting to ponder over whether this guy who specialised in brainwashing young children was the same guy who had earlier helped to develop a mind-altering video game.

But it seems a little suspicious that he couldn’t even decide on the correct spelling of his own company Sinneslöschen in his appallingly written post, and none of his named colleagues have ever been traced.

Of course, any old fool could have written that post under any name they liked, and a cynic might suggest that Kurt Koller or one of his colleagues at the database composed the message to take the saga in a new direction.

And it’s hard not to become overwhelmed with cynicism when you take a closer look at all the elements of the story that appear to point to Polybius being nothing more than a hoax that somehow took on a life of its own…

Green Beret

It feels a bit fishy that an arcade game released in 1981 didn’t get a mention anywhere in print until 2003, a few years after it was first mentioned online.

A Polybius believer might argue that this was down to the incredibly limited release of the game which nobody bothered to document until Coinop.org embarked on a mission to catalogue every game in existence.

But considering that children were supposedly falling violently ill or losing their minds or going missing during the single month that Polybius was in action, and considering that the game was so swiftly withdrawn in the controversial aftermath, you’d think that it would have warranted some kind of mention between 1981 and 1998.

But no, we have yet to dig up a single contemporary newspaper clipping or a single reference in a computer journal or gaming magazine. I’ve still got hundreds of old gaming magazines from the 1980s and 90s taking up far too much room in my house, and I can’t help thinking I would have come across Polybius at some point.

And after all this time, nobody has ever located the ROM image so that we can have a play on it ourselves on M.A.M.E.

Oh, there are plenty of people who claim to own the ROM but they seem very cagey about sharing it, possibly because they’re being very considerate and they don’t want us to lose our minds.

You can easily source thousands of ridiculously obscure vintage ROMS today, including all kinds of crazy Japanese stuff, often blending the classic 19th-century Chinese tile game Mahjong with women taking their clothes off and making strange noises.

But you can’t find a ROM image of Polybius for love or quarters.

And as nobody can agree on exactly how Polybius played, and there are no surviving screenshots of the actual gameplay, that just leaves us with a single screenshot of a basic title screen which could have been knocked up in an art package in five minutes by a highly-trained seal.

Speaking of gameplay, this widely-shared memory of the game incorporating both Vector and Raster graphics at the same time just doesn’t add up.

As monitors could only be produced to exclusively handle one or the other, the manufacturers would have had to decide between the two.

Even the Rogue Synapse tribute from 2007 could only make an attempt to simulate a vector display on a raster monitor to try and give the illusion of both, and there’s no way this would have been possible in 1981.

Vector monitors are now pretty much a thing of the past, and so when you’re using an emulator to have a quick blast on a vintage vector title such as Battlezone or Asteroids, you’re not quite getting the full authentic effect – the emulator is simply converting the original vector graphics into rasterized images that can be displayed on your modern raster monitor.

I only discovered this myself a few years back when I came across an original Asteroids arcade machine and was blown away by how different it felt to playing the emulated version on a PC.

In fact, I became so immersed in it that I completely overlooked the entirely black machine parked right next to it, emitting an ominous hum.

But it’s not feeling very promising when the one thing about the gameplay that most players can agree upon is the thing that would have been impossible.

Maybe the Sinneslöschen company was just way, way ahead of its time but another problem there is that there’s not a single trace of evidence that a company with that name ever existed anywhere on Earth.

Perhaps it was an ultra-secret subsidiary of another company such as Atari which was kept off the history books by the CIA.

It turns out that Atari weren’t exactly averse to creating secret and slightly dodgy subsidiaries during their very early days.

The company often secured exclusivity contracts with certain arcade chains which left many areas out in the cold as the smaller arcades were screaming out for the most popular machines that Atari couldn’t legally provide.

So co-founder Nolan Bushnell came up with the cunning idea of creating a new company in 1973 called Kee Games which would get around the exclusivity contracts by rolling out slightly inferior clones and modifications of the original arcade machines and pinball tables that were tied up in deals.

They were quite shady about it too, publicly announcing themselves as a direct competitor to Atari, and claiming that some of the titles looked so similar because Atari developers were defecting to Kee Games in their droves.

They also produced a few original titles such as Tank which funnily enough helped keep the parent company afloat during a period when Atari was experiencing financial issues.

But the game was up in 1978 after Atari was acquired by Warner Bros who closed down the dodgy offshoot.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll spend a fortune on gear he uses about twice a year.

If Atari really were the secret operators behind Sinneslöschen, this might explain the suspected involvement of Atari coder Ed Rotberg.

And there’s an intriguing connection here with the theory that Polybius may have been part of a covert military recruitment drive.

It’s easy to dismiss that whole concept as being ripped straight out of the plot of the 1984 film The Last Starfighter. In the movie, a teenager from a trailer park spends all his spare time on a fictional arcade machine called Starfighter which later turns out to be a simulation test created by an alien defence force. When the teenager finally grabs the top high-score on the machine, he is whisked away by the aliens to engage in an interstellar war.

As we mentioned before, Rogue Synapse went to the effort of creating a real Starfighter arcade machine much later in 2007, the same year that they developed their tribute to Polybius.

But whilst the idea of an alien defence force – or even a more human military force for that matter – making devious use of an arcade machine to recruit unsuspecting young players sounds more than a little far-fetched, it wouldn’t be the first time that a video game company picked up a secretive government contract to develop training material wrapped up in an arcade cabinet.

Just ask Atari. And Ed Rotberg.

Following the success of Rotberg’s vector-based tank simulator Battlezone in 1980, the U.S Army asked Atari to develop a modified version to help soldiers learn how to get to grips with the new armoured tracked vehicle known as The Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

Ed Rotberg wasn’t mad keen on the idea as he was a pacifist who didn’t want to train soldiers how to kill. But it turns out the army wasn’t exactly after a simple blast-‘em-up either.

In the end, Rotberg spent three months working on a much more complex version of the game with all kinds of extra buttons and sticks and knobs to help replicate the controls of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. And in this version, you didn’t engage in battle with enemy tanks – the only way of losing was to either run out of ammo or accidentally shoot one of your own vehicles.

Originally entitled Army Battlezone before transforming into The Bradley Trainer, this cabinet was widely regarded as just another myth for many years before the truth finally began to emerge, and there’s still a little mystery over what happened with the project after Rotberg completed the modifications.

Only two cabinets were known to have been produced for certain, one of which went missing in action whilst the other survives in a private collection.

Whilst theories abound that Atari may have quietly produced thousands of these machines for the army in the early ’80s, you’d have thought that a few more of them might have turned up after all this time, so it seems more likely that the project was ultimately shelved.

This would make The Bradley Trainer another pretty obscure game that was never released to the public at all, yet the ROM image exists and can be fired up on an emulator today to get a taste and feel of how it worked. It’s not very playable though as you really need all the unusually complex hardware that was bolted onto the original cabinet, so you’d probably have a lot more fun just shooting down baddies on the original Battlezone and denouncing pacifism.

Ed Rotberg doesn’t like talking about The Bradley Trainer as he never felt comfortable with the idea in the first place, but he’s happy to at least admit that he was involved.

In contrast, he has always denied any knowledge of Polybius, telling Den of Geek in 2009:

I understand that my name has somehow gotten connected to this game. I can state with confidence that I never saw or heard of, and certainly never worked on any game called Polybius.

There were plenty of other examples in later years of video games being specifically designed or tweaked for military training, including perhaps most famously of all the PC title Marine Doom. This was a modification of Doom II which was commissioned by the US Marine Corps in 1996 to help train four-person fire teams, replacing the sci-fi scenarios and demon enemies with more realistic scenarios involving human opposition forces.

But it’s not quite the same story with Polybius which was supposedly a covert operation to identify potential new recruits rather than soldiers who had already sworn the oath and inked the pact.

And as most people seem to remember that Polybius was a particularly trippy and phantasmagorical space shooter, it’s difficult to see how the military could have chosen this as the perfect recruitment test, unless the players really were expected to engage in an interstellar conflict.

The other point is that whilst all the evidence has come to light about Atari’s secret subsidiary and their later contract with the military to produce training simulations, we’re still completely in the dark about both Polybius and Sinneslöschen.

Even the name of the company doesn’t make an awful lot of sense.

Steven Roach claimed that a German member of the team called Ulrich Koller came up with the name, although I think the most revealing thing there is that Ulrich just happens to share a surname with Kurt Koller, the owner of the Coinop.org database on which Roach was posting.

Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast has concluded that ‘Sinneslöschen’ is a botched attempt by a non-German speaker to create a compound word using an English-to-German dictionary.

To the native German speaker, ‘Sinneslöschen’ wouldn’t really mean anything at all as it would sound something like “Sense away removed.”

But it feels like the intention was to create a word that translated into English as “sensory deprivation” or “sense delete” which would be an oddly unsettling name for a video game company – and perhaps indicative that a prankster came up with it but didn’t quite do enough homework for the joke to land.

You could say something very similar about the name of the game itself.

Polybius was indeed a Greek historian from the Hellenistic period, famed for his 40-volume work The Histories.

He hailed from Megalopolis in, wait for it, the region of Arcadia.

But he was also famous for putting forward his bold assertions that historians should ideally only attempt to chronicle events from first-hand sources, and that rigorous fact checking, critical evaluation, and a commitment to truth should take priority over embellishments and hearsay and telling an engaging story.

Again, the choice of name does sound suspiciously like a hoaxster is either just having a laugh or perhaps attempting to make some kind of point about the gullible souls who will believe any old shit without checking the reliability of the sources.

When giving up your seat to a pregnant lady on the bus, first make sure that they haven’t just got a beer belly.

But hang on, what about all the children that went missing or died after playing Polybius? Some of the parents might have been struggling to see the funny side of that.

Well, this largely amounts to little more than rumours and gossip on forums, and there’s no contemporary news reports of gangs of children from Portland disappearing into thin air in 1981.

Yes, we have the curious testimony of Bobby Feldstein who shared his bizarre experiences in the seven-part Showcase podcast The Polybius Conspiracy in 2017.

But we also have Jacob Brogan from Slate.com to thank for later exposing that the podcast was largely just a load of old bollocks.

Although it comes across as a serious exhaustive documentary, Brogan began to brew a few suspicions about the authenticity of the material. So he got in touch with the podcast’s executive producer who cheerfully admitted that the podcast was a hybrid of fact and fiction, blending real interviews with a fictional narrative that is woven throughout the seven episodes.

This is not made remotely clear when you’re listening to the podcast, and now we have to guess which bits are genuine and which bits are horseshit, which doesn’t really make for an entirely satisfying experience.

But this probably goes some way to explaining why there is no evidence that Bobby Feldstein was even a real person, why some of his memories are demonstrably false, and why the podcast features interviews with journalists from newspapers that don’t exist.

As Jacob Brogan puts it: “It’s hard to escape the feeling that the only real conspiracy here is the one against the audience.”

And it does feel as if there’s quite a big dollop of deception at the heart of the Polybius machine, fuelled by mischief-makers, podcast productions, and perhaps even our own unreliable memories to a certain degree.

But I’m not suggesting that this is just another example of The Mandela Effect in which loads of people wrongly recall that Nelson Mandela served as President of South Africa in the 1990s before his death in 2013, when we all know that he died in prison in the 1980s.

It could be the case that there are some genuine memories of some very real events at work here.

But what exactly is everyone remembering?

Midnight Resistance

One of the most obvious points to consider is that players are remembering a different game which had a limited or troubled release in the arcades.

Tempest was released in the very same year that Polybius was supposedly rolled out in Portland, and there are elements of the vector game which do share similarities with some descriptions of the gameplay.

The issue here is that Tempest was certainly not an obscure or forgotten game. It was a hugely influential and lucrative title which is often described as the best vector game of all time.

But Tempest designer and coder Dave Theurer did once reveal that an early prototype of the game had a very significant difference to the one that everyone played in the arcades in which you move your blaster around quasi-3D tubes to shoot the emerging enemies.

In this prototype, twiddling the rotary knob didn’t move your blaster at all. Instead, the blaster stayed glued to the same point on the screen whilst the whole landscape moved around it.

I have to admit that this sounds pretty awesome to me and I imagine it would have been a mind-blowing experience in 1981.

Possibly a bit too mind-blowing, though. During playtesting, some of the gamers began to experience motion sickness, nausea, and vertigo, which led to a rethink from Atari.

The theory goes that maybe some of these prototypes made it into Portland, and the unpaid playtesters were the customers at the arcades.

However, there’s no evidence to suggest that such a problematic prototype ever left Atari HQ. And whilst a ROM image exists of an early prototype which was then called Vortex, it’s nothing like the version that Dave Theurer described.

Video game researcher Patrick Kellogg feels it more likely that people are remembering a game that came along a little later in 1983.

Cube Quest was an incredibly innovative shooter released by little-known American company Simutrek which doesn’t sound a million miles away from Sinneslöschen.

Often described as a spiritual successor to Tempest that was way ahead of its time, the game featured real-time 3D polygon graphics plastered over an animated laserdisc background which certainly gave the game a unique look and feel which would have dazzled the crowds of 1983.

Not everyone managed to get to grips with it.

The game has been described by critics as “a poor version of Tempest”, “Highly complicated for a mainstream electronic diversion,” and here’s one to raise an eyebrow, “Visually stunning but hallucinogenic and neo-psychedelic.”

A more technical problem with Cube Quest is that the cutting-edge laserdisc technology was temperamental at best, and the cabinets received regular visits from technicians who were either attempting to repair them on site or conceding defeat and permanently removing the cabinets from the arcades.

So whilst the date is a couple of years off, Cube Quest does seem to fill several other slots of the story as it was a distinctive and revolutionary psychedelic shooter produced by an obscure company, it didn’t hang around in the arcades for very long, and it was regularly visited by mysterious men who occasionally dragged the cabinets away in silence.

The silence may not have been sinister in nature, it’s just that video game technicians aren’t usually very chatty, especially when they’re having to deal with hordes of sweaty kids asking questions.

But there was still other genuinely sinister stuff going down in the arcades of the early 1980s, and believe it or not, there may well have been groups of undercover agents prowling around those neon-lit arenas in which the kids were dropping like flies.

The gaming scene was very different back in those early years.

The old fogies who insist on grumbling about how things were different back in their day were now growing increasingly concerned that these new-fangled video gaming machines were inherently evil and destroying the minds and souls of our children.

Parent watch groups were calling for youngsters to be banned from the arcades as the games were deemed to be addictive, violent, encouraging kids to gamble, teaching them to worship Satan, making them seriously ill, and turning their brains into mushy peas.

You never got any of these dramatic side-effects with a hoop and stick.

These campaigners were taken quite seriously in some quarters, and the city of Mesquite in Texas briefly imposed an arcade ban on under-17s. Other places looked likely to follow until the ban was legally challenged by Atari and struck down by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, with the Supreme Court later declining to make a ruling on the matter in 1982.

Of course, there’s no denying that playing arcade games can make you ill, particularly if you spend hours and hours staring at the same screen with flashing lights and swirling colours and whistles and bells.

There’s nothing massively surprising about that, it’s just that playing anything for prolonged periods in an over-zealous bid to topple the high-score could easily cause fatigue, migraines, motion sickness, eye strain, headaches, snout fever, and a lot more besides. The risks are only increased if you’re shovelling nothing but sugary drinks and shitty snacks down your throat during your efforts to get the top score on Crystal Castles.

This is obviously not the fault of the video game or the manufacturers, but entirely the responsibility of the player who needs to take a good hard look at his reflection in the monitor.

And there were several instances in the 1980s when some players went way too far and suffered the consequences.

For example, there was an incident that occurred in the Malibu Grand Prix arcade in Portland, Oregon on the 27th November 1981.

A 12-year-old kid named Brian Mauro was having a go at beating the world record for Asteroids. This had previously been set by a 16-year-old who had racked up a score of over 30 million during a session that lasted a mind boggling 52 hours.

A local TV crew tagged along to Malibu Grand Prix arcade to film this fresh attempt to break the record, as Brian’s dad stood by his son’s side at all times in support. Brian was doing pretty well for himself, too. Just a single quarter had seen him hog the Asteroids machine for 28 hours which certainly represents good value for money but also throws up several questions in my mind.

For starters, how on Earth is that even possible? I’ve been playing Asteroids for decades but find it difficult to survive for any longer than about ten minutes.

Secondly, what did he do for toilet breaks? It’s not as if these arcade machines had a pause button. Was his dad standing by with two buckets so that he could do his business in front of the entire arcade and the local TV crew whilst keeping both hands on the control panel?

An even more worrying thought would be the kind of food and drink that Brian consumed whilst undergoing this 28-hour marathon. And this would prove to be his downfall.

Brian was dressed up in a tuxedo as he battled bravely on whilst suffering occasionally from hand cramps.

He eventually bowed out with severe stomach pains having accrued a perfectly respectable or arguably slightly bonkers score of 14 million. The Eugene Register newspaper reported that Brian was suffering from serious gastrointestinal upset after having consumed excessive amounts of nothing but Cola and orange juice over those gruelling 28 hours.

He was confined to bed for the next two days during which time he was only able to take small sips of soup through a straw.

But here’s where things get really weird.

Another arcade-related illness was reported on the very same day in 1981. In the very same state of Oregon.

Strike me pink, it was even in the very same Malibu Grand Prix arcade in Portland.

And this time the game at the heart of the incident was Tempest.

This particular incident was far more low-key as it didn’t involve any reckless attempt to break a world record whilst drowning in Cola and orange juice.

It was just a 14-year-old kid called Michael Lopez trying to enjoy a game of Tempest with a small group of mates.

But during Michael’s turn, he suddenly began to develop an uncomfortable sensation as if little lights were flashing within his brain. He stumbled away from the machine and was violently sick in the parking lot before he attempted to make his way home. He didn’t quite make it, though. A neighbour made a call to the police after he witnessed Michael writhing around and screaming in agony on his front lawn.

Michael Lopez fully recovered from the experience and now owns a nightclub in Seattle. This was his first ever migraine attack which became a fairly regular occurrence ever since playing that game of Tempest.

That’s not to pile any blame on Atari. All kinds of perfectly innocent stuff can act as an unfortunate first-time trigger for a migraine.

But it’s the aftermath of this incident that may be quite significant, as the news of Michael’s experience with Tempest was reported in local newspapers, and rumours began to swirl around Portland about this new “nightmare game.”

Much later in 2012, Michael explained the turn of events to Retrocade magazine:

My friends were totally weirded out. They were convinced the game had damaged me. When I got back to school, people were talking about how the game was dangerous. Every time I got a migraine after that, they would say, ‘Man, that game messed you up.’

There were kids at school, who after hearing about what happened to me, would not play it. They’d play every other game but that one. They actually thought it would damage your brain. But then there were the guys who now wanted to play it.

It became like a challenge or something. But it was hard to find after that. It just kind of disappeared for a while.

Whilst the two kids in Portland thankfully survived their ordeals in Malibu Grand Prix arcade, it often gets reported that two other kids weren’t so lucky when they dared to play the classic 1980 maze shooter Berzerk.

But a little bit of digging has revealed that the whole idea of Berzerk being responsible for the deaths of two kids is more than a little off-beam.

Whilst it’s often documented that a young kid called Jeff Dailey collapsed and died from a heart attack whilst playing Berzerk just a week after the two incidents in Portland, there is no contemporary evidence to indicate that this ever happened.

There are a few more grains of truth in the case of 18-year-old Peter Burkowski who apparently died from a heart attack shortly after beating the high-score on the Berzerk machine in Friar Tuck’s Game Room in Calumet City, Illinois.

This led to newspapers questioning whether the intensity and stress of the game was responsible for Peter’s death. But in fact Peter’s heart had been riddled with scar tissue for a while, and whilst it’s possible that playing the game may have been the trigger on that day, he was a tragically young man with a very weak heart.

The owner of Friar Tuck’s Game Room, Tom Blankley, wasn’t especially sensitive in his appraisal of the situation when he cheerfully told the local rag:

The player’s heart had a Time Bomb in it that just happened to go off here. I expected it to hurt business, but if anything, business has been up.

Well, that’s good to know, Tom.

The designer of Berzerk, Alan McNeil, later claimed Tom had privately recalled a slightly different version of events in which Peter had barely even started his game before he died, and that he was already panting for breath after running up the stairs to get to the cabinet.

All these reports only helped to give more weight to the idea that video games were lethal and were killing all our children, even though we’re actually talking about a kid gorging on Cola and orange juice for 28 hours, a boy suffering his first migraine, a completely fake story, and a man who died from a pre-existing heart condition whilst he just happened to be playing a game.

But even though video games were still perceived to be dangerous, they weren’t the most truly dangerous things you could find in the 1980s arcades.

Maybe it really is time to call in The Men in Black to deal with this one.

Rolling Thunder

The Men in Black who were regularly spotted mooching about the arcades were most likely not associated with Project MK-Ultra or any other government-sanctioned mind control program, largely because Project MK-Ultra officially ran between 1953 and 1973 before its scandalous exposure in 1975.

It seems improbable that the CIA would have resorted to similar dirty tactics on U.S citizens eight years after the closure of Project MK-Ultra, and even if they did, I’m not convinced that shoving a few dodgy arcade games in Portland would have been top of the priority list.

But that’s not to say that there weren’t agents of the law sneaking around the arcades in 1981 and playing their own tricks on the customers and the business owners, but with perfectly legitimate reasons.

It’s tempting to think of the arcade venues of yesteryear – or “Slotties” as the deprived people of the UK often called them – as enchanting halls of childhood innocence in which the most controversial thing likely to happen is a kid getting a bit lippy because he put ten pence in a Frogger machine that conked out on him.

Yet the arcades of the U.S in the early 1980s were apparently amongst the seediest places on Earth where drug deals were going down next to the Track and Field machine, pickpockets were lurking in every corner, gangsters were cooking up nefarious plans whilst pretending to have a go on Moon Patrol, and arcade owners were repurposing the machines for illegal gambling.

The darkness and noise of a typical arcade venue made a perfect location for crime to quietly unfold in the deafening shadows.

The thing about the illegal gambling is particularly interesting.

Gambling was tightly regulated in most U.S states in 1981, and if you had a little flutter on a Blackjack or Draw 80 Poker machine, the only prizes on offer were of the non-monetary variety such as points, credits, or occasionally a ticket which could be redeemed for the kind of shitty object you might pick up in a claw machine if they weren’t all bloody rigged.

This was naturally quite off-putting for hardcore gamblers who were only interested in winning cold hard cash that they could then fritter away on the same machine for the next half an hour.

So, some of the more devious arcade owners installed an illegal counter within such games which was usually wired to a back bar. When the player racked up more than the legal limit of fifteen crappy ‘wins’, they would then be paid in cash behind the bar for any additional winnings that had been recorded by the counter, incentivising the players to keep on shoving their money in the machines.

This kind of activity was kicking off all over the place, but it seemed like a particularly big problem in Portland. And within just weeks of the two incidents of Brian Mauro and Michael Lopez both falling ill on the same day, the FBI raided several arcades throughout Portland, poked around the back of the gambling cabinets to seek and remove the illegal counters, and made a total of fifty-two arrests.

That’s not all the FBI were doing.

In quite a head-scratching move, they were wandering around the arcades of Portland and taking photographs of some of the high-score tables in the hope that this might help them track down eyewitnesses that might prove useful in ongoing investigation.

That sounds a bit batty to me as I’m not sure how many fresh leads they would have gleaned from the names or initials on the high-score tables which only allowed a maximum of three letters.

If they’d tried doing this anywhere near my home town in the UK, they would have been attempting to track down hundreds of people called either BUM, TIT, or POO.

A slightly more sophisticated and smarter initiative by the FBI was to hide secret cameras and microphones within certain cabinets around the U.S. The idea was that if a gang of crooks were discussing an upcoming drug deal or bank job or fish market heist whilst crowded around a Crazy Climber cabinet, their conversations would be filmed and recorded, and they’d all be stitched up like a kipper.

One such operation in Seattle led to the arrest of twenty-five suspects and the retrieval of stolen goods with a value of over a million dollars today.

The cabinets were chosen for practical reasons rather than popularity. The FBI figured that the games with smoky glass bezels bordering the monitor were the best ones in which to discreetly install recording equipment, and the top three candidates to fall into this category were Scramble, Galaxian, and our old friend Tempest.

In fact, the FBI seized so many Tempest cabinets for modification in these sting operations, it led to a shortage of Tempest games within the arcades of Portland.

And now all the pieces of this psychedelic jigsaw are beginning to fit together in a way that might paint a more accurate picture of the true story behind Polybius.

If I was an illegal gambling man, I’d bet my last quarter that Polybius never existed in any shape or form, and that it was a prank first put together by Kurt Koller of the Coinop.org database in around 1998. The whole idea behind the prank was probably just to increase traffic to the database which I imagine worked a treat when the myth finally made it into the mainstream in GamePro magazine in 2003.

I also strongly suspect that the messages from the supposed developer Steven Roach was just an extension of the gag which has Kurt Koller’s digital footprints all over it.

What I’m less sure about is whether this was an incredibly clever hoax inspired by a combination of real historical events, or whether the joke just accidentally expanded into something way bigger than Kurt could have imagined at the time.

Bearing in mind how much he messed up the translation of the fictional company Sinneslöschen, I would take a guess at the former.

But whether intentional or not, Kurt Koller triggered genuine memories of real events which just got a little muddled along the way and convinced so many people that a game called Polybius really was warping people’s minds in 1981 before it was taken away by the Men in Black.

Some players will remember the days when federal agents were prowling around the arcades, poking around with certain machines, and silently observing the scene.

Other players will remember the silent technicians who were paying frequent attention to a game called Cube Quest which bore many similarities to the vague descriptions of Polybius and disappeared from the arcades very quickly as it kept breaking down.

Whilst it seems unlikely that a prototype of Tempest ever made it into the arcades, Portland players in particular may recall that the standard version of Tempest did a similar vanishing act from their local arcades after the cabinets were nabbed by the FBI for sting operations.

Portland players may also recall that night in 1981 when two kids became ill whilst in Malibu Grand Prix arcade, with one case fuelling rumours that Tempest was a nightmare game which sent you mad.

The not entirely accurate subsequent reports of people dying whilst playing Berzerk may also have helped to perpetuate the notion that a dangerous video game was let loose in the early 1980s and was taking the lives of children.

And all these memories got mashed up into a conspiratorial recipe which was also peppered with the later revelations that Atari had made secret deals with the government to produce cabinets for the U.S military.

In a sense, the only things missing from the real story of Polybius is a company called Sinneslöschen and Polybius itself.

Whilst Polybius cabinets went on to made subtle cameo appearances in works of fiction such as The Simpsons, Loki, and Wreck-It Ralph – which is the greatest film of the millennium so far – the odds of stumbling across one in real life are higher than managing to get more than half an hour’s entertainment out of Space Invaders.

If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.

That’s not another subliminal message. It’s a quote from some Greek guy who went by the name of Polybius.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the pronunciation of Polybius?

The pronunciation of Polybius is ‘Poh-li-bee-us’.

What are the two vintage gaming machines mentioned that should be avoided at all costs?

The two vintage gaming machines mentioned are Space Invaders and Polybius.

What year was the game Polybius released?

The game Polybius was released in 1981.

What were some of the alleged effects of playing Polybius?

Some of the alleged effects of playing Polybius included addiction, serious illness, subliminal messages, psychoactive effects, insomnia, migraines, night terrors, hallucinations, amnesia, and even deaths.

What was the name of the company that produced Polybius?

The name of the company that produced Polybius was Sinneslöschen.

What were some of the subliminal messages reportedly seen in Polybius?

Some of the subliminal messages reportedly seen in Polybius included ‘You love this, you need this,’ ‘Obey government,’ ‘Follow Orders,’ ‘Never question authority,’ and ‘Join the Navy.‘

What was the supposed purpose of the men in black suits who were seen around the Polybius cabinets?

The men in black suits were speculated to be involved in a secret military recruitment drive or a government-funded mind control experiment.

What was the name of the podcast that discussed the Polybius conspiracy?

The name of the podcast that discussed the Polybius conspiracy is ‘The Polybius Conspiracy,’ produced by the Radiotopia network’s Showcase.

What was the name of the individual who claimed to have been kidnapped after playing Polybius?

The name of the individual who claimed to have been kidnapped after playing Polybius is Bobby Feldstein.

What was the name of the website that first mentioned Polybius online?

The name of the website that first mentioned Polybius online is ‘Coinop.org’.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Polybius: The Killer Arcade Game That Got Erased from History
• Hero image source by Bernhard Holub / openverse, by-sa.