Polybius (urban legend)

Polybius is an urban legend about a lost arcade video game. According to the legend, a new game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon, in 1981. The gameplay was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, and dangerous. Children who played the arcade game were said to suffer from amnesia, seizures, night terrors, and hallucinations. Despite these adverse effects, the arcade cabinet was described as so addictive that players returned to Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished. The lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men in black who were said to record data on the players before removing all the arcade machines.^[2]

An alleged start screen, attached to an article on coinop.org^[1]

There is no evidence that Polybius ever existed. The earliest known print reference to the game is the September 2003 issue of GamePro. The earliest online reference to Polybius is the coinop.org entry, dated to 1998. There is no evidence that the supposed publisher, Sinneslöschen, existed. Snopes has called it a modern-day version of the early '80s urban legends about "men in black" recording the high-score initials saved in arcade machines.

The urban legend has had a lasting cultural impact. It has persisted in video game journalism and appeared in music, television, film, and performance art. Two notable video games titled Polybius were released in 2007 and 2017, claiming some degree of connection to the purported arcade game. In fiction, the game and legend have been used to evoke 1980s nostalgia, supernatural themes, and conspiracy theories.

Background

A E-FOIA request for Polybius returned no results.

There is no evidence that the game ever existed.^[2] The first online mention of Polybius is a coinop.org article dated 1998. It includes a purported screenshot of the title screen allegedly from a ROM image file created from one of the original arcade machines. On May 16, 2009, an update to the page promised to bring further information after a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, to investigate. As of 2025, no further information has been added to the page.^[1][3] Researchers have found evidence that the entry was first uploaded a few years after 1998, making even the upload date fictitious.^[4] Archives of the entry from 2000 do not contain the 1998 date, but do contain the text:

"Last Modification of this game: 2/6/2000 10:23:41 AM
Reason for modification: New addition - anyone heard of this game?"^[5]

The earliest known printed mention of Polybius is in the September 2003 issue of GamePro.^[2] The feature story "Secrets and Lies" declared the game's existence to be "inconclusive".^[6] The article spread the legend to a broader audience, but its author only heard about the legend when the owner of coinop.org contacted him.^[4] Interest was further kindled in 2006 when a post appeared on the coinop.org forums by an individual presenting himself as "Steven Roach" who claimed to have set up the publishing company Sinneslöschen.^[7] Based on the timeline of publications, gaming magazine Inverse concluded that the game "was almost certainly invented" to promote coinop.org.^[8]

There is no record of the game's purported publisher, Sinneslöschen. Author Brian Dunning describes the word as "not-quite-idiomatic German" meaning "sense delete" or "sensory deprivation". In German it would be pronounced [ˈzɪnəslœʃn̩]. It is derived from the German words Sinne ("senses") and löschen ("to extinguish" or "to delete"), though the way they are combined is unusual; Sinnlöschen would be a more standard German construction.^[2]

Polybius shares its name with the classical Greek historian Polybius, born in Arcadia and known for his assertion that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with eyewitnesses.^[3][9] He was also known for his work on puzzles and cryptography, such as the Polybius square.^[8]

Legend

A mock-up Polybius cabinet made by Rogue Synapse

According to the legend, a new video game appeared in suburban arcades around Portland, Oregon, in 1981.^[10] Released during the golden age of arcade video games, it was housed in a simple black cabinet.^[11][12] The game was abstract and geometric, but highly addictive.^[13] People who claim to remember playing the game recall different and contradictory gameplay experiences.^[14] Players supposedly suffered from seizures, amnesia, insomnia, night terrors, and hallucinations.^[15] Addicted to the new game, children formed lines around the cabinet and fought each other for access to the machine.^[2] They continued to play, becoming increasingly unwell, until after just a month all of the Polybius machines were taken away.^[10]

It is claimed that the machines were visited by men in black, who collected some form of unknown data but left the coins inside.^[2] It was said that the game could turn itself on autonomously.^[16] Polybius was suspected to be not a product, but an experiment to test responses to the game's psychoactive stimuli.^[1] As the legend comes to an end, some of the players went insane, some took their own lives, and after a month of experimentation, the game vanished without a trace.^[4]

Reception

The alleged original Polybius arcade game is generally considered a hoax.^[2] Fact-checking website Snopes.com calls the game a modern-day version of 1980s rumors about "men in black" recording the high-score initials from arcade machines.^[17] No newspapers or gaming magazines from the 1980s mention Polybius.^[18] Aside from the mockup cabinets and games inspired by the myth, no authentic cabinets or ROM dumps have ever been documented.^[3]

Internet writer Patrick Kellogg believes that players claiming to remember having played or seen Polybius may be recalling the video game Cube Quest. It was released in arcades in 1983 as a shooting game played from laserdisc. Kellogg describes its visuals as "revolutionary" and far ahead of typical games of the time. He states that frequent breakdowns are typical of laserdisc games, so this one was often removed from arcades.^[19] University of Arizona professor Judd Ruggill has also proposed Tempest as an influence.^[20] Tempest is an abstract and geometric game that requires intense focus and was inspired by the nightmares of its creator.^[16]

While some people have claimed to remember earlier mentions on Usenet, no archived Usenet posts discuss Polybius. However, the Publius Enigma, an unsolved puzzle connected to Pink Floyd's 1994 album The Division Bell, was discussed on Usenet in the early '90s. These early recollections of the game may be false memories, recalling instead the similarly named Publius Enigma.^[8][21]

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."^[15] Ripley's Believe It or Not! called Polybius "the most dangerous video game to never exist".^[22] Portland historian Joe Streckert says of the game, "What H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon is for books, Polybius is for videogames."^[10] Portland Monthly calls it "one of Portland's craziest urban legends", comparing it to the CIA's MKUltra mind control program of the 1950s-1970s.^[23]

Themes

Winners Don't Use Drugs arcade campaign

The story of Polybius may be rooted in several real but unrelated events. ^[4] Author Brian Dunning believes the Polybius legend grew out of a mixture of 1980s influences.^[2] For example, two players fell ill in a Portland arcade on the same day in 1981.^[2] Teenage Portland resident Michael Lopez developed a migraine headache after playing Tempest and left the arcade. He was found unconscious on a stranger's lawn after blacking out.^[4] During a filmed attempt to break the Asteroids world record at the same arcade where Lopez became ill, another Portland teen played for 28 hours until suffering from stomach cramps.^[24] Ten days later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided several Portland arcades in the area. The lead-up to the raid involved FBI agents monitoring arcade cabinets for evidence of tampering and recording high scores.^[2] The FBI made 52 Portland arcade arrests in 1981, and 25 arrests at a single arcade a year later.^[25] Some arcade machines had been converted to gambling machines by arcade owners.^[7]

The presence of men in black or government agents prowling arcades has precursors beyond Oregon.^[2] Arcades were broadly seen both as targeting children and as sites of vice, such as gambling, smoking, theft, and drug use.^[26] Government agencies targeted video game arcades with anti-gambling and anti-drug programs.^[27] Major arcade developer Bally Manufacturing was repeatedly investigated for connections to illegal gambling.^[26] In 1983, one Massachusetts town banned all arcade video games due to fears of arcades run by criminals with the police chief stating, "I don’t want my children supervised by those kind of people."^[27] To catch drug sales occurring in arcades, the FBI rigged classic arcade games such as Tempest and Galaxian with surveillance equipment.^[8] During the 1990s, before the spread of the Polybius story, the FBI launched its "Winners Don't Use Drugs" campaign, which flashed full-screen public service announcements from the FBI on arcade machines when no person was playing the game.^[28][29]

Atari's testing procedures for new games may have also contributed to men in black rumors. Atari, then a major arcade game developer, would covertly place small numbers of incomplete new video games into public arcades. Atari's employees swapped in test versions of these unfinished games and observed players' responses in the arcades. To prevent their competitors from rushing copycat games to market, Atari did not disclose the true nature of these field tests to any arcade patrons.^[30]

Many adults in the 1980s expressed concern about the new video games children spent so much time on.^[8] Early video games were the subject of fears and anxieties about their possible dangers. A 1980 New York Times article commented on their potential for addiction, and the National Safety Council claimed that video games promoted violence.^[27] There are nine recorded cases of arcade games triggering epileptic seizures in the 1980s.^[2] In 1982, a teenager died while playing Berzerk in Calumet City, Illinois. His heart failure was not triggered by the game but led to rumors of a cursed arcade game.^[31][32]

Although contemporary magazines and newspapers do not mention Polybius,^[18] similar legends and rumors circulated in the late '70s and early '80s. Trust was declining in government institutions, and rumors spread of arcade machines designed to hypnotize, brainwash, or recruit players. The unusual machines and the affected players were then said to disappear. These rumors influenced science fiction such as the film The Last Starfighter, in which a teenage gamer is monitored and recruited by aliens.^[30][2] The novel Arcade by Brian Maxxe was less popular than Starfighter but featured a fictional game very similar to Polybius. Arcade had a more sinister plot than Starfighter, based around government mind control experiments done on children in arcades.^[4][33]

The United States military has modified several video games to train soldiers. In the early 1980s, they commissioned Atari to modify the tank combat game Battlezone into a tank training simulator called The Bradley Trainer. The project and the reluctance of Battlezone programmer Ed Rotberg were covered by newspapers in 1981.^[29] In the late 90s, just before the first Polybius rumors began to spread, the military had Doom II modified into a virtual training program for marines.^[2][34]

Legacy

Polybius has inspired and appeared in music, television, and films.^[35] It has been used to evoke connections to the supernatural and to the 1980s,^[36] including a central cameo as the "main attraction" in the Nine Inch Nails music video "Less Than".^[37] It has cameos in many TV series, such as The Goldbergs (2013), The Simpsons (2006), Dimension 404 (2017), and Smiling Friends (2020). The Loki (2021) cameo gained acclaim on social media as an example of Loki referencing real-world conspiracy theories, and sparked speculation that the game is integral to the show's fictional multiverse.^[3] For Paper Girls (2022), CBR reported that the Polybius cameo gave the series 1980s science fiction credentials and differentiated it from Stranger Things (2016).^[36] Artists Goto80 and Raquel Meyers also covered the theme in a series of performances in 2010.^[38] The Polybius Conspiracy is a seven-part podcast published in 2017, adapted from a canceled feature film project.^[23][39]

Two major video games were inspired by Polybius and bear its name.^[40] In 2007, freeware developers and arcade constructors Rogue Synapse published a free downloadable game titled Polybius for Windows at sinnesloschen.com. Its design is partly based on a description posted on a forum by an individual who claimed to have worked on the original.^[41] Rogue Synapse's owner, Dr. Estil Vance, even founded a corporation bearing the name Sinnesloschen.^[42] They present it as an "attempt to recreate the Polybius game as it might have existed in 1981".^[43] In 2016, Llamasoft announced Polybius for the PlayStation 4 with PlayStation VR support.^[44] Developer Jeff Minter initially claimed to have played the original Polybius arcade machine in Basingstoke, England, but later admitted that this claim was itself a contribution to the hoax.^[45] Minter's game does not attempt to reproduce Polybius' alleged gameplay, but it is closer instead to his work on Tempest successors Tempest 2000 and TxK.^[44][46]

See also

• List of urban legends
• Satanic panic
• Toynbee tiles
• Polybius square