page_title: Polybius (urban legend)
section_title: Analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Polybius (urban legend) / Analysis
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a letter from the FBI stating they do not have any records for the game Polybius
context_page_description: Polybius is an urban legend that emerged in early 2000, concerning a fictitious 1980s arcade game. It has served as inspiration for several free and commercial games by the same name.
  The legend describes the game as part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment based in Portland, Oregon, during 1981. Gameplay supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. Eventually, all of these Polybius arcade machines allegedly disappeared from the arcade market.
  Polybius is also the name of a Greek historian born in Arcadia, who was, ironically, known for his assertion that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with witnesses.
context_section_description: The original game's existence has never been authoritatively proven. 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. Magazines of the time period dedicated to electronic gaming make no mention of a Polybius, and mainstream news also fails to note such a game. While a number of mockup cabinets and games inspired by the myth do exist, no authentic cabinets or ROM dumps have ever been located. Ben Silverman of Yahoo! Games remarked: "Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the game ever existed, no less turned its users into babbling lunatics ... Still, Polybius has enjoyed cult-like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era."
  Skeptics and researchers have differing ideas on how and why the story of Polybius came about. American producer and author Brian Dunning believes Polybius to be an urban legend that grew out of a mixture of influences in the 1980s. He notes that two players fell ill in Portland on the same day in 1981, one collapsing with a migraine headache after playing Tempest, and another suffering from stomach pain after playing Asteroids for 28 hours in a filmed attempt to break a world record at the same arcade. Dunning records that the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided several video arcades in the area just ten days later, where the owners were suspected of using the machines for gambling, and the lead-up to the raid involved FBI agents monitoring arcade cabinets for signs of tampering and recording high scores. Dunning suggests that these two events were combined in an urban legend about government-monitored arcade machines making players ill. He believes that such a myth must have been established by 1984, and that it influenced the plot of the film The Last Starfighter, in which a teenager is recruited by aliens who monitored him playing a covertly-developed arcade game. Dunning considers "Sinneslöschen" to be the kind of name that a non-German speaker would generate if they tried to create a compound word using an English-to-German dictionary.
  The game Cube Quest, released in arcades in 1983, is a shooting game with surreal visuals which played from a laserdisc; as such its visuals were far ahead of typical games of the time, and it would be frequently visited for maintenance (because of frequent breakdowns of laserdisc players in arcade games) and often removed from arcades after a short time for the same reason. Many commentators believe that players claiming to remember having played or seen Polybius may actually be recalling Cube Quest.
  However, some skeptics believe that the Polybius myth has a far more recent origin. British filmmaker and video game journalist Stuart Brown, after his investigation of the legend's origin, did not find any evidence of the Polybius myth existing until the year 2000. He concluded that Polybius was an intentional hoax made by Kurt Koller, owner of coinop.org, in order to drive traffic to his website. The hoax capitalized on the popularity of conspiracy theories and the highly viral nature of other recent Internet hoaxes. In Brown's view, the reasons for a 1980s origin are simply retroactive justifications of the hoax's existence which served as inspiration to Koller to craft his tale.  He also theorized that people remembering seeing something about it on Usenet in 1994 were misremembering articles on the Pink Floyd-related Publius Enigma puzzle. Brown also noticed striking similarities between the logo of Polybius, provided by the image on coinop.org in 2000, and other arcade video games such as Bubbles and Robotron: 2084. He concluded that the bottom text is similar to that of Robotron: 2084, and the font in which the logo is made in is almost identical to that of Bubbles, with only the O different and the H flipped. He later stated that this could be a copycat fan of Wil
caption: E-FOIA request for Polybius, which came back with no results.
exif: {}