Polybius

## Polybius by unknown author

If you were born before the 2000s, you might remember spending a lot of time - and a lot of money-at your local video arcade. In their heyday, arcades were where you had to go if you wanted to experience cutting edge games, and new cabinets were being installed all the time. In 1981, right around the birth of the arcade boom, one such game cabinet would serve as the center of a conspiracy so strange and mysterious that it's still talked about 40 years later. That game was called Polybius.

Polybius was first spotted in a few neighborhood video arcades around the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Children rushing to spend their pocket change on games of Pac Man and Pong were surprised and excited to find that a new game had been quietly installed next to their old favorites. The cabinet wasn’t like the others they had seen though. It was solid black with no decoration aside from the glowing text above the screen that read “Polybius” in a blocky white font. The game appeared to be a standard 2D shooter, similar to Asteroids, but the graphics were much better than anything else that had yet been released, and the technology used appeared to be far beyond the capabilities of other cabinets at the time, featuring both vector and raster graphics.

The game was an instant hit anywhere it was installed, with lines to play it stretching around the block. It wasn’t Polybius’s groundbreaking graphics that would make it famous though. Rumors soon began circulating that you would experience some truly weird stuff while playing it. Some players reported hearing a woman crying while they played the game, others saw misshapen faces out of the corner of their eyes when they looked at the screen. After playing, players would often report a sense of missing time, being unable to remember how they got there or how long they'd been playing. That could easily be explained away as the effects of too much screen time, but unlike with other games of the time that people were also playing for hours and hours, the effects went beyond simple mental fatigue.

It was when those who had played Polybius left the arcade and went home, that the real terror started. Players who had spent extended periods on the Polybius cabinet experienced night terrors, anxiety attacks, dizziness, and extreme nausea. And it seemed that the longer and more frequently one played the game, the worse the mental effects would become. Strangely, the reports of the game's side effects did nothing to lessen its popularity, even among those who were plagued by the game’s effects. The game seemed to be addictive and would put its players into almost a trance-like state during gameplay. But the strangest of all reports to surface regarding the game Polybius was that later at night, after the arcades had closed, people reported seeing strange men in black suits entering the arcade.

Some even claimed that they had peeked inside while the men in suits were there and saw them extracting data from the back of the Polybius cabinets. These men wouldn't answer questions about what they were doing there, or even speak to anyone at all including the arcade owners. The men would simply barge their way in, open up the back of the Polybius cabinet, and switch out the game's ROM, before taking the original away with them. Nobody could be sure who these men were, or why they were collecting data from Polybius and not any of the other games. Were they simply pulling data that had to do with gameplay in order to improve the game and make it even more addictive for players, or was there something even more sinister going on with this strange game?

Before any answers could be found about the mysterious game, the company behind it, or the men in black suits, all of the cabinets suddenly vanished from arcades. Most reports claim that Polybius was only available to play for a month in the summer of 1981, and after appearing seemingly out of nowhere, disappeared just as quickly as they'd shown up. According to some Portland residents who claimed to be present when the Polybius machines were dismantled and removed from arcades, the machines had one last strange quality - they said that the screen remained on even after the cabinet had been unplugged and carted away. The game has never resurfaced, and although many have made attempts to recreate it, none of the replicas ever had the same bizarre effects on players that the original game had.

So, what exactly was Polybius?

One of the most ascribed to theories is that it wasn’t a game at all, but actually a government psi-ops experiment, similar to MK-Ultra, a top-secret project conducted by the CIA in the 1960's which involved using a mix of torture, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, controlled electroshocks, and psychoactive drugs in order to test the limits of the human mind. The project was started in response to allegations that the Chinese and Soviet armies were using hypnosis to control American prisoners of war in Korea. Never one to be outdone, the CIA wanted to see if they could produce the conditions necessary to completely control a subject's mind, and, in further tests, totally erase a person's memory. The tests were brutal and often conducted on completely unwilling and unaware subjects, something that can sadly be said of many CIA experiments carried out during the cold war.

Given their track record, it's not hard to believe that in 1981, still firmly within the cold war period, that the US government would be willing to test a powerful psychic weapon on unsuspecting American children in the form of an arcade game. The theory that Polybius game cabinets were really government mind-control machines was only bolstered further by the game's creator. On the game's start screen, the text read “Polybius, copyright 1981, Sinneslöschen”. The name “Sinneslöschen” is derived from the German words meaning “senses” and “to delete” or “to extinguish”. The most common interpretation of the name is ”sensory deletion” or “sensory deprivation”- both of which are appropriate ways to describe the missing time and amnesia that would often happen following intense Polybius play sessions.

One cabinet reappeared in an arcade in 1998, but quickly disappeared again. To this day, no one has ever found the original ROM...