Polybius (game)

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Polybius is supposedly an arcade game, thought to be similar in genre to Atari's Tempest, and the subject of an online urban legend. According to the story, the game was released to the public in 1981, and caused its players to go insane, causing them to suffer from intense stress and horrific nightmares. A short time after its release, it supposedly disappeared without a trace.

The game

According to the story, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs of Portland, Oregon in 1981, something of a rarity at the time. The game, Polybius, proved to be incredibly popular, to the point of addiction, and lines formed around the machines, quickly followed by clusters of visits from men in black. Rather than the usual marketing data collected by company visitors to arcade machines, they collected some unknown data, allegedly testing responses to the psychoactive machines. The players themselves suffered from a series of unpleasant side-effects, including amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and even suicide in some versions of the legend. Some players stopped playing video games, while it is reported that one became an anti-gaming activist. The supposed creator of Polybius is Ed Rottberg, and the company named in the urban legend is Sinneslöschen (German for sense-delete), often named as either a secret government organization or a codename for Atari. The gameplay is said to be similar to Tempest, a shoot 'em up game utilizing vector graphics. The origin of the legend is unknown. Some think it originated as a usenet hoax by a curious character named Cyberyogi, whose real name is Christian Oliver Windler. Others believe the story is a true urban legend – one that grew out of exaggerated and distorted tales of an early release version of Tempest that caused problems with photosensitive epilepsy; the game was reported to have caused motion sickness and vertigo, and was therefore pulled. Several people had claimed to have a ROM of the game, but none of them have made this ROM available for public scrutiny, a "lack of hard evidence" situation typical of hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Indeed, there is even a lot of conflicting information about what the game is even like. Some sources claim it is a maze-style game while others describe it as an action space-fighter. The Polybius legend received some mass-market attention in the September 2003 issue of GamePro magazine, as part of a feature story on video game urban legends called "Secrets and Lies."^[1] The magazine determined the legend to be neither true nor false, but "inconclusive." [1]

Steven Roach

On March 20, 2006, a man under the name Steven Roach made a post on coinop.org telling the story of his involvement to Polybius, and how he hopes to "lay it to rest."."^[2] He claims to have been working for a South American company that wished to promote a "new approach" to computer graphics (probably vector graphics). The game was claimed to be very inventive and addictive, but the graphics, through mistake rather than design, were dangerous and prompted epileptic fits. The product was recalled, the subcontractors, Sinneslöschen, were disbanded and the program was lost. On April 26, 2006 Duane Weatherall of Gamepulse.co.uk (now bitparade.co.uk) interviewed Steven Roach after Roach posted this message onto another forum.^[2] The Roach story contained a number of inconsistencies: some of it, indeed, seems to be sourced from Wikipedia, such as the suggestion of Cyberyogi's involvement, which was the product of way too extensive searching through Usenet archives on the part of a Wikipedia editor. The interview also included some of Roach's background, including the revelation that he comes from Rhyl, Wales, and a possible recreation of the storyline.

Popular culture

In the second series of Trick Of the Mind, Derren Brown created a video game called "Waking Dead" which would put certain people in catatonic states, taking advantage of a phenomenon called Photosensitive epilepsy. While Brown claimed that 1 in 3 people are affected, the condition is actually medically rare and only affects around 1 in 10,000. The program showed a person playing the game and then falling into a trance, at which point Derren and assistants transport the player on a stretcher to a building which is decorated exactly like the game, with zombie actors fitted with explosive squibs. The video clip from this episode was very popular and had widespread circulation on the internet in June 2005. However, there is also controversy as to whether the clip is real or faked. A Polybius machine was featured as a gag in the September 24, 2006 episode of The Simpsons, titled "Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em...". In an arcade full of horribly outdated arcade machines, Polybius can be seen in the background. The short-lived TV series Blister had a story arc centered around the search for Polybius.

References

External links

• The game's entry on coinop.org
• Polybius at the Killer List of Videogames, includes cabinet photograph
• Scott Sharkey's humorous article on the game. WARNING: contains a screamer.
• A video clip of the Derren Brown show
• An attempt at creating what such a game would have been like