Slashdot Mirror
Polybius Game Urban Legend Resurfaces
Eric Greif writes "I've just discovered information on an odd arcade game from 1981, only released in some backwater suburbs in Portland, Oregon. This game
was called Polybius and was apparently featured in a recent article in GamePro
magazine. This game boasts strange effects on the players of the game, such
as various forms of amnesia, as well as behavior and mood changes." GamePro say that " Credited to a company called Sinnesloschen [German for 'sense-deleting'], Polybius... was an abstract puzzle game... one arcade owner claimed that black-coated gentlemen would periodically come to collect data - but not coins - from the machines." Snopes.com call Polybius out as a hoax, correctly, but after all this recent attention, does anyone know who devised this elegant spoof, and when?
Yeah, you can do it too. I'd post the proof, but I don't really have any web space, and it's more fun to do yourself, and, hey, it only takes 20 seconds. Well, you need photoshop first. Basically just load up the supposed screen shot, go to Image-Ajust-Levels. In the levels drag the middle slider underneath the little graphic representation all the way to the left. What do you see? Just as I expected, a clear differentiation between the copy/pasted text from a real game and the pure black background. It looks like little rectangles of colored blocks around the text that fills the rectangle, and outside of that it is pure black. Basically the pure black background can't get any blacker, and no matter how much brightness/contrast/saturation you add to pure black, it stays pure black. Well, the real background from the screen grabs this faker got to copy-paste the letters together to make the words, or really whatever method he used, have a speckled background. There is a clear rectangular border around all three parts. It's oddly shaped, too. Not evenly surrounding each part of text, which could conceivably be jpg encoding artifacts, but it's a clear border that extends about 2 times the size of the bottom text below the bottom chuck. About 1 times the size of the middle text above that text, and the size of the middle text extended above the top title text. It's a clean line, and very obvious when viewed under these circumstances. An obvious hoax. Of course this doesn't disprove the whole thing, but it totally debunks by far the best "evidence" that is available. Try it! It's kinda fun in a nerdy CSI kinda way... -BaumSquad
Well, I did this with gimp (using image->colors->brightness-constrast), and I saw the same thing, but I belive this is an artifact of jpg compression. You can see the same effect on the screenshots from the other games on the same page (See the "game audits" image).
JPEG is lossy compression. Sorry.
RFC1925