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?
...try and disprove it.
Reminds me a little of the movie "The Last Starfighter".
:)
I kind of doubt Pac-Man is a training simulator for anything, though.
I'm reminded of Iain Banks's novel Complicity, in which the protagonist spends rather too much time playing fancy computer games. Banks, who obviously has the same problem, invented some extremely cool games for him to play, including one which sounds like Civilization, only much more imaginative and creative. People are always asking Banks where they can buy these games. Sadly, they don't exist outside his head.
although I don't recall where or when.
Oh yeah! I remember that game.. it rocked. The best part about it was that it was free to play. It wasnt very hard, but there were all these weird transitions that played between levels. The game existed for sure, but all this talk of mind control isassssofo nngggrrrrff afsfsffasfaff gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg ggggggggg gg ggggggggggggggg ggggggggggggggg
http://web.archive.org/web/2000030322484 4/http://www.clickto.com/coinop/GamePage/Polybius. html
I assume the URL has been broken by /. string filters...
Anyway. The "s" in the middle of the word is a Fugen-s that connects word parts the same way a dash does; usually, if you use a dash, you don't need an "s", though the rules can be complicated. In theory, you have a legal noun now (das Loeschen), but you probably would say die Sinnesloeschung instead. It isn't exactly wrong this way, but is sounds strange.
If they had wanted a cool name, they should have gone for Sinneserloeschung, which is more poetic (IMHO) and implies that the senses slowly die. Or, of course, there is always Sinnestod, the "death of the senses" -- I'd have gone with that.
Where's the ROM? Or, if there's the ROM, how do you emulate it? (You just don't plug it in MAME...) And even if you have the ROM, where's the damn hardware? It's been a while since year 1981 - anyone can make a ROM of a game, call it "Polybius" and make people think that's the real mind-erasing game thing. And it'll be even more convenient if the game won't work in emulator...
No, we need more solid evidence than vague reports. Specifically, hardware specs, full history, ROMs, whatever - but not rumors.
And if you have rumors, at least make them believeable, coherent and verifiable (not "my brother's wife's aunt's roommate's son played it once").
I could tell you of games that were extraordinary to say the least, and one clearly could not believe they have actually existed unless you saw them with your very eyes. But at least if I type their names to Google I can find them pretty fast and they run in emulator. (Try "Army Moves" - the %#@&*ng jeep jumps, can you believe that? - and "Painterboy" - a noble predecessor to Grand Theft Auto, except that you paint houses instead of kill people. Both for Commodore 64. =)
That being said I'm going to get this topic on the right track whether you like it or not. First of all I don't think the government does keep track of who has the highest scores at contra. With the way games are today they prove nothing about real world abilities. There are plenty of fat people who couldn't shoot a real gun straight if their life depended on it, but they could ownz joo at Counter Strike. I actually think it could potentially be useful for agencies like the NSA, CIA, ETC to test peoples logic skills with puzzle games, though most of these are a console thing and therefore would be hard to collect data from people who don't come to you.
In the future, if virtual reality ever becomes a reality, and there are very realistic FPS and strategic combat games I wouldn't put it past big brother to monitor the l33t and attempt to recruit them. [disclaimer] I might be insane, I've been playing alot of Polybius lately. [/disclaimer]
Trust Your Technolust
I seem to recall a similar concept being presented in a comic book in the early to mid eighties. I suspect it was a Marvel comic featuring a team of heroes. In fact, I quite clearly recall that another part of the storyline was that the machines were powered by kidnapped children (in addition to erasing player's brains).
However, posted to Usenet by yours truly:
Every mention I've seen (coinop.org, gooddealgames.com, etc) is extremely skimpy on details such as names, dates, and specific arcades. The general story at the moment is that in less than a dozen arcades in a suburb of Portland, OR in the early 1980s, Polybius was
introduced. It was an abstract action/puzzle game which did't really attract much attention to itself. However, some people who played it reported incidents of amnesia, forgetting important details about their lives, such as their name, or where their home was. Further, some reported terrible nightmares.
The story further states that most of the kids who played Polybius swore off video games entirely, and that one became a big anti-videogame advocate (some instances of the story mentioning him as a lobbyist). However, no names are given.
Lastly, at least one former Portland, OR arcade owner claims that men in black suits would periodically come in to gather data from the machine, but not quarters. Again no names given.
Examining the logic of the story, however, makes it extremely suspect. If such a thing had truly happened, then the conspiracy in question didn't really do anything to avoid attention. In fact, they did almost everything they could to -attract- attention.
Picture this:
ARCADE OWNER: Oh, hey, you must be here to look at the Polybius machine.
MAN IN BLACK: Why do you say that?
ARCADE OWNER: Because you're wearing a black business suit, stupid. This is an arcade, not a juice bar. By the way, aren't you going to take the quarters or something?
MAN IN BLACK: No. I'm getting data.
Etc.
Now, if such a thing -had- happened, it should have set off warning lights all over the place.
On the other hand, my paranoid brain just spat out a possible explaination other than the "we're being obvious because no one will believe it" explaination that conspiracy theories so often use. How about "we're being obvious because some people will believe it, and we want to control what you believe?"
Fact: In 1983, video games were becoming a serious contender for consumer money.
Fact: In 1983, the public at large did not percieve video games as something to be regulated or monitored.
Fact: They do now.
Some other things to consider: Video games cannot induce amnesia or hallucinations. In fact, no form of video/audio stimulation can without exceptional chemical circumstances.
However, drugs can. Astonishingly, there are drugs which could have produced the exact reactions the children who played Polybius experienced. Many of these could be delivered via touch, or through the air to be inhaled. It wouldn't be too hard to hide a delivery system in a thing as massive as an arcade cabinet, but even that runs a risk: What if someone got hold of the cabinet?
Does everyone remember those bean-bag ashtrays that used to be all over the place? Acades were cluttered with them. Ever know of an arcade that actually cleaned them out?
It wouldn't be too hard to hide a delivery system in one of those, and no one would notice if a vapor seemed to be coming from an ashtray.
In other words, if the whole Polybius thing did happen, the whole thing is a smokescreen for political manipulation to demonize video games so that the government could control them. The game itself was a red herring.
Beware the ashtray.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
1. Make customers have amensia and forget the game
2. ?
3. Profit!
Kids, I grew up in West Michigan and live in Portland and on the scale of "who has more atavistic hicks mired in 19th century thinking," Holland Michigan and Ottawa County lead the pack.
Advice: on VPS providers
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
if you like fiction based on arcade machines that never existed?
Snopes doesn't really go into it true but it doesn't take a hell of a lot of investigation to call this out as bogus.
First, search around the internet and there is a certain monotony to "reports" of this game. For the most part it is clearly the repetition of some blurb someone wrote that has just gotten pasted hither and yon. There is no supporting evidence, no credible, attributed first-hand accounts. Just like a hoax: a simplistic, monolithic data source makes for a singular, monotonous presence on the 'net.
Next, the supposed ROM. The only evidence that exists of this is a screen shot that could obviously easily be faked. It's said it hangs up on the title page - how convenient. Where's the file? Who found the ROM? Where did it come from? Who's got it now? Easy enough to fake up a title page that's just a typical 80's bubble font - not even any graphics or new information, just the "game" and "company" information that already existed in the story. Most believable explanation? A lazy hoaxer just propping up a tired rumor.
Finally, the whole premise is just dumb. Video games cause amnesia and nightmares? How? Magic science, of course. Secret Military hoodoo. And like the military doesn't have an unlimited supply of seventeen and eighteen-year-olds in the enlisted ranks and guards that they could experiment on to their hearts' content. No, they'll cart experimental equipment out to the boondocks of Oregon to test teenage slackers... uh, to what end again? To collect data... on what? High scores? Giving random punks amnesia and nightmares - I'm sure it's tops on the CIA's to-do list. In fact, who exactly collected this information about kids losing their memories and waking up screaming? If someone, somewhere, legitimately discovered and demonstrated a trend, where is that person? Anyway the idea of video-game mind control is such a chestnut cliche that Harlan Ellison actually mocks it as such in the short story "The Hour that Stretches."
In short, Slashdot's proof is Snopes' proof is my proof is as good as proof that something doesn't exist gets - if there's no supporting evidence and the premise is implausible, it's as certain as it needs to be that it's just BS.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
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
I am reasonably sure that this is a hoax, but I'm disappointed that no one has *any* evidence that it is. Even Snopes just says it's not true, without providing links to any of the alleged original posts on Usenet from the alleged perpetrator of the hoax.
Isn't that how urban legends spread? By a bunch of people repeating what they think is true without referencing any authoritative sources?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Wait...I thought the name of that game was Everquest?