Games - Polybius

Home > Listing Index > Games > Polybius (game)

	Games - Polybius

Polybius is supposedly an arcade game, thought to be similar in genre to Atari's Tempest, and the subject of an online urban legend. The following is a summary of the urban legend:

:In Portland, Oregon in 1981, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs, something of a rarity at the time. This game was called "Polybius". The game proved to be incredibly popular, to the point of addiction, and queues 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—amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and suicide appearing as having been caused by the game in various 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 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 that the story is a true urban legend—one that grew out of exaggerated and distorted tales of an early release version of Tempest which 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.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Polybius (game) ]

Searches on eBay

polybius