Hi all! I want to say right away that the video and text do not pretend to be all possible “best of the best” and so on. The text for the video took about two years to write. More precisely, it was written in a couple of evenings, but then corrected several times.
After writing the video, they looked for a person who could dub it properly and then found a person who could edit it. No one has experience in writing texts, no experience in editing, and only a friend who did the voice acting plays in a music group and therefore was able to record the voice acting efficiently and well.
Initially, the text was inspired by the AVGN video. I became interested in this topic and realized that in the ru community there is very little information about a fairly interesting urban legend.
Well, for the most part it can be considered that this is a shorter retelling of the original hour-long video from the YouTube channel Ahoy.
Okay, criticize, downvote, etc. I’m ready. >.
There are moments in the video that were not convenient to indicate in the text.
Well, I’m attaching the text.
Polybius is an arcade game released in 1981. There is an urban legend that can rightfully be called one of the oldest mystical gaming legends.
An arcade machine appeared mysteriously and unknown to anyone in Portland, Oregon in the 80s. Legend has it that the device was completely black in appearance, and the logo glowed green.
The game was similar to many of the popular tunnel shooters of the time (such as Tempest) and maze games (such as Pac-Man).
This arcade machine immediately attracted people. Reviews about the gameplay were vague: the office itself was described as nondescript, and the gameplay was strange, abstract, fast. Although in fact, at that time half of the old games could be described in exactly these words. And even despite its plainness, the game was addictive.
However, the most mystical thing is that after playing this machine, people began to have a variety of health problems: partial amnesia, nausea, headaches, nightmares, a feeling of paranoia could appear, and some even committed suicide. According to rumors, various people from different intelligence agencies were often seen at the slot machine. They watched the slot machine, recorded the process, and after some time the arcade cabinet disappeared without any evidence of its existence. This led people to believe that this could very well be a secret government experiment.
Currently, there are no ROM dumps, there are no boards for the gaming cabinet itself, and all the stories that are on the network or from eyewitnesses differ a little, although there are points of agreement. Among the many stories from supposed eyewitnesses, the only similarity is that everyone calls him Polybius (or Polybius in Russian).
This word in itself is not new: this was the name of a historian from Greece who lived in Arcadia.
He also came up with the Polybius Square cipher. The essence of the cipher is that the letters are arranged in a square, and numbers are assigned vertically and horizontally to the letters in the grid, almost like on a chessboard.
Even the word Polybius itself in Greek can be decomposed into two words “Poly” – many, and “bios” – life. “The Many Lives of Arcadia” – how do you like this coincidence??
Besides all this, among the many stories there is another interesting fact. Quite often, game developers leave the name of the company that developed this product on the start screen. And the storytellers say that they saw a developer or publisher named “Sinneslöschen”.
Sinneslöschen is a German word. If https://rocketpotcasino.co.uk/ you try to take it apart, you can read the following:
Sinnes – feeling and löschen – wash.
The name refers to the fact that players on this machine forgot their feelings and erased their memory.
No one has saved any gameplay, no screenshots, nothing. You can try to find some material on the Internet, but most likely it will be fake. There is only one screenshot that is repeated often. This screenshot is the opening screen with the title screen. It contains practically no important information, or rather only what we already know: a regular black screen, green letters POLYBIUS, manufacturer or developer and credits. Credits are, roughly speaking, the number of attempts that were paid with coins through a coin acceptor.
The logo on the initial screen stands out from all the other games from 1981 because it is quite detailed. At that time, every byte of rum counted and developers limited themselves to plain printed text so that it took up as little space as possible. The Polybius logo can be compared to the popular game Duck Hunt with the same dog that laughed sarcastically at the player when he missed the ducks. But this exciting duck hunt came out in 1984, when game development stepped a little forward and they tried to make games more attractive.
If this slot machine did exist, then this can only be explained by the fact that Polybius was ahead of its time and was truly an experimental development, because it was released in 1981 according to the title screen.
As I said earlier, the gameplay is not saved anywhere. There is only a strange site, which, unfortunately, is currently unavailable. Polybiuslive.com first appeared in 2008 and contained some vector images. There is no evidence that the site may contain reliable images. The site is currently unavailable, but can be viewed via WebArchive.org
There are a lot of people who claim to have copies of Roms, that’s why no one has shared them yet?
You can also find gameplay on YouTube, but they are all fan-made. Made allegedly from the words of eyewitnesses, and not from the original roms.
What if you try to find valid game files?
Game files were first available for download in April 2004 on the gooddealgames website.com.
Anyone who downloaded these files and tried to run them received a notification that the game can lead to memory loss and mental changes, and can also cause epileptic seizures in easily susceptible people.
When you press OK, a black screen appears, which contains a brightly flashing logo and a sound with a rising tone. It will blink until you click continue.
But when you press any key, the game crashes with a critical error, the description of which says “Happy April Fools”! Send this urban legend to a friend!”
There is also a site like sinnesloschen.com. On this site you can download a working version of the game. The site doesn’t even hide the fact that it’s a fan resource. A kind of author’s vision. What it might look like. There are even game files that could be downloaded and run. This time the game actually started and offered several games to choose from. They even contained some kind of logical gameplay, but as you completed the levels of the games, the screen began to change very much, flashes and other psychedelic effects appeared.
If you enter the code 35-34-31-54-12-24-45-43 in the game, an additional menu with many settings will open. Through the Polybius square, these numbers are deciphered as Polybius. In the menu you can find items such as nightmares, amnesia, and you can even set the level of paranoia that will be instilled in the player..
If you disassemble the game with special tools, then in the contained files you can find various inscriptions in English. Like “obey”, “submit”, “don’t sleep”.
Although this is a fan assembly, it is made quite well, and if you delve into the files in more detail, you can find quite a lot more creepy things.
There is currently a game for PlayStation VR
It should be played with caution, but not because there was a danger of suicide or other problems that could be found in urban legends. The game is full of bright colors and has very dynamic gameplay. Considering that the game is in VR, it is contraindicated for people who are prone to epilepsy to play this, but for others I would simply recommend that they treat the game with caution. After such gameplay, your head will definitely hurt.
There are a lot of stories online from people who allegedly were software developers. One of them claims that the company that developed Polybius is distantly related to SEGA, but cannot provide any evidence. There is also an interview with a man named Stephen Roach, who claims that Sinneslöschen was founded by two amateur programmers in the Czech Republic in 1978. And 2 years later, a South American company approached them to develop an arcade game, which planned to use a completely new approach to game graphics. But Steve Roach doesn’t have any evidence either.
The first mention of the game appeared on February 6, 2000 on the coinop website.org, which is a kind of arcade games database. Before this date, there is no mention of Polybius either on the Internet or in other resources. T.e. between 1981 and 2000 there is a gap of several years.
Kurt Koller may also be behind this whole legend. He is the owner of the coinop website and he was the first to submit the legend of Polybius to the gaming publication GamePro. This magazine had a separate section where various gaming myths and legends were discussed. The magazine’s publisher put forward its version of what is true, what is a myth, and what has insufficient data and cannot be confirmed. And just the article about the killer slot machine had the status of unconfirmed. Kurt could have done this to draw attention to the site so that the audience would become interested and learn about the existence of his site. But he did it so subtly that anyone who started looking for information about Polybius would end up on his website.
Kurt himself claims that the information on the site exists from past owners, and he himself did not enter information about Polybius into the database.
The fact is that the site previously belonged to another community of people for quite a long time and constantly moved around different domain names. But information about Polybius appeared on the site precisely in February 2000, when Kurt Koller became the owner of the site.
Well, we realized that this is just a beautiful legend. But what if there is some truth in it? What if young gamers were actually getting some health problems from these slot machines??
First, let’s figure out how legends appear. Some interesting story is taken, passed from one generation to another, and each time, due to ignorance, the story can be embellished. The narrator may even unconsciously embellish the story, because he simply forgot some moments or he remembered them exactly in this form.
Let’s return to the health problem among young gamers. In the past, games often flashed bright colors during in-game explosions or other events. Naturally, in people who are prone to epilepsy, such outbreaks could cause an attack. Yes, even I began to feel not very good and felt my eyes starting to hurt while I was looking for material and watching various gameplay to create this video.
What about other health problems?? In 1981, an incident occurred that was described in the newspaper. 12-year-old Brian Morrow suffered an upset stomach while playing. The boy spent 28 hours straight playing the game. Doctors say the problems were caused by the huge amounts of soda he drank while playing. There is also a known case of a 14-year-old teenager named Michael Lopez, who received a migraine while playing at an arcade cabinet. But the guy played Tempest. These cases happened in 1981 in Portland.
Fast forward a year to Illinois. 18-year-old Peter Burkowski died of a heart attack while playing Berzerk. The guy already had heart problems, and the heavy workload and emotions simply intensified the result, hence the sad consequences.
We also sorted out health. What about the slot machines disappearing?? A journalist named Kat Despereaux grew up in Portland. According to her story, Portland was a city where new video games were tested. In the halls there were unmarked arcade cabinets, which could simply stand for some time, and then disappear without a trace or were changed before the official release. Although she had never heard of Polybius.
Disappearing machine guns dealt with. What about the secret service people who hung around the arcade cabinets?? There is truth here too. In an interview with EuroGamer, Todd Loader, while working on a documentary about Polybius, explained that the FBI actually hung around arcade cabinets in Portland. But this happened due to the fact that at that time arcade halls had a bad reputation and it was believed that this was all a cover for gambling and drug trafficking. Actually, it was precisely in 1981 that a case in Portland about illegally holding games in one of the halls was closed. The hall was subsequently closed.
This is a very common urban legend abroad. References can even be found in the popular animated series The Simpsons. On September 24, 2006, an episode was released where you can see an arcade cabinet in the background with Polybius written on it. The style has been slightly changed, but the name remains the same.
On September 24, 2006, an episode of The Simpsons was released, where you can see an arcade cabinet in the background with Polybius written on it. The style has been slightly changed, but the name remains the same.