When it comes to mysterious tech legends, few stories are as enduring or as strange as Polybius.

This mind-altering arcade game appeared briefly in Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s, then vanished without a trace. Was it real? Was it a government experiment? A prank? Or simply a cautionary tale about believing everything you read online?

Let’ go back to the early 1980s.

A Paranoid Time

Due to miniaturization and early microprocessors, the arcade video game became a reality in the late 70s.  Space Invaders appeared in 1978 in Japan and in other countries in 1979.  By 1980, it had been joined by numerous other games and arcades stuffed with cabinet coin-op games suddenly popped up everywhere.  Anywhere within walking or biking distance of a teenage population had an arcade, particularly malls and shopping centers.

Teens and pre-teens flocked to these gaming centers and pestered their parents for a never-ending stream of quarters.  BTW, 25 cents in 1980 would be approximately 90 cents today.  Imagine paying nearly a dollar every time you played a video game…and if you weren’t very good at it, the experience might only last a minute or two.

The early 80s were a weird time in terms of parents and social trends.  This was the era when some parents formed an advocacy group over concerns that Dungeons and Dragons encouraged Satanism and suicide, while others urged government investigation in the way Satanists inserted secret messages into rock and roll songs through backmasking.  There was a lot of paranoid thinking.

In such an environment, arcades were often viewed as a dangerous, seductive vice for kids.  I was nearly a teen at the time and remember parents whispering rumors that the “vice squad had raided the arcade again” because an underground drug ring was operating there.  In fact, I heard rumors about “underground drug rings” operating out of every arcade.

In actuality, kids were not a profitable market for narcotics, and besides, every quarter they had was being fed into these wildly profitable machines, so there was little need to peddle dope.

Nevertheless, there were…issues.

Players sometimes got obsessed, and I saw more than one proto-nerd rage for reasons such as:

• His three-letter high score was knocked off the leaderboard on his favorite game.
• Someone else used the same three letters, or ever worse, took credit for his accomplishment.
• Misspelling his three letters.  A kid named Tony I knew nearly melted down because he owned all of the top ten slots for Defender but had typo’d the #1 slot.  #2 through #9 were TKS but #1 was TLS and it drove him mad, such that he nearly went broke trying to get enough 10 new high scores to beat #1.
• And of course, glitches, power outages, or someone bumping an arm which denied a high score.  So unfair, with only the sense of holy injustice a teenage mind can summon.

Then there game hogs, who had a little more money than everyone else and could stand in front of a machine for hours.  And, of course, kids who simply got a little too into arcade games obsession and whose parents began putting limits on their time.

Enter Polybius

Polybius was an extremely well-crafted video game, first deployed in Portland, Oregon.  Its gameplay was a generation ahead of anything else on the floor.  It was hard to find a machine because the power requirements were substantial so not many arcades had it.

Players described the game as a fast-paced shooter with puzzle elements and intense vector-style graphics, flashing lights, and word messages that strobed on the screen.  The case itself was all black, with only the glowing word POLYBIUS on its marquee.

Kids who did manage to find a system often abandoned all other games and obsessed on Polybius.  This lead to fist fights and more than once the police had to be called at closing time to pry teens away from the controls.  More darkly, there were many emergency room admissions by teens who underwent seizures from playing, and even when not at the controls, kids seemed to suffer hallucinations, night terrors, and blackout memory loss.

And then, all of a sudden, Polybius disappeared.  No one could find the machine anywhere.  Rumors spread that they’d been seized by the government.  Or perhaps the government had placed them in the first place as a sort of trial run…for what, no one was sure.  It was clear, though, that the placement of Polybius games had been planned, and on deeper analysis, it seems they were strategically placed to get a deep cross-section of American youth.  And likewise, their removal was done stealthily, often in the middle of the night according to some later court testimony that was leaked.  I say “leaked” because most of the documents related to Polybius were sealed for reasons unknown, and if you do a FOIA request today, you won’t get a word back.

Polybius was gone.

Or had it ever existed?

Origins and Speculation

If you remember Polybius…you don’t.  The story told above – stitched together from various sourced I’ve heard or read over the years – originates circa 1998, nearly 20 years after the arcade golden age.  All of it is untrue, except the FOIA request bit…that is true, because the government has no data to reply with.

It’s not clear if this is a true Mandela Effect, where many people seem to have a memory of something that never happened, or just an urban legend that was too attractive not to retell.

The reality is that while many people have heard about Polybius, the game never existed.

It may have originated on coinop.org.  In 1998, an alleged screenshot was uploaded, and in 2000 there was an addition to the site’s database asking if anyone had more information.  In 2003, there was an article in GamePro which said an investigation into the existence of the game was “inconclusive”.

Allegedly, the game was manufactured by a German company named Sinneslöschen.  That name is non-idiomatic German for “sensory deprivation”.  If the name of the game sounds familiar, it’s likely you’ve read a bit of Greek history.  Quoting Wikipedia:

It is named after the classical Greek historian Polybius, born in Arcadia and known for his assertion that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with eyewitnesses.

Polybius…from Arcadia…hmm.

According to legend, Sinneslöschen was actually a front for a CIA group (or men in black, whatever you prefer) that used the machine to collect data on players.

Several actual events likely contributed to the Polybius legend:

• In 1981, a player in Portland, Oregon collapsed after playing the arcade game Tempest, which used strobing vector graphics.  Later, in the same arcade, a kid was forced to stop a 28-hour Asteroids run after severe stomach cramps.  There’s the “seducing kids” and “messing with their minds” bit.

• Ten days later, the FBI raided several Portland arcades to investigate illegal gambling and pirated software.  (The FBI doesn’t investigate drugs.  That’s the DEA, and I’ve never read that the DEA was investigating arcades.  It was the 80s and they already had their hands full).  The FBI made 52 arrests in Portland arcades in 1981, and 25 arrests in a single arcade.  Men in black, anyone?

• The Cold War-era fear of government mind control programs like MK-Ultra made people more willing to believe such experiments could happen.

Modern Tributes and Recreations

Although the original game likely never existed, fans have recreated or paid tribute to the idea of Polybius:

• In 2007, someone released a playable remake using modern tools and vector-style visuals.

• In 2017, Jeff Minter created a VR game titled Polybius for PlayStation, featuring psychedelic visuals and intense music.

• Polybius has been referenced in pop culture, including appearances in The Simpsons, Loki, and various documentaries.

• Hobbyists often build fake Polybius cabinets for gaming conventions and expos.

The legend lives on, whether the original game did or not.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.