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?

Just a wild guess:

[fm6]

Probably comes from a story or novel. Polybius is the sort of thing a thriller or SF writer would invent. Perhaps we could ask the writers of a certain TV show [caltech.edu] where they ripped off the idea.

I'm reminded of Iain Banks's novel Complicity [amazon.com], 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.

Page hasn't changed in a while...

[Kris_J]

Gotta love the wayback machine:

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...

You are ruining it

[Metal_Demon]

You are all missing the point. What could be a very interesting conversation on whether this could ever happen, how, why, and does the government secretly keep tabs on people who kick ass at war-games, has become "prove it". It is quite obvious this game is a load of crap but the real point is What If?

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]

Re:You are ruining it

[Hanashi]

The idea of a government using games or puzzles as recuitment devices isn't farfetched at all. In fact, during WWII, the British Government Code & Cipher School ran crossword puzzle contests whose secret goal was to identify people with the ability and interest to be trained as cryptologists. Some of these people went on to work at Bletchley Park, breaking Axis radio ciphers like Shark and Enigma.

Of course, that's a far cry from your standard arcade video game. I doubt there's much value to recruiting skilled video game players into the military. Now, if you want to talk about using games to recruit someone, a hacking game like Dark Signs [darksigns.com] would be a better target for the paranoid among us.

Read "Lucky Wander Boy"

[dsyu]

if you like fiction [amazon.com] based on arcade machines that never existed?

More Polybius info...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have personally been researching this game for a few weeks now, after seeing the original article, and in fact was the one who e-mailed Snopes.com about it (around Aug 1). I was disappointed that although they concluded that it was false, no explantations of it's origin were mentioned. This topic has also been heavily discussed in the Penny Arcade message boards a few weeks ago.

What I find to be the MOST interesting aspect is not the "amnesia inducing" properties, but if the game actually EXISTS. I have gone so far as to contact multiple arcade machine vendors, some of which claimed to have seen it at one point or another. If it does indeed exist, it truly has to be the most rare game of all time, and I find that to be much more intriguing.