Dunning records that the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided several video arcades in the area just ten days later, where the owners were suspected of using the machines for gambling, and the lead-up to the raid involved FBI agents monitoring arcade cabinets for signs of tampering and recording high scores.
He notes that two players fell ill in Portland on the same day in 1981, one collapsing with a migraine headache after playing Tempest, and another suffering from stomach pain after playing Asteroids for 28 hours in a filmed attempt to break a world record at the same arcade.
American producer and author Brian Dunning believes Polybius to be an urban legend that grew out of a mixture of influences in the 1980s. Skeptics and researchers have differing ideas on when, how and why the story of Polybius began. Still, Polybius has enjoyed cult-like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era." Ben Silverman of Yahoo! Games remarked: "Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the game ever existed, no less turned its users into babbling lunatics. Aside from the mockup cabinets and games inspired by the myth, no authentic cabinets or ROM dumps have ever been documented. Magazines and mainstream news of the early 1980s make no mention of Polybius. This led to the hypothesis that the government was hosting some sort of experiment and sending subliminal messages to the players. , which catalogs urban legends, concludes the game is a modern-day version of 1980s rumors of "men in black". The alleged original Polybius arcade game does not exist. The article declared the existence of the game to be "inconclusive", helping to both spark curiosity and spread the story.Į-FOIA request for Polybius, which returned no results This is the first known printed mention of the game, exposing the legend to a mass-market audience. Polybius appeared in a September 2003 issue of GamePro, as part of a feature story on video games called "Secrets and Lies". The game has the same name as 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. The word's meanings are derived from the German words Sinne ("senses") and löschen ("to extinguish" or "to delete"), though the way they are combined is not standard German Sinnlöschen would be more correct. If it was a German term of actual use, "Sinneslöschen" would be pronounced like. The word is described by writer Brian Dunning as "not-quite-idiomatic German" (a word constructed outside the norms of German-language usage and grammar) meaning "sense delete" or "sensory deprivation". The company named in most accounts of the game is Sinneslöschen. Approximately one month after its supposed release in 1981, Polybius is said to have disappeared without a trace.
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Players supposedly suffered from a series of unpleasant side effects, including seizures, amnesia, insomnia, night terrors, and hallucinations. The machines were visited by men in black, who collected unknown data from the machines, allegedly testing responses to the game's psychoactive effects. The game was popular to the point of addiction, with lines forming around the machines and often resulting in fights over who would play next. The urban legend says that in 1981, when new arcade games were uncommon, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs of Portland, Oregon. A mocked-up Polybius cabinet made by Rogue Synapse
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