410: Return To Polybius

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[SPEAKER_00]: a dangerous game.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jason Horton.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rebecca Leib.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And this is Ghost Ham.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rebecca Leib, that's Jason Horton, and this is Ghost Town.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Come with me.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Back to 1981.

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[SPEAKER_00]: When our kid games were at their peak, we've got space invaders, we've got Donkey Kong, we've got Pac-Man, remember those?

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[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1980s, arcade games were a multi-billion-dollar industry, arcades being the social hub for teens, so naturally, news of hot games, obscure games, games you were dying to play, new experiences, were really big news.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So when one game came out with its own mystery, its own tales of addiction, obsession, amnesia.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Death, even CIA influence, you better believe people wanted to play it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Today on Ghost Town, the Legend of Polybius.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1981 rumors of this game really started cropping up, at least, so the internet tells us.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It was a game that was played mostly and the suburb was a portland, limited release, it was fast action, it had puzzle elements, there's even a graphic of it that you can still find online, which I did very easily.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's exactly what you'd think of in 80s game, like it really is,

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[SPEAKER_00]: Like, Harkin' back to space invaders, it's got a similar, heavily pixelated kind of mysterious spacey font.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It just says, Polybius in dark background and kind of these teal chunky letters.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It says the publisher and the bottom and that's kind of it, you know?

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's, again, really expected, and you just get enough information to believe, but again, not enough information to make any real conclusions about what the game is, except as a reference to other games, but the similar aesthetic, or where it came from, et cetera.

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[SPEAKER_00]: This game is described again and again as being particularly addictive, again, despite its normal appearance.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The only concrete details, a name, a release date, 1981, and the company behind it, Sina Slashon, which did I say that wrong, of course I did.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It was reported that those who played Polybius experienced disturbing side effects, including amnesia, nightmares, nausea, intense anxiety, epileptic seizures, sleep disorders, painful headaches, and paranoia.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Some players, even reported feeling they could no longer control their thoughts.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Many people thought that the game influenced behavior subliminally in some kind of direct

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[SPEAKER_00]: In extreme cases, the game is supposedly responsible for several suicides and acts of violence.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Many players require psychological help to deal with their mental health afterward, again, allegedly, with some allegedly, never fully recovering, of course.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it is truly the recipe for a lure, especially, you know, going back to this mythical time and gameplay.

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[SPEAKER_00]: the side effects of this supposed game, I should say, we're so intense that many former arcade junkies swore off video games altogether, sure they did.

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[SPEAKER_00]: One player, allegedly who tried out Polybius, even became a prominent anti-video game crusader afterwards.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right, right, right, right.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what about that?

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[SPEAKER_00]: So what other information do we have about this game?

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[SPEAKER_00]: The company, the company named in most accounts of the story is Sina Slashin.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Sina Slachen.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, my German horrible.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And this name is the only part of the plebius story that, you know, we can sink our teeth into, really.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Running the word through Google's translate reveals that it means mind-racing, in German, interesting.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The mind-racing company really backs up what this legend is trying to get at.

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[SPEAKER_00]: What the purpose of the game actually is.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And that is that an unknown government agency might be the CIA, might be the FBI,

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[SPEAKER_00]: teenagers, whatever.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, according to the legend, during the trial run of polybius, employees of the manufacturer of the game would periodically appear at chosen arcades dressed in all black with heavy coats.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They are they would observe the people playing the game.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They are performance, they are reflexes, they are mind bending to the will of the game.

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[SPEAKER_00]: After only a month or so, all the machines

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[SPEAKER_00]: vanished.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The plebius arcade machines have disappeared without a trace.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now there's lots of variations on plebius, but they all kind of, they act, they show themselves similarly, right?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Crazy game, mind control a game, seductive game, you play it and you play it and you play it and you go crazy,

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[SPEAKER_00]: Right?

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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, again, it's very dangerous sounding.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's very alluring.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's very mysterious and why do we do that?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Why do people go crazy when they play this mystery game?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because the government is doing tests on your little brain when you're playing the game.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Right?

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[SPEAKER_00]: It feeds into a lot of fears around video games that were prevalent at the time.

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[SPEAKER_00]: We'll get into that in a little

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[SPEAKER_00]: why the name itself, Polybius.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Polybius was an ancient Greek historian.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Can we get some information about that?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Does that contribute to the game's meaning and perhaps the mystery of it, perhaps?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Most famously, Polybius wrote the histories, a wide-sleeping document that went through the rise of the Roman Empire in the third and second centuries BC.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It covers the period 264 to 146,

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[SPEAKER_00]: and records all kinds of historic details and Italy, Iberia, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Africa.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The history is, I mean, I read in college, it's a really, really important text, not only for being one of the only Hellenistic historical works to survive in any substantial form, but also because it is so ahead of its time politically.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He talks about separations of power and government checks and balances to limit power and the introduction of that famous phrase we, the people.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, it influenced all kinds of governmental documents and, of course, the U.S. Constitution.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that's one thing.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So that means what that this game is kind of a harkening back to the foundations of our government of what makes giant organizations tick of what creates institutions and keeps them running fairly.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's a tongue and cheat play on that?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Or is it maybe referencing not Polybius or his writings, but a less famous offshoot of Polybius, the Greek historian, a cipher that bears his name.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The Polybius cipher, also known as the Polybius checkerboard, is a device invented by the ancient Greeks, Cleozynes, and Demo Cletus, I believe I'm saying that right, and made famous by the historian, Polybius himself.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the device is used for fractioning characters so that they can be represented by smaller sets of symbols.

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[SPEAKER_00]: If that doesn't make any sense to you, it doesn't really make any sense to me really.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a way of like number crunching, I believe, which is useful in a numeric shorthand for telegraphy, stenography, cryptography, it's a very old shorthand code for delivering messages.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, I don't quite understand it myself, but that's what I understand it to be.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's pretty fucking cool.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So okay, let's say the game is named after the cipher.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Then it's like, all right, we're unlocking the code, we're unlocking a mystery.

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[SPEAKER_00]: What is that mystery?

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[SPEAKER_00]: What is that code?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Is it to gain more knowledge?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Is it for the federal government to gain more knowledge by way of us?

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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So what else do we know about this machine?

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[SPEAKER_00]: No newspapers or gaming magazines from the 1980s even mentioned it, which is very hard to believe it was some kind of controversial machine of the time, if it got attention, and there's no rom images of the arcade machine software ever.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing has ever surface, which is also kind of hard to believe.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, if it's this kind of mythic machine.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The first online-mentioned oblivious is in 1998, 17 years after it's supposed release.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The online reference is in a coin-op.org article, a web resource and digital museum for classic arcade games, coin-operated machines, repair guides, and restoration logs.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It included the screenshot that I just described, but really not much else.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The earliest known printed mention of Plebius is in the September 2003 issue of Game Pro.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The feature story, secrets and lies, declared the game's existence to be inconclusive.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The article spread the legend to a broader audience, but it's author only heard about the legend when the owner of the coinop.org contacted him, nothing deeper than that.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Interest was further ignited in 2006 when a post appeared on the coinop.org forums by an individual presented himself as Stephen Roach and claiming to have founded Sinich Slach.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Based on the timeline of publications, the gaming magazine, inverse concluded that the game was, quote, almost certainly invented to promote coinop.org.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And if that is the case, that is a very cool gorilla marketing strategy that we're still talking about, that I'm still talking about to you today.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Not bad.

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[SPEAKER_00]: On May 16th, 2009, an update to the page coin.org promised to bring further information after a trip to Kyiv Ukraine to investigate.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, as of 2021-26, no further information has been added,

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[SPEAKER_00]: To the page which again makes me believe that perhaps coinop.org was behind this after all.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But that doesn't mean people weren't trying to investigate it and take it seriously as a real game, which ended up itself made people created the game.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's like inception for early 80s arcade games.

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[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to talk about it after this break.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The first tear in the Polybius legend of this mysterious, perhaps mind-controlling, making kids crazy, video game, comes in 2000.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we're going back to coinop.org.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's original online reference.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Researchers have found that the entry on coinop.org was first uploaded a few years after 1998, even though it's labeled 1998, indicating that the upload date was fabricated, pointing us back to coinop.org.

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[SPEAKER_00]: As perhaps, being the source and the culprit for the Polybius game hoax, we could say, do we want to call it a hoax?

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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's not a game, but weirdly enough, it would soon become one.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In April 2004, a site called GoodDealGames.com distributed its own version of the Polybius game, clearly trying to evoke the myth and mess with people.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Those who are brave enough to run the new Polybius video game are given a warning that it has been linked to impaired memory and psychological changes.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Gameplay may cause epileptic seizures and susceptible individuals.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Do you still want to continue your ask?

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[SPEAKER_00]: You click OK!

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[SPEAKER_00]: And when you do, you'll be met with the familiar title screen reformed for a 4-3 monitor with the logo rapidly flashing.

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[SPEAKER_00]: A sound effect plays a sequence of

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[SPEAKER_00]: The game exits with a fatal error and a message box reads, April Fool's.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, this little Polybius joke game only served to make the legend of the game more seductive, more intriguing, and of course, more popular.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But there is another game that has become the dominant example when searching for Polybius gameplay.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's thought to be from Synoslaw.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe, the closest thing we have, but the site explains that it's just fan mail and attempt to recreate the game, or whatever the game was supposed to be.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In this game, you're presented with the obligatory warning screens.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Don't play this game.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It might cause psychological trauma, but it's not just an April Fool's joke.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It is in fact a game, and it's a game that is somewhat simple, I would say, and maybe even a little bit pouring, honestly, I didn't play it myself.

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[SPEAKER_00]: in all fairness, I just read about it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So basically the game is this.

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[SPEAKER_00]: You control a ship with a row of numbers at the bottom, and you can rotate and shoot from the ship.

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[SPEAKER_00]: You shoot these glowing shapes also with numbers on them.

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[SPEAKER_00]: If you shoot a shape with a number that mirrors one of the numbers in the rows, or is evenly divisible by a number in the top row,

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[SPEAKER_00]: then you'll reduce the number base by that amount, I think, I think.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Once the base reaches zero, you advance to the next level, and then the visuals level by level get progressively trippier.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently, if you enter code, you can also access higher game functions, the codes might even be from the original plebius cipher, which is an arc.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very archaic reference.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, the game feels a little bit like space invaders, a little bit like Tetris, a little like again, I don't know enough to really like, and it's specifically to maybe like even like Dr. Mario almost, I mean, again, I'm really showing my hand here, but it sounds kind of cool and also kind of like low file like these games are want to be.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, as far as the plebius myth is concerned, it's really, this whole game is a tribute to the heyday of cabinet and arcade gaming.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And the story of plebius, again, is unsubstantiated.

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[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And it's probably not true.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, it's probably not true.

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[SPEAKER_00]: If we can't find something about a 1981 arcade game with mind control effects on the internet, or a physical example of it in an arcade or in arcade museum, it's probably not true.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like we're talking about 1881.

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[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about 1981.

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[SPEAKER_00]: We're truly like it's the dawn of the digital age.

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[SPEAKER_00]: If we can't point to something or a link on the internet, what are we even doing here?

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[SPEAKER_00]: But the polypious myth is almost more important than that in my opinion.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just about trying to find the origin of this game or what this game is or how to play it or what it's about.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's really indicative of

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[SPEAKER_00]: The story of Polybius might firstly be rooted in several real but pretty unrelated events and influences.

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[SPEAKER_00]: For example, two players fell ill in a Portland arcade on the same day in Guess What Year, 1981.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Teenage Portland resident Michael Lopez developed a migraine headache after playing Tempest and left the arcade.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He was found unconscious in a stranger's yard after blacking out.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Then, during a filmed attempt to break the asteroid's world record at the same arcade where Lopez became ill, another Portland team played

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[SPEAKER_00]: asteroids for 28 hours until suffering from severe stomach pain.

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[SPEAKER_00]: 10 days later, the FBI raided several Portland arcades in the area.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The lead up to the rate involved FBI agents monitoring cabinets for evidence of tampering and recording high scores for possible witnesses.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The FBI made 52 Portland Arcade arrests in, guess the year.

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[SPEAKER_00]: 1981 and 25 arrests at a single arcade in Northportland a year later.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now these raids were not about mind control or secret government ops, they were about people breaking the law.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because some arcade owners had a legally converted video game cabinets in two gambling machines.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And that was no bueno, that was not good.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now we've got that, right?

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[SPEAKER_00]: We've got these government entities breaking into very dramatically Portland gaming arcades.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And then we've got, of course, people getting headaches and disoriented from massive gameplay.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But then there's the whole issue of video game panic.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Many adults in the 1980s and honestly even today expressed concern about video games and children spending too much time playing them and what that was doing to their brains.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Earlier video games were the subject of lots of fear, anxiety, danger.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean how many times have you had the discussion, does video gaming video games promote violence, right?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Does playing them make someone more violent?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Does it rot their brain quote unquote, right?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Do they do something to somebody?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Do they trip up people psychologically?

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[SPEAKER_00]: There are nine recorded cases of arcade games triggering epileptic seizures in the 1980s, which is probably the most concrete evidence for the danger of video games.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1982, a teenager died while playing berserk in Calumet City, Illinois.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He had heart failure during that time.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And again, it was a time when he was playing a video game.

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[SPEAKER_00]: His heart failure was not triggered by the game itself, it was just a horrible and tragic accident, but of course, this teenager playing the game while he passed away created this conflation that we are still talking about, the idea of game is being bad influences, and even the idea of games, cursing people, being cursed, being something that can control people

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[SPEAKER_00]: Which is, again, true, epileptic seizures are important concerns in playing games, but again, a lot of these things got much bigger than some of their parts.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Then there's the idea of this whole urban legend being perhaps not that original.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's lots of legends and rumors circulating, especially in the 70s, 80s, 90s of machines, experiments designed to infiltrate the population, to hypnotize them, to brainwashed them, to recruit people.

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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, these things are also very, very sexy, very seductive, trying to get

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[SPEAKER_00]: And we've talked about it too with different computer games, you know, trying to get people to crack a code to see if they have what it takes to become a part of a government agency of an operative, again, very, very sexy, not often happening.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Although, again, we do know that.

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[SPEAKER_00]: that CIA has been known to recruit from different puzzles, so not, not based in reality, but conflated to a point where it becomes this myth, this urban legend.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Ben Silverman of Yahoo Games remarked, quote, unfortunately there's no evidence that the game ever existed, no less turned its users into babbling lunatics.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Still, Polybius has enjoyed cult-like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I would argue that we're still pretty technologically paranoid.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I think we can apply this to lots of things.

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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, our overuse of social media of our phones, constantly being attached to our faces of AI, the conversation around AI, and how much that influences our mental health and how much that has played into how we relate to each other, how we relate to artistic forms, how we create.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So that's not my favorite quote.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I personally like the quote about plebius in wait for it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Ripley's believe it or not.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I like this quote because it alludes to plebius being this straw man for these collective fears that we had at the time, and that we still have today.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And if we can put our fears, our paranoia, our concern, our unfamiliarity on something like a video game, then we have something to direct all of that emotion and fear towards.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Versus it being more complicated, more amorphous.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The Ripley's believe it or not, quote, calls Bolivia's quote, the most dangerous game to never exist.