POLYBIUS - The Video Game That Doesn't Exist

Next up: RetroAhoy - The Secret of Monkey Island
NB: This video contains flashing images, particularly at 11:34, 15:22, and 59:02

0:00 Introduction
2:37 Evidence & Analysis
5:11 Visual Evidence
8:21 Gameplay Footage
16:33 Physical Evidence
20:30 Anecdotal Evidence
28:50 Tracing the Source
37:06 Pre-2000 Evidence
43:14 Cyberyogi
48:23 Kurt Koller
52:13 Parallels and Possible Influences
1:06:46 Conclusion

[thegardenofeatin]

Here's how to solve the mystery: Create a company called Seneslochen, release a game called Polybius, and see who sues you.

[pericles]

Not only was Polybius born in Arcadia and his name literally means "many lives" one of his most famous quotes is " historians should never report what they cannot verify through eyewitnesses". Whoever came up with all the details for this story is a straight-up thematic genius. Hope they found their true calling as a writer or director.

[PeeperSnail]

I saw a Tumblr post not too long ago that talked about why this urban legend caught so much traction. To paraphrase, every individual element of Polybius is true to some extent:

1) The symptoms described (headaches, nausea, nightmares, mild memory loss and trauma) fit what someone going through an epileptic seizure might experience. Back in the early 80's, epilepsy awareness was near to non-existent, and for a lot of epileptic people, their first seizures were probably triggered by arcade games.

2) Men in black frequenting arcades were a common sight in some places. This isn't due to them gathering info from a creepy game, but rather, because they suspected an arcade was a front for an illegal gambling ring. It wasn't an unfounded fear, as many early arcades did indeed turn out to be just that.

3) A poor neighborhood like that described as the origin of Polybius would absolutely set up bootleg arcade machines. These would be frankensteined from various cabinets, and the games would suffer from visual glitches due to the poor construction.

[Gurmannen]

It's funny, I've watched this probably 4 times now, over 5 years, fully knowing the conclusion of the video. Still, it is so well made and so perfectly narrated, I keep coming back.

[Didymus-vzuy]

26:45 "I had the prankster's full name, and an approximate location; so I drove there and personally beat him to death with a crowbar."

[markterrano]

There was another potential source to disprove the myth. As an 80s arcade adult (I used to visit multiple arcades every week) I knew several of the arcade owners. It was a fairly small scene and I think if you find any 80s Portland area arcade owner they can probably tell you the other owners of the era. Video Games and pinball machines were a significant capital investment, and the glossy single-sheet brochures from the arcade companies were what arcade owners had to make a big purchase decision on. So they all regularly visited each others arcades and played the new games, scoped out how many people were waiting to play and estimated the hourly income from machines at their competitors arcades. I remember talking to arcade owners in line playing Dragon's Lair for instance. I wasn't in Portland in that era but in New Orleans which was a big test market for arcades. Any game that had rumors of long lines would have attracted immediate interest by other arcade owners.

[angwa_]

Geez this dude could probably track down a killer if he wanted to

[Scudboy]

I grew up in the 70's and 80's and the arcade explosion at the start of the 80's was unreal. Your average arcade had dim or even black lighting, all the games had their volume set to maximum and most arcades had jukeboxes as well, blaring heavy metal and rock at almost concert decibels. It was an assault on the senses that's hard to describe unless you were there. New games were coming out almost daily sometimes, and you never knew what would show up next. Every movie theater had an arcade too, and half the fun of going to the movies was hitting up the arcade while you waited for the movie to start. It was a crazy time. The idea that a game could pop up somewhere as an experiment in mind control is entirely plausible. New machines were so common and they generated such a huge buzz when the showed up you could have to wait hours to play a popular game, lining your quarters/tokens up on the machine to save your place in line. Every new game had some new gimmick or twist to set it apart, and the fight over floor space in an arcade was brutal, with distributors bribing and threatening arcade owners to get their machines installed. There was intense competition behind the scenes and at video game conventions- originally not for the fans, but for the distributors and developers, with a sales driven convention floor that wouldn't have been out of place at a 60's car dealership convention. I had a good friend who worked at an arcade and would tell stories of distributors shoving competitor's machine out of the way to install theirs or even outright stealing machines to get floor space for their own. Most arcades did not own the machines they had- they leased them. When a machine was old or unpopular, they'd have the distributor come pick it up, but other companies would offer to remove the machines for them. You can guess that a lot of these machines did NOT end up where they were supposed to go. There was a really Wild West lawlessness about early arcades that made them that much more fun to go to.

[kabukijr]

POLYBIUS:
*doesn’t exist*
Petscop:
_Are you challenging me?_

[bobbarob]

"There's also a user named polybius who was quite active in alt.mag.playboy between 1997 and 1998."

Local man incidentally kinkshsmed by digital archaeologist from twenty years into the future

[austinsavage]

Games being addictive was truly a horror story back when you needed to put 25 cents in each time just to play

[DaemonNoctis]

The most important thing I've learned from this video is that somehow there is still records of the most hidden conversations and information from the earliest stages of the internet which to me is just fascinating.

[d.aurora]

The amount of research you've done for this video game is astonishing which video game journalists these days don't even bother doing. Mad respect to you sir.

[unstablemathematician]

German is my first language. "Sinneslöschen" is not a commonly used word (and I'd definitely do a double take if someone used it in conversation), but it's a perfectly valid and grammatically correct compound noun.
Quick rundown:
"der Sinn" means "sense" in this context (though it could also mean "mind", which I think is a more interesting interpretation).
"löschen" is a verb that means "to erase". However, pretty much any verb can also be used as a noun. "das Löschen" is the noun counterpart of "löschen" and it means exactly what you think, "the act of erasing". So, "das Löschen" can be used to form a compound noun just fine.
To form a compound noun, you sometimes have to change the ending of one of the words. "Sinn" is one of those. Essentially, the long version of the word "Sinneslöschen" would be "das Löschen des Sinnes", which translates to "the erasing of the sense/mind". "Sinn" is in the genitive case here, so when you shorten it, you keep the genitive ending.
Therefore, you get "das Sinneslöschen".

So, yeah. Weird, but grammatically correct, and given that German is such a finicky language and the person made all the right decisions when forming this compound word, I believe that they're a native speaker or have been living in Germany for a while.
A non-native speaker would have probably called it "Sinnlöschen".

[MattMcIrvin]

In the comments of another YouTube video I saw someone insisting that he'd seen Polybius (replete with the usual Men in Black fiddling with it, etc.) in an arcade at the Mall at Rockingham Park in Salem, NH in the early 1980s.

Mentioned it to a friend, and he immediately pointed out that the mall didn't exist until 1991.

[redshiftthefox]

Mojang use to play into the myth, where in the update notes of each new version of the game they'd include "- Removed Herobrine." They haven't done this for years. Maybe it's simply because patch notes and changes are no longer put at the forefront of the launcher anymore, perhaps it could be that more people don't know what Herobrine is compared to those who do. In any plugin or mods' patch notes I've written I always include "- Removed Herobrine, " because Mojang won't anymore. Granted, the Minecraft community who still remembers, may not care much anymore, too.

[Ghostly_Leo]

This isn't a YouTube video, it's a goddamn documentary.

[squog]

It isn't even funny how good this documentary is.

[timurtheterrible]

Fun fact: This video is mentioned on the Polybius Wikipedia page.

[knightbrolaire]

As a Czech citizen, the story of the alleged Welsh developer who moved to Czechoslovakia because of his parents' business affairs really cracked me up. As a communist country, there were no private businesses, they were all owned by the government. There was little to no trade with the west. Getting hired by a South American company to make a game for the US market is a darn wild fantasy. Also, the eastern bloc (or most of it) was pretty much behind in computer technologies - I suspect scientists backed by the government would be lucky to work with such computers here around 1980. People fabricating these grand stories set in foreign countries should really do some research of those countries beforehand :D