Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 364: Polybius ft Kevin from Pixel Lit

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

Joined by video game novelization expert Kevin from Pixel Lit, Mathas takes him, Alex, and us all back to the dawn of video games to get to the bottom of the mystery of Polybius, the arcade game that may or may not have ever existed.CHILLUMINATI is a weekly comedy podcast hosted by Mike Martin, Jesse Cox and Alex Faciane. Hold on to your tin-foil hats and traverse the realms of the mysterious, supernatural, spooky and sometimes truly horrible - and your third eye will never be the same!Subscribe to our Patreon to support us and for extra content like full video episodes, weekly Minisodes, exclusive art, and more at http://patreon.com/CHILLUMINATIPODThank you to our sponsors:HEROFORGE! https://www.heroforge.com/OFFICIAL MERCH: https://theyetee.com/chilluminatiMike Martin - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - https://www.youtube.com/@StarWarsOldCanonBookClub/Editor: DeanCutty Producer: Hilde @ https://bsky.app/profile/heksen.bsky.social Show Art: Studio Melectro @ http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Logo Design: Shawn JPB @ https://twitter.com/JetpackBragginEpisode Sourceshttps://www.reddit.com/r/TheCinemassacre/comments/78sjqg/polybius_angry_video_game_nerd_episode_150/https://skeptoid.com/episodes/362https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7517030/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJTi6f3j4C0

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chulamani podcast. Episode 364 is always on one of your host, Mike Martin, joined today by just one of my two LA boys, Alex Vassiani. Hello. Oh, no. Hey. Oh, no. Don't worry.

We filled the seat real quick and relatively easily because we're also joined by one half. Anytime Jesse's out, I will make it sound like we can just replace him. You just want to keep him in check just in case. I want to keep him on his toes. I want him to know at any moment. he could go. Because today we got one half of the Pixel Lit podcast, which is a weekly podcast that covers honestly, surprisingly deep breath of video game novelizations and tie-ins.

We have Kevin from Pixel Lit. Welcome to the show, Kevin. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm glad to just be your replacement 40-something year olds. We're all in that age range. It's all right. I think that's the millennial role in life as being the replacement 40-something. year olds for people.

Wants to a 40 year old. Yeah. And I stayed a man child so that I'm fresh for anything. You know, my mind's fresh. That's the key. I'm having a youthful spirit. Yeah. I'm sad that I don't get an of L.A. today.

I'm just like an L.A. guy today. Just the L.A. guy without Jesse. You weren't, because Kevin, you're not from L.A., correct? I'm not from L.A. I live in Florida. And I'm from the Philadelphia area originally. Yeah. I'm a New England boy, too.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's tough being being dislocated from the northeast. But I survive with my family down here in Florida. We're doing our best. Not the worst. Not the worst weather in Florida. Not the best, not the worst. That's like California. It's California, but with vividness is how I described. California with vividness. California but sweatier. That's yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we've both been on pixel lit.

I got to say, you know, I read an ass book. The thing is like, yeah, it's always hard when you, when you have a podcast with guests on where there's like a bit of like pre-reading. And I was happy to do. It was very easy for me.

I read very fast. But I was just, it was probably the weirdest background information that I've ever been asked to enjoy. just before doing a show. I read the Road Rash book. Road rash. Road rash.

The motorcycle Sega Genesis arcade game where you like beat people with with bats and sticks. And it was it was not a compelling story, but it was great. It was so good. And I read the Blaster Master book and I remember very little. Yeah, there's not much to remember except that it is literally a retelling of the Blastermaster story that you would have gotten from like the Instructural. manual and you know they just filled in with some extra

excellently novelized yeah yeah wonderful books and then he got in a car and then he got out of the car and then he got in the car oh no the car's falling ah it's gravity or whatever the yeah i think that was how the book went actually yeah pretty much you've been doing this for a while now i have to know what is the worst video game novel you have ever read is there one that you just have on like the shelf as like nothing could beat how bad this is. Yeah, it's Dark Souls, the mask of vindication is the worst. Interesting. The Dark Souls would not be what I thought.

So bad. It is, I can't even remember the author. But it's somebody famous, Dark Souls. And it was so disappointing that I, it was one of the, well, okay, no, I do get angry a lot on the show but this was probably the angriest I got okay it was Michael Stackpole who if you are a

Star Wars novel fan you're very familiar with Michael Stackpole I love Michael Stackpole growing up X-wing series all that all that fun stuff but Star Wars mask of indication basically it felt like Michael Stackpole had a

half-finished draft of a fantasy novel and just like sprinkled some like dark souls shit in there like bonfires and souls and whatever and weird time stuff and was just like here you go here you go guys this is this is it and they just ran with it dark souls yeah the flip end of that spectrum is the book i'll say everybody should read uh that is that is a game book is uh sacred and terrible air because that was written uh uh by the disco alesium guy.

Before he made disco elysium, he wrote this book, Sacred and Terrible Air. And it is so weird and unique and Eastern European. No surprise that that would be fantastic. Yeah. It's fantastic. So I definitely,

Robert Kervitz's Sacred and Terrible Air is worth a shout. Hell yeah. And that game was, that was a, that game, You know, I was, last week, I just did, but last week I just did an episode about Grand Teft Auto 5 and how all, all consuming the game was. And disco elysium was all consuming in a completely other way.

Like what a, what a, what a crazy world that was. Yeah. A nominal, phenomenal game. Yeah. Okay. So since you, you said, this isn't your first time on our show. Well, what happened my voice is on our show? On our show.

I want to I want to deep Russian accent for the rest of the show. I want to ask you, I just had a little bit of discolusium left in it. Yeah, I just came out. I don't know what happened there.

Chaos magic. In the context of this show, pretty much everybody who listens to it always says, oh, I'm a Mathis, which means like I'm like Fox Mulder basically, or I'm a Jesse, which basically means I'm Dana Scully,

or I'm Alex, which basically means like I'm Tony Shalub in Galaxy Quest as a metaphor I use often. I'm just, I'm along for the ride. I enjoy a good tale. Yeah. Where do you fall on that spectrum when it comes to like the paranormal, the unexplained, the conspiracy theories?

Yeah. I would say I wish I was an Alex, but I'm actually a Jesse. Is it, is it just, is that, is that because you feel like it's an injustice when things don't have explanations? Is it like, you can't let it go? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's, that's kind of where I land on that. I can't let things go, even though I wish I was able to kind of just go along for the ride a little bit more. Hey, you know, working through therapy might be autism. I don't know. We'll find out. Hey, bam, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man. The podcast world. I'm not autistic at all.

At all. This is not just me info dumping for three hours. I didn't just turn my hyper-focused infixation into a show. So that aside, because you're a skeptic, a lot of the time the explanation comes along with it. But have you ever encountered anything in your own life or have, has anybody in your family story or a local legend in your world that comes to mind when it comes to the paranormal or conspiracy theories or even just a favorite that you have? Honestly, no.

My family is, you know, pretty, pretty straightforward emotionalist Germans. So there's not a lot going on there. Even if they've expected everything, they would tell them to go away and it'll believe in you. We have expected everything that's ever happened. Yeah, everything that I've experienced that could have been a supernatural phenomenon had an explanation, ultimately. that explanation was my dad playing a prank on me. Fair. Yeah.

Yeah. Like when my brother was watching the exorcist, my dad climbed into the air conditioning vent. Oh my God. Jesus Christ. And whispered through it during a quiet moment that Captain Howdy loves you to my brother and his friends. So that was.

That was. That was. That was. That was fucking boring. your dad, Johnny Knoxville? Welcome to Jackass. That's nothing actually ever happened, but that's like, that's like pure Jesse. Yeah, it is.

You're actually going to fill the role rather well today. Yeah, that's pure Jesse, honestly. Jesse's like, if I saw it in real life, I wouldn't even care. Honestly, the skepticism is welcome on this episode because what we're talking about today is actually kind of already well known out there. Yeah. I mean, look, I love when, I love when what we're going to talk. about crosses over with like the what the guest talks about like I love that video games video

game boys here we've also true we also all are yeah for years video game people yeah exactly it's what we all started it's where we all like our content has started from 15 years ago and on um and one of the most well-known topics from even when I was young and had heard about it and one we even covered through you Alex very briefly in one of the kind of like listical episodes is a polybius which we have not covered in full and improper on the show at all, which surprised me when I was like, should we do this? Yeah,

I feel like it's notorious enough that it deserves to be given like at least, you know, one one episode's worth of attention, right? Yeah, because it's a pretty fucking amazing story. It's pretty like, it's a pretty like great urban legend. Like it has so many good little details to it that make it fun.

Yeah, there's a few real life things that tie into it that are the reason it really like kind of took off too. Um, so before we. jump into like the full thing a shout out to the two main uh sources i use for today today's episode um stewer brown uh stewart brown's documentary polybius from 2017 uh just worth if you have any interest that is actually super good yeah super good um and brian dunning skeptoid uh also a really good read for you to uh go to and then there's just like a million other small

even angry video game nerd i can get a shout out because i watched his polybius video again prior to getting ready to do this episode. Love to have him on the show at some point too. That'd be really cool. Thank you so much to HeroForge for sponsoring today's episode. If you already know me, you know I have a tabletop RPG problem. I just love working with HeroForge in general. So when they came more like Skycastle games showed me what they were building,

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Head over there. Follow the Kickstarter page so you know when it goes live. Yeah, so before we go into the details, what is both of yours general knowledge of the Polybius? I feel like I've gone deep into it before in the past because definitely I've almost done episodes on this before. We've had a couple of video game-related guests on in the past where we almost did Polybius.

I remember that it's like a video game cabinet. with like a mysterious sort of essence to it. And that there's something about it hurting your brain and it having to do with like government research. Yeah, probably the same amount, maybe a little less just like, hey, it's a myth of some addictive game, you know. Yeah, yeah. Well, then here's basically the pitch for you. It's like somewhere in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon in 1981, supposedly there was an arcade cabinet that, quote, should not have been. there. So the arcade cabinet itself was described as black with no side art, no illustrations

really on it. And like no real any, anything to kind of like call you out of the arcade cabinet. There was no like asteroids type art on it that would have been on it at the time. It was just a straight black plain cabinet with just a name across the marquee that had just kind of a weird lettering. And that name was very simply Polybius. Supposedly the kids who played it could not stop playing it. And the ones that couldn't stop started mentally coming apart with headaches or nausea. Some said that they had night terrors or they had amnesia. They couldn't even remember playing it. Seizures, knocked them into the ground. Some of them stopped sleeping entirely. And supposedly some of them stopped talking. And a few of them, depending on the version of the story you get,

stopped existing. Like they just vanished from thin air. That was me playing Destiny 2, to be honest. I did years. I did years. If they flew by, I don't remember what happened during those years. We,

World of Warcraft, circa 2004 to 2008. That was like 2003 with Star Wars Galaxies. Oh, you're right. Star Wars Galaxies is first. Or whenever,

whenever that came out. But it was college. And I had my room in college. So I was able to really isolate. I feel like it's a couple of times a year. I lament Star Wars Galaxies. I like, ache for the times before new combat upgrade and all the stuff they the Jedi force village love

the Jedi in general oh man great anyway yeah no no yeah it just was one of my favorite games i fucking love that game so many papers ruined oh yeah i college scores gone i just i was too busy trying to be important in star wars galaxies where everything was player driven going to farm crate dragons for their pearls oh yeah anyway every week or so with polybius men and dark suits, men in black, would come into the arcade. They opened up the machine and took something out of it and then would leave. They never supposedly touched the money that was on the inside. And then one day, just out of nowhere, the Polybius cabinet was gone.

And when people looked it up, nobody could find a company or like a copyright or anything that belonged to the supposed game. And no cabinet in any collector's garage anywhere on earth had a Polybius arcade. The only name that anybody seemed to be able to find attached to it was a manufacturer that nobody ever really found called Sinosokin. Sinuschon, Sinusation, right? Slienslossian, thank you. Sinarslashen, so yeah, you know that, exactly. But that's the pitch of the story.

That's basically the myth in a nice, tight little package. And like we both know, and just to save everybody some time right up front, it isn't real. There was no such machine called Polybius. And I'm sure there are a few listeners who hear me say that. It was like, well, what the fuck are we doing here for an episode then? Because there's actually some real documented, findable stuff that is tied to Polybius that we can pull dates on. Kids in Portland arcades, for instance, genuinely did get sick in 1981 on a specific day with one specific arcade. and it actually made the paper at the time.

Then men in suits did genuinely come to Portland arcades, open up the cabinets, take data out. It wasn't mysterious what they took and left the money alone because that's all they were there for. And we even know which agency and why. Black unmarked cabinets with no art on them genuinely also did show up in arcades and vanish a few weeks later, but there's also a boring industry reason for that.

Video games did put people in hospitals around this time. And there is a real mechanism behind that as well. Like all this stuff I'm saying is that this is the bones of the actual myth. This is where it comes from because it is a lack of information as most things are mixed with real world events, which is a fertile breeding ground for anyone to just start shoving theories into it that just match what's needed to make the story make sense. So we're going to kind of like, we're not going to super focus on the legend so much, as much as I'm just going to kind of like go through it. You're going to disassemble the Tulpa. Yeah, we're going to disassemble the Tulpa, the Eggregor of Polybius, real live on air right now.

You're going to open the breakfast sandwich and just eat the bacon. And then just after that, you're going to just eat the eggs. And you're going to appreciate it for what it is, understand why it plays a role in the sandwich. And then you're going to go, exactly, exactly. Yeah, I'm hungry, you guys. Yeah, you're making me hungry, dude. I could eat. Also, because we're old, I'm going to set a little bit up because I just don't know how much people under a certain age have any idea of how enormous arcades were.

Like, even though we grew up in the, I'd say the dying process of the arcade, there were still like USA skates and stuff that had like a thriving arcade section or the arcade in my local mall that I would go to and my dad ever so long. I'm gonna say, I think the big difference between when we were kids and when, like, you know, you think of arcades today, even if you're like being like, I've been to an arcade with like old video games in it, is that like, back when we were kids, well, back when we were kids, the arcade was it. Like, you could go to an arcade that was just the main thing to do there was to go play video games at it. Like it was a business that was just an arcade. And now they're all like a bar or there's like at the movies, there's an arcade or at the mall. there's a little arcade sometimes, but it's never like how it used to be where, like,

you know, the family arcade near, I forget where that was on, I forget it was, maybe it was on Vermont in L.A. And there's like a couple other ones like there's often at the beach. There's like dedicated arcades. Those ones are like,

there was like a culture to that. Like how skateboarding used to have a culture and how like, you know, pogs or whatever like people would like, there's like rules and, you know, you put your cord. down and it would be like it's time for me to play next like there was like a vibe to it people

would like fight each other i don't know you learned secrets from talking to each other you'd like meet people at the arcade like how you used to probably meet people at the movies when you were younger or something like that yeah yeah you could be like the fourth on a on a x-men arcade and and you know the x-men arcade or or if you were lucky you had the six player one uh with with all the screens. You always know yeah. Oh my God.

Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. And the Simpsons arcade game, which was just so random and had really nothing to do with the Simpsons other than the characters. I remember playing that down the shore for hours on the board.

I didn't realize until I was actually doing the research for this is that the X-Men arcade, the reason the X-Men look different than the cartoon characters is because it was based in the pilot that never got picked up. Probably next man. Wolverine. The X-Men.

I didn't know that at all. I actually just watched the pilot a few days ago. And I don't know, Wolverine. He's had an Australian accent, I think. Yeah, he's got the brown suit. Totally. Yeah, he's in the brown suit. He had like a different voice actor.

Very different show. That's really cool. But, yeah, like, back, right, arcades were booming around 1981. That's like where they hit their peak, 1981, 1982. Also, it's like the place where you could get the best technology. Like, the games looked the best. You weren't getting games that looked like this. at home.

And during its peak, video game coin operated businesses in the U.S. were pulling in more money than the movie industry and the music industry combined. The music industry is like fucking crazy to me. That doesn't even make sense to me.

No. And think about two, it's like all in quarters. All in quarters. All in quarters. Dude, I'm okay. If I, okay, if I never purchased a video game at my house

ever. And I, my room looks like Mathis is limited by the size of how big PC game boxes are. Yeah. How many he can fit on a shelf. Yeah. Yeah. Blue Ray size cases are, yeah. Blue ray cases are not so much of an issue. I've got a lot of video games over the years as a video game YouTuber, reviewer and like video maker. And if I had never bought a single one and you translated everything that I've spent on all my consoles and all my games into, quarters, like, that's how many quarters we're talking about. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. It's insane. Yeah. It's impossible to fathom. I didn't realize how, even I didn't realize how fucking successful this industry was back then. And to kind of, again, put more perspective on this. So Pac-Man hit in 1980.

And that shit was like an instant virus in society. Like, that game hit. And all of a sudden, there was a Pac-Man cartoon, a Pac-Man. cereal, a top 40 single called Pac-Man fever that charted. Yeah. Spackmania, baby. Yeah, there wasn't fucking Pac-Mania. Time magazine put video games on the cover in 1982 and that with a headline, uh,

that was gronk flash zap. That was the headline. Gronk. Gronk flash zap. Some copyright was like, some copywriter like, some copywriter like that's so raven into the future. was riding just had a stroke and just wrote Bronc for some reason.

I must write gronk. Rob Gronkowski. He's coming. It's like when the flash shows up to Batman. Bronk! Arcade machines were just fucking everywhere. And not only in just arcades, like machines were in, I don't know if you remember as,

but I very vividly remember as a kid, even in the early 90s. Like, arcade machines were in like my local pizza place. Yeah. They were in, like I said, the USA skates, the local laundromat. Longermat still, yeah. And my local grocery store actually had one, I remember. I keep thinking about buying a fucking Neo Geo machine and putting it in the laundromat

and being like, listen, let's split the take on this. I feel like everybody would play if you put a fucking Neo Geo machine in a laundromat today. 100%. It's exactly the right place to play video games. People need to go back out in the world. Had like a little mini arcade in his waiting room. which is, you know, great for kids who are waiting to get their teeth all jacked up with the wires.

Yeah, dude, mine had a mispacking machine in there, like a bar top one. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, basically anywhere you could find space, you were basically shoving an arcade cabinet because it was just guaranteed money. Like, it was just bringing in straight cash. And I know we talked about arcades in our kind of nostalgic view, but also, like,

in 1981, arcades were sensory overload. You walk into one. it's dim lighting and it's fucking loud. And there's my, my least favorite kind of human, teenagers. Everywhere in this bitch. Like everywhere.

Are we old boys? Are we old? I remember being a teenager. Teenagers do suck. We, like, as kids, we kind of suck a little bit.

I think it's part of having to be a teenager is sucking a little bit. Sure. Yeah. You know, in every possible way. And then, so like, sorry,

Alex's face is just completely, like, you get, dude? Picture me, I'm really far away. You know, dude? Like, this is me, like, distancing myself from the messaging and just, like, trying to check in. It does sound like, you get? It's just like, it's just like Robert Pattinson playing Chris Hansen just starts to lean

into the frame. He's like, you see how this looks, right? It just thinks, so, like, wear that and that, I should probably, there is context to why I said But back in high school, way back in the day, I had the unprivilege of learning of like all the like hockey boys and like popular girls would go to rainbow lipstick parties. Uh-huh. Did you know what that was? Do you know what that is? Is this, okay, I've never heard of this actually happening in my life, but I do know.

No, no, no. So this, this I remember we're talking about everybody wears different colored lipstick. And then they try to make a rainbow on. on the dick. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely happened in my school. I was informed about it.

I was informed about it. Yeah, I wasn't popular enough to go to them. Are you the homeless? Are you the homeless king? There was a memorandum. I was the anime club king. The nerds that were invisible in all the rooms were like taking information back to you,

passing it to you with little pieces of paper. My Lord, they are. They're doing it right now. The rainbow potty. There's a memorandum of understanding passed out during home. room saying this is happening nerds oh yeah and speaking of uh sensory overload you always knew that x-men uh arcade machine was in the in the in the arcades yeah oh yeah before you finish that

sentence i heard it in my frontal lobe i can still hear that voice i'm so bummed i missed out on the opportunity to get the one-up arcade version of that game because uh i think it finally came out right like for real again long ago and now it's not available anymore. No, there's like, I think it finally came out on like stuff,

right? Oh, that'd be cool. If you want to hook up like fight sticks to it, I know it actually came out on Mr. not too long ago too, if you do update all. If you know what I'm talking about.

But, man, it has support for the six player one. That's a great cabinet. You could, you could buy an original for $5,000 on vintage arcade. That's what I should take to the fucking laundromat.

Imagine if we started like a serious X-Men community league at the, at the launderea, whatever that thing is called across the street. I love that place. I kind of also bring this up with the teenagers and all that stuff too, because the industry also realized that the arcades have kind of this image. Like, it's loud, it's unbearable,

their kids everywhere. And in those early to mid-80s, they started purposely trying to push it away from that and make it into these more what we now nostalgize about, which is like, this kind of like warmer, fun, a place where like kids are running around and stuff too and like parents are bringing their kids there and so on.

Oh yeah. Because it was like it was like kind of like an edgy place to be originally. Yes. That's what you mean? Like it's like kind of dangerous. It's like the punk rock kind of place to go. Yeah. And they didn't the arcade cabinet owners were like that don't like this.

We need to like rebrand so we can have. You know what every industry fucking does inevitably along the, the throw of time is stop. Yeah. Kind of like when Vegas tried to be family friendly for a minute there. Yeah. It was like, come to Vegas. It's for families. And then they're like, fuck that.

What happens to Vegas stays in Vegas? We're done. Yeah. They figured out where the money was, dude. It wasn't in chicken strips. Yeah. It was not in kids chicken strips. So if you were a parent in 1981 and, you know, you're now kind of your kid is like

off into this dark area with like feeding machine quarters filled with like strangers. That might be the first fall of video games right there was when they like tried to make it uncool. That's like the fall of Satan from heaven. That's like the first, that was like, that's where we lost video games. It really, seriously, because this is, the parents had a problem with this. Yeah. And it became, the reaction was genuinely like enormous. And it is, I think like the thing that has been oddly, I would say forgotten about how

influential this was about arcades back then. Because, you know, again, it's all very nostalgic. But no, this was like kids were skipping school. The kids, parents were worried they were all. all filled with fucking drugs or older people that they shouldn't be with hanging around 14 year old, you know. And that this is the first time we were, we see parents begin to worry about and worry about video games being engineered to be addictive. This is like, now they're starting to worry, oh God, my kid, it's all they want to do is go out there and spend all their money. And to them,

it's almost like gambling or going to a strip club. You know, they're kind of equating it to that. And that's, that's the interesting thing is it reminds me of in New York City in the, the, the 1940s, Fiorello Liguardia and the city council banned pinball. New York City had had banned pinball for over 30 years until like the late 70 or mid-70s until somebody was able to prove in a city council meeting that pinball was a skill game and not just gambling. But yeah,

there's always been a bit of a moral panic. Every time. Just under the surface. And it's, it's, it makes sense that this is happening. This is 1881, you said. It makes sense because in a few years from now, in 1981, we're going to see the beginnings of the satanic panic. Yes. Yeah.

It's, it's in the zeitgeist. It's in the air in the early 80s. And by, and by 2026, everything free is predatory and physical ownership no longer exists. So, so, uh, so they clean that. right up. Good job, guys. You got it. We're going to fix it. You got it. We're not on the verge of when you're dark age. You save gaming. Information is still free guys. Keep going. I blame Ronald Reagan. Oh, everything goes back to that fucker. Hell, you can go all the way back to the South not being punished properly if you start digging deep enough.

So what happens when all the, when parents start getting fucking worried about all this shit? They start legislating to Kevin's point. Like, so. Senator Joe Lieberman. arrives. I mean, yeah. So Mesquite, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas, passed an ordinance barring anyone under 70. You were going to say, which is delicious. Which is fucking delicious. I love Mesquite. Barring, it passed an ordinance barring anybody under 17 from the local arcade without a parent or guardian, which is the moment I think like this is all starting to domino into the version of arcades we grew up with. The arcade for this was an Aladdin's castle, which was owned by Bally and Bally sued.

In that case, City of Mesquite versus Aladdin's Castle went all the way to Supreme Court of the U.S. and got decided in 1982. U.S. Supreme Court? Yes, it went all the way to. See, this is why I loved doing context, baby, because it makes all the lore around Polybius

really click and makes sense as to why it took fire. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Polybius. Now I'm sitting here like, oh my God, Supreme. Core. Holy gronk, dude. But also like, never mind that. Like, it also was not just happening at home. It was also happening overseas as well. The Philippines and Singapore banned arcades outright altogether, just on the grounds that they caused aggression, truancy, and a psychological addiction similar to gambling, which again, thank God for loot boxes now. Thank God. Sponsored by loot crate.

Are they still around? No. No. No. They're gone. Yeah, they've been gone for a while. It's been a while, yeah. Rip my Thanos, flammable Thanos oven mitts. Oh, my God, I forgot about those. Oh, my God, it's whiplash. So around all this, there was kind of like a specific thing that happened in 1981 that fed this directly, which is the competitive, which is the competitive scene had turned kind of like, I guess like an endurance sport.

Because like at that point, high scores in that era were not about. skill by itself at this point on a lot of these games if you were good enough you could play essentially forever on one quarter which meant that the world record was not just like how good of you how good you are measurement and it was like more of like how long you could play physically standing their measurement once you passed a certain threshold like a dance contest yeah like exactly exactly and that meant some people were going to do this without sleeping so you've got kids doing 30, 40, you know, like session, hour sessions in some way, in some instances, standing up in public with crowds and then in some cases, genuine local news cameras,

like covering how long this kid has been fucking playing this game. That had to smell so bad. Oh, you might, a video game convention, I'm sure, like that waft of like a Pax East on day four or three. I can't remember who shot it. I think it got taken down because I think people probably. thought it was a little bit in poor taste, but somebody shot like one of

the retro conventions with like a long lens, or at least made it look like they shot it with a long lens, like nice big widescreen footage and like put it to the soundtrack of Cullianus Cotsi. And it was like people standing in line and like taking off

their like costume helmet and just being like drenched and just sitting there smoking a cigarette. And being like juxtaposed with like the plight of man in this world. old and stuff and it was like, Kulia Sasksy

that might have been Justin Silverman. That was fucking hilarious. Well, picture of that then. But like, obviously the arcades are like with local news covering it or eating it up. It's all free publicity.

It's bringing more and more people to the arcades. Skateboarding. It's fucking blink 182. It's South Park. It's a million things. Yeah. Yeah. But unfortunately,

if you're a parent, watching a TV show about a local 12-year-old who's been awake for two days straight in front of his fucking arcade machine, while the adults around him are cheering him on, you might be really worried for your kid who goes to the arcade every weekend with his friend. You know? So that means. I guess.

I mean, in 1981 in their mindset, like, yeah. I'm never like with my kid. Like, okay, like for me.

And I understand what you're saying. I'm not trying to be like a dick. I understand what you mean. Absolutely. But I'm like, Like, I'm never like, what if they're there for two days without eating or drinking? It's like, no, they're going to be there for like fucking two hours. And then you're going to pick them up, but they're going to walk home for dinner.

Like, what are we talking? Yeah. If you're a parent and smart about it, you'll be, they'll be fine. I'm not saying nothing bad that ever happened at an arcade. I'm just saying, bro, come on. Yeah. The worry was enough that that's when the Surgeon General got involved. Sure.

See Everett Coop, our favorite president, Reagan, surgeon general, and who is maybe the most famous person to ever hold that job. publicly named video games as one of the top dangers to children. He even singled out Missile Command specifically as offering nothing constructive. I don't know why it was Missile Command. He's teaching them how to bomb us. Don't you see? We have to keep the kids out of arcades.

So this is where like the basis of addiction was really worried because he was also claiming that these things were consciously, consciously engineered to get children, hooked and the phrase he used was that kids were getting hooked body and soul the surgeon general the united states is now on record saying arcade games were coming for your child's soul coming for your child's soul yeah centipede is coming to get you missile missile missile command a real bad one missile command is fucking that that that game just gives me a headache because it's like like it's it's yeah yeah flashes right in your face.

Yeah, it's the Porrigan episode just like, dead ass. Over and over. That shit fuck me up, dude. That means that this, you know,

this for me is the moment where like, okay, now these, there are parents out there who believe, oh, these video games are actually physically doing something to my kids. They're making them addicted,

just doing something to their brains. We have to do something about it. And this is like, now we have a fertile ground. We have a fertile ground for like anything to fill in the conspiracy theory. Now we move on to the 29th of, November of 1981 at an arcade in Portland, Oregon area, and a 12-year-old boy named Brian Mauro was 28 hours into trying to break the world record for asteroids, which is crazy.

The record he was chasing had been set by a guy named Dennis Hernandez and had taken him about 52 hours. This is why they need to do like tournament additions that are harder. This is crazy. Again, that's what I said earlier. The games were just like you could master them. And it was just an endurance test. It's all became was endurance at that point.

So Brian is trying is going for a two day marathon. He's trying to like break it. And of course, cameras show up are on him. He is by the accounts of it also wearing a tuxedo while he's doing this. He is drinking Coca-Cola essentially continuously on camera because he is 12 and it is 1981 and that's what you would do as a kid. Sure. And when his hand started cramping up on him, the arcade staff would come over and start

massaging his hands to keep him going. I mean, is he playing with the other hands then? Is it what's the? Yeah, I guess. It's what I say this was, asteroids. So maybe he could just move around for a minute and just like at one hand massage. Yeah. You could probably play one handed.

I don't, I don't know. What the fuck? But at 28 hours, he has, he has to stop because he has severe stomach pain. And then that's the end of his attempt. And I can imagine it's the constant Coca-Cola for like 28 hours. That shit can clean blood off a freeway, bro. It's like corrosive. Got all my calories and nutrients and vitamins from Coca-Cola.

Just a pure syrup straight to my stomach. And on the same day, at the same arcade, a 14 year old named Michael Lopez was playing Tempest with his friends and he got a migraine. This is the first one he ever had in his life and he left and on the way home he ended up collapsing in a stranger's yard.

So we have two kids. Is he coincidentally? Yeah. Oh my God. He lived. He just had a migraine. Temp is a pretty sick game. I don't know if he ever had a migraine.

My brother and my father are prone to them. I used to get them a lot when I was younger. Yeah. Destroy them. Yeah. It's like you can't even look at light. It's like crazy. Yeah, I'm looking at pictures of Tempest right now.

And that, yeah, I think that would just murder. Tempest is sick. Yeah, it's crazy. If he had an Encherido and he played one quarter of Tempest, he would pass away. But I mean, I think about the synchronicity here of like the lining up of two kids in the same building on the same day. One of them got a stomach ache from 28 hours of fucking caffeine and Coca-Cola and no sleep. And one of them just coincidentally got his first mind grade and probably inducing. by Tempest, you know, as he's playing this game.

All of them are easily explainable, but unfortunately, both of them made the paper. And again, remember what I just told you about the emotional kind of like weather of this stuff at the time? Because this lands now in a country that's fucking ready to take and take any event about these arcades and blow it up into something so much bigger. So like Tempins itself, I do want to like spend a second on here because the Tempice actually becomes pretty central to this whole thing. And it's not really going to be a coincidence that it keeps coming up.

Tempest came out in October of 1981, one month before that day. It's a vector game for those who have never played a vector game. Oh, hard to, hard to describe what a vector is. Yeah. Literally, you have to kind of like just a picture that instead of building like a picture out on a grid of dots like everything else, it's drawing glowing lines directly with I learned reading up versus researching the. stuff, an electron beam.

Yeah. And then vector monitors have a brightness and a sharpness to them that nothing else at the time came close to. You can't even really like until you've played on a vector machine. You can't really imagine what it looks like compared to a regular. There was a home vector console called the Vectrix. Yeah. Yes, the Vectracks.

I want to get one one. That had it. But yeah, there's a puppy. Smitty. He hates Tempest. Hitton Tempty. Notauri notorious. try to play Tempest ones

and it just gave them a seizure but it's like I just imagine like the the lasers or the light just it's like shooting at the screen and just into your eyes it's super bright it's and I'm sure you like I think asteroids also

if you've never played a vector machine I think asteroids is one it is bright as shit it is like serious it looks like somebody's like looking in the sun at an eclipse how bright is like yeah it's You really should be wearing those eclipse goggles if you're going to be playing on the vector machine.

Seriously, like seriously, they look like fucking like radioactive. Like, it's crazy. Yeah, what Tempest looks like to try to describe it is like kind of looks like a tunnel and you're looking down like a geometric well and things are climbing up. Yeah, it's like a vanishing point. It's like a vanishing point like looking. The whole playfield is spinning and flashing at high contrast. Yeah, you're like doing the trench run basically. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It also goes to gets faster and fast. as you go. So it's just insane. And every single description of what Polybius supposedly looked like is actually a description of Tempest. The tunnel that's described for Polybius, the geometry, the psychedelic quality of it all, even the speed of it increasing. When people say they remember a game that made them feel strange, they are actually describing a real game. It just came out one month before the incident. It is sitting in the same room and it was just a flashing game of Hell to your eyes. I've never played a real Tempest machine in my life.

I don't know that I've played Tempest before. I like Tempest actually. It's on a lot of like compilations of Atari games, but I, I can't imagine what that would look like in a vector screen. It's so much more complex than the stuff that I usually. And vector, vector machines were notoriously hard to keep running. Like they broke if the wind blew the wrong way.

Yeah, they do. They just seem like some Wild West technology or something. Yeah. It's like impossible. well there's also like a medical mechanism for like what was triggered too it's just photosensitive epilepsy i'm sure a few people are a live show discovered they might have that at the last segment i fucking fucked up so bad dude oh my god this is what i'm talking about with this is what i'm talking about with uh uh polybius it's like you think you you you develop the game and it's fine

you think about it whatever whatever but then you realize like this is on a screen and we did a Q and A, I don't, I don't think anybody actually discovered that they had epilepsy at the show. I think it actually was fine. No, yeah. There's a dark room. We were playing Area 51 for the PlayStation on a projector. And I was just like, oh my God, I forgot that it was going to be like huge on the screen because I've been making it on my

13 inch laptop. Yeah. You lean into the mic and just said like, I didn't think this through. It was great. Well, roughly one and 100 people have epilepsy, and even a fraction of those people have the photosensitive kind, and that's just where flashing lights at certain frequencies or like high contrast patterns trigger a seizure. And plenty of people who have it don't even know they have it

until something sets it off. Tempist was like, the perfect thing to set it off on some people. So like, take that, and that's ingredient number one. Yeah, you weren't joking about the Poregon episode, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's ingredient number one of our sandwich here, like the photosensitivity and Tempest and all that. All right, we took the bacon out.

Delicious, delicious, delicious bacon. It was good. Next, we moved to Saturday, the 3rd of April in 1982, and an 18-year-old named Peter Berkowski walked into Friar Tuck's game room in Calumet City, Illinois, with a friend around. a half past eight in the evening. And he played another game we briefly discussed on this show.

I think even in the same episode with it, he played berserk. Berserk is a maze shooter where you're running through rooms filled with robots, trying not to get touched. And there's a bouncing, smiling face. This is a weird game. It is a super weird game. What does he say?

He says something. He's like, he like says something like this. I can't remember what he says. I don't either. He, bouncing smiling face called Evil Auto that chases you cannot be killed cannot be stopped wow it's it's one of those like nasty pieces of like old school hard game design sure uh this kid played for about 15

minutes he got his initials onto the high score list with that and then he turned to put a quarter into another machine and instead he collapsed and he died holy shit Jesus Christ now obviously is a medical reason for what happened to him. The autopsy found that he had a pre-existing heart condition and that he had scar tissue on his heart that was estimated to be a couple of weeks old, meaning something had already happened to him before he even walked into the arcade. You had like a heart attack or something that he didn't even realize it at some point. Exactly.

He was just like 18-year-old kid with an undiagnosed cardiac problem and it killed him and where it happened to kill him was just the arcade. It was very coincidental. That's nuts. That part's real. but it's in the Chicago Tribune. Like this, we know of this. His name is,

Oh my. He can look it up, Bukowski, which I just mentioned because it is also misspelled Burkowski in about 90% of everything right about him, but it's Bukowski, Bukk, not Bercowski,

Bukh. Story of, story of researching shit for a show like this. No shit. Yeah, you just get used to do with this. People are so wrong. Oh,

and I found Evil Otto's voice, by the way, it goes like this. Pooner alert and pooter alert. Yeah, having that thing. chase you and you can't do anything about it. It's horrifying.

Yeah. Have either of you played UFO 50? Oh my God. Yes. So awesome. So like Barbuda, the first game on the has has that like face thing that chase you around. I hate it.

Mario Brothers 2 in the U.S. Same thing has that like evil face when you pick up the key. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. When you get the key. Yeah. So within six months or about six months of Peter Bukowski dying, a second death shows up in the print,

and the second death actually happened first. Because of Berserk? Well, the story goes that in January of 1981, more than a year before Calumet City, a 19-year-old named Jeff Daly played an intense session of Berserk, put up a high score of 16,660, and then dropped dead of a heart attack standing right in front of that machine. 666 in his score, bro?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Satan's game. Six, six, six, six between one and zero, dude? Yeah. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

And the detail everybody, like, repeats is the score, actually. You're not wrong. Alex is like, they do repeat that 16,666. If you just knock off a zero and the one, you've got six, six, six six. Oh, shit, bro. You just, it's there. It's there. It's right there.

Hear me out. That's the mark of the beast. Oh. Uh. It's going to move on. The problem is doing your research. Jeff Daly, the guy who supposedly died of this, doesn't exist.

Oh shit. Wait. So we have no, but it still took off. That's the thing. Like, it's, again, it's conspiracy theory had taken off about this. I scored 666 Daily in Berserk. Never existed. I could not find any news coverage about his death.

There's no. wire story, no local paper. Nothing for what is. Supposedly the first video person ever killed by a video game in a year when the American press could not get enough stories about video games hurting kids. So like the absence should have been like the absence is the evidence in my mind. What if what if the game just like took him out of like the timeline? He raised him from existence.

So like he never existed in the first place. But there's some some Mandela effect. Oh, we merged timeline. We merged. There was a timeline merge or split. I wonder if there are people out there who were alive at that time and who believed truly, like that. You knew him.

They knew. Yeah, they knew or they remember seeing papers about it or something. I'm very curious. And then when they went and looked at that berserk game again, the smiley face had devil horns. Then he was red. Oh, shit. And then on the island prequel.

On the cabinet art, it was Jeff going like, oh my God. that'd be sick. He's banging on the, he looks like he's banging. Yeah. And he has the high score still. And he has to this day. The eternal high score.

What I did find, though, is that other people did some work more than I was doing. And other people were able to find a Jeffrey Daly of about the right age who died in the US in 1981. He was a young man from Virginia, but he didn't die of a heart attack. He died in a car crash in May of that year. nowhere near an arcade and who was buried out in Virginia. Like he was a dude named Jeff, Jeff Daley, but like doesn't seem to be attached.

The Daily story is usually pinned to Friar Tux, which is the same place Peter Bukowski died. Friar Tux also like what the lore doesn't tend to notice is that it actually didn't open until 1982 and this person's death supposedly happened in 1981. So the timelines of them happening, don't even... This is Quinky Dinks.

This is... All Quinky Dinkus. Exactly. This is Quinky Dinks, bro. Imagine being such a Robin Hood fan, though, that you name an arcade Friar Tuck in 1982. That's like a dead zone for Robin Hood people, you know? Friar Tuck, too, is like not like the cool guy in that...

Not the cool guy from the story. He's kind of like the pot-smoking dude. Like, he's like... He's the... He's there, but he's not a man of action. He's the chumly of the group. So, like, we're kind of... We have a fertile ground here, right?

Even like to note, like even the creator who designed Berserk, Alan McNeil, made public pushbacks that two people had died on his game. So like, look before Pallibius is even in the zeitgeist yet. Like this is before the internet, all that stuff. The arcade world has already produced a fake death, invented specifically to turn a real, a real death into something grander. and it worked so well. Now, like, 40 years later,

it's still really repeated out loud, like, in public to this day. I was going to say, I was going to say, I'm pretty sure I've written that in a listicle before, like, in one of the many terribly paid video game journalism jobs I've held over the years. Now we have, like, ingredient kind of two here, but ingredient three is a quick one. We can even kind of loop it into ingredient two. It's just mustard.

It's just English mustard. Yeah, exactly. It's just English mustard. Ten days after Brian Morrow and Michael Lopez both got sick and in the Portland arcade. The FBI raided multiple arcades in the Portland area. Like that actually happened. Federal agents in Portland in arcades literally were 10 days later.

We're raiding them. So now we have our men in suits showing up from the lore. They rated? They rated. But the reason isn't because people died at the arcade. The reason is gambling. Remember where I told you about the part of the art of at the top about an arcade cabinet being full of fucking cash,

like in a room. Some arcade operators have figured out that with some modification, you can turn a video game into a gambling machine. You could play, rack up a score, and then the guy behind the counter pays you out. And the cabinet does the,

like, it's a toy. You're like operating through the arcade machine. That's crazy. Okay, so it's nuts. If I was like spending, my money in a way that I was gambling, that would not be the way that I would do it.

Just so, like, that's crazy. Like, a game where you just like fuck up and die. Yeah, but people are just betting. Like, that they could like, you know, X to Y or whatever, it's crazy. I would have, and I would have assumed if, if you, if I,

gambling was not on the, the top five. That was not on the family feud top five. No. For me. I would have gone with like money laundering. Would have been pretty, pretty easy to do with, it's like a cash. Quarters.

It's all cash. Yeah, yeah. know, pretty simple, but. Nope, they were gambling. They were gambling, which immediate kind of explains why the FBI gave a shit at all. They're like, my nephew, my nephew, Fiorino, he could be Donkey Kong, faster than anybody here. I bet you a million dollars, my nephew could beat you a Donkey Kong. I bet you $100 that he's going to jump over the first barrel clean.

It's going to be clean. Clean, clean. I swear to God, he's not going to touch that barrel. He's going over a clean. There's not going to be a pixel. Overlap. Who's got money on this? Put some money down.

And it's crazy because now we literally turn a room that's children's entertainment into a functioning unlicensed casino in cash that produced no records whatsoever, which was means it was also a very convenient way to move money that would rather not be counted. Hmm. Oh, there's the money laundering. There you. Exactly. It's there.

It's always there. And like that, that, like those two things are, well, bring FBI to your fucking door, knocking on your door to just like, you know, see what's going on. And here's how they investigated it, which is super fun. In the lead up to those raids, agents went into arcades and opened up the cabinets. They were checking whether the machines had been physically tampered with, whether the boards had been modified for payouts.

And while they had the machines open, they were reading the screens and writing down the high scores. These top 10 lists with these three letter initials on them were a list. list of the arcade's most frequent regulars by this point, which means it was a witness list. The high score list became a fucking witness list. Dude, what a, what a cockamamie idea for a casino. Right? They fuck this.

This is all them. They blew this. This is our men in suits coming into the arcade, opening up cabinets quietly, not touching the money, but instead taking the data machine, writing down numbers, showing zero interest in the money and then walking out and leaving because they were investigating money laundering and casino like shit going

on. It's crazy. That is literally fucking insane. So then you have like the next week you have like some kid at the in the playground saying hey I saw the kids also from the Italian New York diaspora he goes hey I saw the men in black over there

and my friend Jeff Daley died Is that the devil boy? I don't you dare bring his name of this establishment. This is a Catholic establishment. Sign of the cross. Don't you dare bring the 666, billionaire.

Praise me to God. Praise me to God. Get him out of here. Anyway, you wanted to play Tempest. Dude, I was going to. And so the next link to this being like, Tempest, linking Tempest 2 being oblivious is that there are a counts of federal agents putting surveillance equipment inside the arcade cabinets in that era, which if you take a second to think about it,

makes sense because you're investigating what is happening in the room while you're not there. And a video game cabinet is one of the single best places to install listening devices on the inside of it. Are you talking about it already there? Are you talking about for crime? Yeah, for gambling and money laundering. So they were like putting surveillance equipment in the casino to like like the way that you look for card counters? Well, no, I guess. I don't know how they do that.

But they open up, they open up the arcade machines to put listening devices in the inside of it and whatnot. Close it. Catch gamblers? Yeah. Because they would have, you know, the owners would come over and have to like pay them out and all that stuff. Like they, yeah, there's conversation that had to add. This is the dumbest shit. This is the dumbest shit.

This is the dumbest shit. This is so. Do the video game nerds think they found a cheat code in real life and they did not? And again, the reason Tempest and loops into this is because reportedly the Tempest cabinet was the favorite cabinet because there was an enormous amount of space in the display because it was a vector machine. So it was just like there's a lot of room in the back to put this shit. So not only is it the mind control machine because of the headaches that it would create, but. Also, be just by chance, because of its size, also it can fit cameras inside. So because it fits cameras inside and gives you a headache, it was government research.

Yeah. That's fucking. Do you see it all coalescing? This is like, I didn't even really realize. This is like the type of shit that I would have focused on in an episode if I wrote about this. This is awesome. It's so weird. It's so weird.

So we have like, I'd say one ingredient really left. And I'd say it's the most specific and vividly detailed in the whole legend. And it's the one that always sounds like it has to be invented. The cabinet itself. The part, like, who would make an arcade cabinet that has zero advertising on it, no art on it? All there is is just a supposed name on the arcade cabinet. And it was super popular, but nobody knows the name of this thing because there's no name.

And there's like nothing on it to like indicate it. But if you do your research, this actually happened all the time for it. And the industry term for it was called location testing. The problem in arcade company ad in 1981 was you have now built a game. You just don't know if it's any good. You can't really ask people because people are terrible at predicting what they're going to spend their money on. What you actually need to know is whether a real teenager with a quarter would walk up to your arcade. with 40 other machines competing for it.

And with that quarter, pick yours to spend their time and money on and whether you will do it again and again. It's reminding me a little bit of like algorithms. You know, it's like the earliest binary mechanism of algorithm, right? The arcades are the ones in the, the quarters are the ones in the zeros. And you're seeing where quarters are being spent the most. So what they did was you would build a cabinet, put your prototype in it, and then just quietly rent out a spot and put in a couple of arcades and just see the earnings.

Atari actually did this. A lot of people ended up doing this in a location test cabinet just didn't have art on it because art costs money and you commission it once the game is going to go into production, whether you know your prototype will make money. Makes perfect sense. Yeah. It makes complete market sense. It's just a, so what ends up happening is you get a plain black box with a name,

silk screened or taped onto the market. key and then that's it. There's no announcement. They don't do anything. It just mysteriously shows up in your arcade one day. Is there for a couple months. Nobody knows about it. They start playing it.

And if it's popular, get people get confused when it mysteriously disappears a couple months later after the test because that wasn't the full product. So there it is. That's amazing. That's your mysterious black box cabinet was just market testing. was QA before like QA was a thing in video games that we that teams do now. It makes perfect sense. Like it doesn't even seem, it doesn't even seem like, like, uh, mysterious to me, but it's

like the notion of being a kid or not understanding anything about where arcade games come from, which as I do more video game stuff in my life as I go on through the years, I find that almost no one understands the video game industry in any way. And it's just like, it's just so funny to imagine it from that. perspective where you're like, oh, machine gone, where machine go? Yeah. Oh, it must be mystery machine. What happens?

You have a machine. You have kids, you have kids, teenagers who are just like fucking dumb. And then you have a bunch of adults involved who are just like, incurious. Like they don't, they're not, they're, they don't really care to dig any further than the surface level. Right. So you get these newspaper articles. We're like, ah, a kid died at the, at the, at the, the, at the, the,

standing up at the at the machine. Um, and then you have the replication of these. It's almost, it's basically viral, a viral myth of, of like, hey, there is a, there's a machine that killed kids. Um, and it just spreads. It is. It's fascinating. And you want to spice it up yourself, right?

To like, kind of sell the story when you tell it. So it just gets spicier as time goes on. Yeah. I love like dissecting this shit. Cause it's so interesting what, what little things had to all happen at the same. time to really build this. And as far as the gameplay is concerned, obviously we talked about Tempest,

but like there was also another game that people may have been mixing into this. It was a game called Cube Quest, which for the time had some unbelievable visuals for its time. And it broke down, but the thing is that the game broke down constantly and it was needing service constantly,

which means there was also a guy at the machine that opened it every few days mysteriously and didn't take the money. Oh, dude, this looks crazy. Wow. Yeah, I know. It looks crazy. But it broke down all the time.

Yeah. And Tempice itself one more time, which had a genuinely troubled release and got pulled and patched all the time because early units had a bug that could give players free games. And Atari had to go out and fix that shit in the field, which means there's a real 1981 scenario where a strange machine appears as technical problems gets visited repeatedly buy men who open it up and do work inside it and then it gets taken away. And has insane

graphics that look like totally it looks like the future. The future has arrived like it really has like a lot of tubes in it too. Like it really does look like you're flying down a psychedelic tube like this entire game much like Tempest.

Just comparing like the pixel the rastered images that you're seeing in most arcade games. And then the first time you see, people probably saw a vector machine, they had to have lost their shit because it was the future. It looks smooth. Yeah, it looks impossible.

I'm looking at, I'm looking at 2050. It's, it's forever from now. Yeah. But it's, the future is now. It is. And it's, then it comes with migraines. Yeah. Lots of migraines and lots of gambling.

Like, weirdly, both of those things huge right now in the future. Absolutely. So to me, like the next obvious question then is if this is all happening, then when did the legend show up? Because at this point in time, Polybius, the name Polybius didn't is not there. It's not in the rumors. There's rumors that like the weird machines, but it all is just the fertile breeding ground of this stuff.

And as people have gone looking really hard for any trace of the Polybius rumor around that time or even in the 90s, the earliest rumor we can seem to find is like, well, we have arcade trade magazines from the period which covered this industry obsessively and would have loved like a story of that topic didn't happen not a mention it seems polybius's start date is the 6th of february the year 2000 that seems to be the first how many uh how many topics have we recently done Alex we're like the rumor seems to have been started decades later yeah yeah exactly exactly it's like the end entertainment industry is like, like the need to be interesting.

It's just created the willingness to just kind of like make something up. Well, where did this come from? We were able to, I shouldn't say we, people who have done the work prior to me. We're able to find a website called coinop.org, which is actually super cool, genuinely useful website. It's a database and digital museum of arcade machines. And the guy who ran it is named Kirk Collar. and on the 6th of February in 2000, an entry appeared on that site for a game called Polybius.

The entry lists it as copyrighted in 1981, but no such copyright actually exists. It lists the manufacturer as Sinal Sloshin. It says it had a very limited release, one or two Blackwater arcades in a suburb of Portland, and that it was developed by some kind of weird military tech. offshoot group and that it is used and that it is used proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA and it lists most of the actual actual fields as unknown and whoever posted

it claimed to have a ROM image of the title screen from which fragments had been extracted including the year in the company name. I feel like I've seen this before. Probably have. Yeah. Nobody has ever seen that ROM though. And then somebody made made sure people knew about it sometime before September 2003, Kurt Collar sent a tip about Polybius to GamePro magazine, which I was subscribed to. I loved GamePro, which at the top,

which at that point claimed to be the biggest independent multi-platform gaming magazine in the world. Again, I think that's true. It was huge. GamePro ran it in a feature called Secrets and Lies, and the way they handled it is what we're going to look at. They didn't say it was true.

and they, but they did not say it was also fake. They simply declared the game's existence as inconclusive. So that's why it's like ever held on as a, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because Kirk Collar, the person who supposedly put this up there sent this tip. There was no way for them to verify the tip. So they were like, you know, inconclusive at this point. It's a national level video game magazine. So immediately this is going to be fuel.

It feels like. It's basically just a pre creepy pasta. Like there's so many creepy pastas about video games. It just feels like an early version of that that just got a little bit out of hands. Because there was just no people weren't looking into. They're kind of taking things on face value still. They're like, well, there's people who are like, you can't believe anything on the internet. And then there's people are like, oh, no, we post real things on the internet.

And coming from a. site that is supposed to be a database, a I guess reputable database of arcade games and ending up in GamePro. Yeah, I can see how this ended up taking on a life of its own mixed in with everything else that happened in 1981.

Everything kind of get blended together into a slurry. Especially if you're like specifically writing it, right? Like it's like kind of makes sense like you know, wanting to make something that sounds believable so you get a lot of

details from a lot of different sources like right on purpose together it's like you know it's not just like confusion it's like somebody really tried to make it seem real yeah well the the person the documentary stoop brown the guy who did the documentary i watched he's kind of the one that i that did like really tried to find the origin as to why any of this was going on and his conclusion of it was that polybius was an international hoax created by kirk caller simply to drive traffic to coinoff.org. He's trying to be like a viral come to my website, see what's

going on here kind of thing. And he also found that people who were certain that they, like Mandela effect style remembered reading about Polybius on something called Usenet in the mid-90s. Part of his research, they were likely remembering a completely different thing

called Publius Enigma. Yep. This, which was a genuine and much stranger mystery, Alex has felt like sew up your alley. We did this. Yeah, we talked about this.

Yeah. Oh, that shit did sound fucking familiar. Yeah. So this is the Pink Floyd one, right? Correct. It's the Pink Floyd album and the anonymous internet posts, all that stuff.

Go listen to it. What episode was that? Was it super, do you remember? It's in one of the Cornerfest type episodes. Yeah. Yeah. So again,

but it's so close to Polybius. Publius, Polybius, Barry Roman sounding names. One one real internet mystery, but the other one fake made up 19 years later. Polyis, Publius. Yeah.

And he also pointed out that the Polybius logo on the original coin op page has a strong family resemblance to the logos of real arcade games of the era, specifically Robotron and Bubbles. And once it was out, it did what these things do now, honestly, which is it just became viral on the internet. It just went everywhere all at once at the same time online. It got into the retro gaming forums. And then on to early creepy internet stuff, which in the mid-2000s was hitting its stride. with just like weird, creepy internet, SCP, you know, that kind of spooky spaghetti shit.

And Polybius arrived preloaded, kind of with everything that scene was looking for, the combination of government mystery, lost artifact, a missing ROM, just enough evidence uploaded online. Believeable. Yeah,

like not that crazy. Yeah. He did a very good job at leaking weird things. You know, if like, if the backrooms was in the early 2000s, like that kind of stuff, I feel like would take fire

in a different, way. Because I really thought this was older too. I genuinely thought this was an old story. Right. But it's like not that old in reality. And then in 19, then in 2017, Jeff Minter, who's a legendary game designer, made an actual game called Polybius on purpose, which you can go by right now.

And there is now a real Polybius from 2017, 36 years after the fake one never existed. And then there's... Sinislasian, or Sinislashia, which it's supposed to be German. It's not good German, though. It is a mashup of a word for sense and perception and a word for erasing and extinguishing. So it's trying to say something like sense deletion to a German speaker. It apparently reads as a clumsy compound that a native speaker would not ever make. it is what a company name that looks like when an English be a lot of people say basically it's

what a company name from an English speaker who doesn't know German would make to make a secret sinister just make it seem cool yeah yeah exactly uh that's really like the most menacing detail of it all um as time went on the claims got picked apart in an interview he attributed the origin of the name sinislash into a German man he knew him as Ulrich Collar which is the same surname as the man who runs coinup.org. Like, yes, people keep pulling it apart by 20, basically by 2009, we now know fully there is a fake game and everything I had gotten pulled apart. And what we were left with is a really compelling mystery with a really fascinating origin

story who one day some designer would take inspiration from from and create Polybius. Have you played the Polybius game from 2017? I never did. I'm, I'm sure I've turned it on, but I've not like ever like gone ham and gotten into Polybius. Oh. Puppie time wants to be free. It makes me feel good, you know, knowing that I'm not the only guy with a dog that makes sound. Exactly.

I just keep mine banished downstairs. I get it. I get it. Yeah, my dog was very up. My wife and daughter came home and my dog was very upset that he was in the room. Fair enough. He just couldn't believe he was where he was. And he lost it.

So. that kind of leads us to the end. And the reason this whole thing kind of took off. We have a perfect breeding ground for lots of rumors back in the day of like mysterious, weird things. And then somebody in 2003 creating something that was unfalsifiable by design to create some sort of viral marketing scheme to get people to come to as coinop.org website. Eventually it is created.

But at the end of the day, we are left with the truth. A lot of complicated things happened during a very weird couple of years, which built perfect place for anybody to grab hold and feed the online internet mystery machine. And we ended up with Polybius 19 to 20 years after Polybius was supposed to have existed. That's the episode. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Yeah. Did you learn something new today about Polybius?

Was it worth that episode? Yeah, no, that's, that's awesome is kind of dissecting this. This is kind of cool. It actually reminded me, either you played that visual novel, The Uncle Who Works at Nintendo? No. It's like a horror visual novel came out, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago or so. But basically, you are just, it's a guy, a kid goes over to his friend's house for a sleepover,

and the uncle, and he's kids like, oh, yeah, I got a new game. It's from my uncle who works at Nintendo. And there's a, there's a time sense of urgency where the uncle is coming to visit and shit gets weirder and weirder as the uncle gets closer to visiting. And when he arrives,

basically it becomes like house of leaves stuff where everything is not real. But yeah, the uncle who works in Nintendo is, is, I'm going to have to look that. Sounds. I'm very into that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very into that. Yeah. I like the idea of that. Knowing that this became like a like a meme after the fact and gained its historical credibility like instantly. Like I think you should keep that in mind, listener. I think you just keep that in mind. It's pretty it's pretty freaking crazy.

Yeah. Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the show with us today. Thanks for having me. If people want to check out pixel it, which is a show where if you didn't catch it from our intro, where people read video game adaptations that are novels, right? Like, and kind of like do like a book club review of them. Basically, yeah. And it was a fever dream of a read for me. Yes. Oh, my God, yes. I'm sure they're not all like ridiculous nonsense.

I'm sure some of them are kind of legit or cool. You would be surprised how many are actually just nonsense. But if you want to check out that show, where should people go, Kevin? Yeah, we're pixel-lit podcast. on basically every podcast platform you can throw a stick at Apple, Spotify, overcasts, pocketcasts, whatever.

And then there's, we're also on YouTube. We're looking for fresh subscribers on YouTube. So go ahead to, go ahead to subscribe on the YouTube version if you're feeling, you know, gaming. Fuck it. Yeah. Fuck it. Yeah. Yeah. Spice. Go over. Sub on YouTube. Hell yeah.

Sub, hit it, and hit the bell. Why not? Ding, ding. Oh my God, the bell. It does laugh the bell. Get those notifications. Kesh. Get that notification. Take the little scroop of the bell. Take the little scrote of the bell. What the fuck? We're out and off to patreon.com slash Illuminati Pot to go do a minisode.

Thank you all so much. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. We appreciate you. We love you. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Jluminati podcast. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by the... I don't know who they are. There's two What?

Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer No Neo and Trinity No I don't understand And I probably never will Let me just tell you right now That there's two

Kennedy And Claire Redfield I'm telling you I think he literally just looked up Famous Duos Cheech and Chau And it's been going through the list ever since

I'm trying to dig deep Which one of you is Dick Powell. Me? Your name's Jesse Cox. No, I want my body. I want to. No idea.

I want my market. A naughty podcast. Your host, Mike Martin, joined by Alex and Jesse. A shooting star across the sky that's actually a U.S.