Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Polybius: The Arcade Game That Read Your Mind

Episode Date: July 5, 2026

An arcade cabinet appears in Portland in 1981, tucked between ordinary machines and drawing a strange crowd. Players report migraines, vivid nightmares, and missing time. Then the game disappears, leaving behind only forum posts, half-remembered sightings, and one of the internet’s most persistent gaming legends. Heidi traces the Polybius myth from early message boards to modern retellings, and asks why the idea of a game designed to study — or alter — the people playing it still feels plausible.For more follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1839058226Join Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the FBI, gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and gave us America’s Most Wanted. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. You’ll also get ad-free and early released episodes across the Crime House lineup.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, exciting news. Crime House Plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four-part limited series on the Crimes That Built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page. This is Crime House. An arcade cabinet appears overnight. No logo, no artwork, just a plain black box and a name glowing in pale green letters, Polybius.

The lines for it stretch around the room. Kids get in fights waiting for a turn. but instead of walking away with a high score, they end up with migraines that they can't explain in nightmares that they can't shake. And then the men in dark suits arrive, and the game vanishes. Nobody hears about this until 19 years later when a story pops up on a random internet forum, making people wonder, was Polybius real, an urban legend, or something else entirely? Welcome to Twisted Tales, a crimehouse original. I'm Heidi Wong. week, I'll take you deep into humanity's darkest stories and the creepiest corners of the

internet. If you've ever had a haunted moment or a twisted tale of your own, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments, the creepier, the better. Crimehouse exists because of listeners like you. Want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad-free? Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcast, tap try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. We're also on YouTube. with full video episodes. Just search and subscribe to Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong so you can watch the horror come to life.

Today's episode is about Polybius, an arcade game from 1981 with mysterious origins and nefarious purposes, if it ever existed. But unlike a lot of internet urban legends, it's hard to tell where the stories end and the truth begins, because some people actually remember playing it.

This one's a bit different because it's not a lengthy creepy pasta, It's a lot like the backrooms in the sense that it started off as something small, just a short post on an obscure gaming website, and it became something much, much bigger. And it's one of those things where people weren't sure if it was real at first. So the story grew into something huge until it didn't matter if the source material was real, because people decided it was.

Now let's go back to 1981. The Golden Age of Arcade Gaming is in full swing. Pac-Man came out the year before and completely, broke people's brains. Donkey Kong is everywhere. Kids are skipping school to play Gallagher. Couch cushions everywhere are getting flipped in a desperate search for extra quarters. Parents across the country are freaking out about it and it's hard to blame them. Sure, we think of arcades as places for harmless fun. But maybe that's our stranger things nostalgia talking. Arcades were dark, loud, and designed specifically to separate kids

from their money. By the early 1980s, local governments were passing laws to restrict them. Some cities banned minors from arcades during school hours. Others required arcade owners to keep the lights on above a minimum brightness level. The machines were designed to be addictive and everybody could see it, and nobody really knew what to do about it. This is the environment Polybius came into, at an arcade in suburban Portland, Oregon. Nobody remembered it being delivered. There was no big announcement or excitement over a new game coming in. It was just there one day, tucked in between the other cabinets, but it stood out, not for the reason you might think. The other games were covered in vivid artwork with spaceships, monsters, or

fighter pilots. The brighter, the better, but not this one. It was plain, painted completely black. The only thing on it was its name, in pale, glowing letters. And it was different in terms of the gameplay, too. According to the people who claimed to have seen it, the gameplay was abstract and hypnotic, lines and shapes shifting at high speed, pulling you forward. Some accounts say it was a lot like Tempest. The Atari vector shooter released around the same time. There are theories that maybe Polybius was a beta version of it. And there's a precedent for that. Atari actually used to put unmarked early versions of their games to get reactions from players. But compared to Tempice, Polybius pushed things a lot further. It wasn't just a shooter. It had puzzle elements too.

Others say the game had no logic at all, just an escalating visual intensity until something in your brain simply couldn't keep up. And everyone who claims to remember it agrees on one thing. It was addictive in a way that went beyond anything else in that arcade. Massive lines formed for a chance to play it. Fights broke out over the machine. Kids who never fixated on any particular game were coming back every day, spending every quarter they had all on Polybius. And then they started getting sick. They had migraines, nausea, and they couldn't sleep. And when they did get some rest, they had night terrors so vivid they couldn't shake them for days. Some reported memory loss. They started to play and then

all of a sudden an hour had just vanished with nothing in between. Some said they felt like they couldn't control their own thoughts in the days after playing, that something had gotten in and rearrange things. Some claim the game gave them seizures, and none of that stopped them from going back. The weird gameplay, the dangerous side effects, that was all weird enough on its own. But what took this to the next level was the men in black. Every few days, men in Dark Sews came to inspect the game, but not to collect the coins or even to do maintenance on it. They just opened the machine and took something out of it, like a strange storage medium, according to some accounts, although nobody could say exactly what they were taking or where it went.

Then they left without a word, and soon enough, the game was too. A few weeks after it appeared, the cabinet was gone. There was no explanation or announcement for people to get one last chance to play it. Polybius was gone, almost like it had never been there at all. And nobody wrote about it. Not in any newspaper, not in any gaming magazine, not any one. In fact, the first mention that's ever been found about it wasn't until February 6, 2000, 19 years after the game supposedly appeared.

It was a post on a website called coinop.org, which is a database of classic arcade games. In the gaming community back then, a site like this carried real weight. It was where you went to settle arguments about release dates, manufacturer details, or obscure cabinet variants. If a game appeared on coin op with a copyright date, in a title screen image, it felt like proof that it was real. So when someone wrote about Polybius, it didn't seem unusual until people read the post. The person who made it said they got in a computer file of the game. They said it had only been released in one or two arcades in a suburb

of Portland. In terms of gameplay, it was quote, weird-looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements. Okay, normal enough, someone got a copy of an obscure game and wanted to right about it. But then it got into the weird stuff. The memory loss, the men in black suits, the game's sudden disappearance. Supposedly, the CIA wanted to test people's reaction to psychological effects. That's the data they were recording. And to back it up, the post included a single image, a title screen, showing the game's name and below it a copyright line. Right away, this post got a lot of traction, people wanted to know more. Starting with the company behind the game, just from the looks of it, it seemed legit. When you break down the name, it's the German word for something

like sense deletion, which sounds pretty dark considering the effects that Polybius had on people. But that's not the only thing people realized about the company. For people who actually knew German, the grammar didn't really work. It was like someone pulled two terms from a dictionary and smashed them together, which could mean that it was fake, but at the same time, there are plenty of companies with nonsensical names out there. It's also the exact kind of name that a classified government project might use when creating a front company in a hurry. Nobody has ever found any record of Zinislercian existing.

No business registration, no copyright filing, no former employees, no address. Nothing. Which again is either because the company didn't exist, or because it was precisely the kind of entity that wouldn't have left records, a small operation, running fast, built not to be found. The lack of answers left people with a question the internet turned over and over for years. Did Polybius actually exist? Or had some people used a niche gaming database to plant the seed of an urban legend and wait to see if it grew?

Either way, the story was spreading. It went from that single coinop.org post to gaming form, across the internet, and in September 2003, about three and a half years after the first post, Game Pro magazine included Polybius in an article about gaming urban legends. Here's where it gets interesting, because the article listed it as inconclusive and declined to call it an outright fake. And shortly after that, people started coming forward with memories of the game. Their accounts popped up on forum posts, comment sections on gaming sites, and eventually Reddit threads. People coming forward to say that I was there, I saw it, I played it, and they were specific.

They described the sound that the machine made the particular quality of the screen glow. One person said the screen emitted a tone that you could feel in your back teeth. Not everyone agreed on what the gameplay was actually like, though. Someone remembered it more like a maze game. Another said it was purely abstract shapes with no logic at all. But that could still have a rational explanation. This was now over 20 years since the game supposedly appeared. It could just be people with hazy memories,

which wouldn't be surprising considering what the game did to them. Or maybe it was people who read a vague description online and filled it in with their own imaginations. Or they could just be making it up for fun. With so much uncertainty circling around, it was hard to know what was real, which could have been the entire point. The 19-year gap is the thing that I keep going back to.

If a game was genuinely causing seizures and blackouts, I feel like someone would have said something. The local news may be an old doctor's note, some kind of complaint. But on the other hand, arcades in 1981 didn't have review aggregators or social media. If you played something strange, you told your friends. That's it. And I think that ambiguity is what makes this legend work so well, especially for people who discovered it when that post was finally made in 2000.

Then there's the variations in the eyewitness accounts. Inconsistent memory is classically what happens when people are independently misremembering a real but fuzzy event. It's also what happens when people are constructing memories from a vague description that they write online. So that doesn't really give any answers either. And the internet in 2000 was the Wild West in a way that's genuinely hard to remember now. There were no fact checkers, no Wikipedia, no community of debunkers with the infrastructure to investigate a claim in just a few hours.

Something could live on the internet for years before anyone had the tools to seriously look into it. And by the time that they did, there was so much out there that it was hard to separate the truth from fiction. Hi, listeners, it's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I want to let you know that Crime House Plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America. America's 250th by dropping a four-part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow murder, true crime stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th,

or you can binge all of them right now, add free with Crimehouse Plus. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page. You might think this story is too strange to be true, but here's the thing. Weird stuff was genuinely happening around Portland arcades in 1981. On November 27th of that year at the Malibu Grand Prix Arcade, a 12-year-old named Brian Morrow tried to break the world record for asteroids. He played for 28 hours straight, and according to the local newspaper, he did it while wearing a full tuxedo,

which honestly that's a commitment. And after 28 hours of gaming, soda, and orange juice, he collapsed with severe stomach pain and spent two days in bed. Sadly, he didn't get the record score. So we've got some addictive gameplay and health problems, but not to the level Polybius supposedly had. However, Brian's attempt on asteroids wasn't the only. only game-related injury in Portland. In fact, on that same day, at that same arcade,

a 14-year-old named Michael Lopez was playing Tempest, which if you remember is the game that people compared to Polybius. And as Michael played, he suddenly felt lights flashing inside his brain. He stumbled outside, was sick in the parking lot, and was later found on his front lawn, writhing and screaming. His parents called an ambulance. It was his first migraine. He told the newspaper that it was so bad,

he thought that he was dying. Two kids in Portland, same arcade, same day. Both ended up incapacitated by a video game. And that's not the only real-life connection to Polypius. Because 10 days later, the FBI raided that arcade and several others in the Portland area. So now we have our men in black. But in this case, we know the investigation was about gambling. A lot of arcades in Portland had quietly modified their coin-op machines to pay out cash, essentially running illegal slot machines inside what looked like a family entertainment venue. The FBI found out what was going on and sent agents to check it out. They'd examine the cabinets, opened them up, checked for modification software, and document what they found. They also wrote down

the names of the top scorers on each machine's leaderboard, who were either gamblers or potential witnesses. In all, they made 52 arrests across Portland in 1981. Now, picture what that that looked like to a kid in the arcade at the time. Strange men in dark suits moving through the space like they own it. Nobody explains who they are. They stop at a machine, open it up, write something in a no pad. Then they close it and move on to the next one. And in some cases, they took the cabinets with them when they left, just like what supposedly happened with Polybius. I'd love to get your thoughts on this because there's a lot of possibilities here. Was Polypius a part of all of that? Was there a real cabinet that someone played felt genuinely sick from, watch the men in suits examine, and then

told their friends about in a story that passed down from person to person for two decades before it finally found the internet? Or does someone who knew about these Portland incidents use them as raw material to plant a story on a niche internet database and watch it spread? And then there's the other possibility that Polypius was actually real. And with all this other stuff happening, it got swept under the rug. I know the last one is a long shot, but the story refused to die, because in 2006, six years after the original post, someone left a comment on that coinop.org entry. The commenter's name was Stephen Roach, and he said that he was one of the programmers who built Polybius. Stephen said that the company was a small company based in Czech Republic.

It was founded in 1978, and the name was just a mashup of German words that they thought sounded cool. But apparently, they knew what they were doing when it came to making arcade games. They were approached by what Stephen called a nameless Southern American company to design a new game, one with puzzle elements and a new approach to graphics. Stephen said what they made was so good they couldn't stop playing it. In fact, it was so good that their investors worried it was too addictive and might be harmful. But they went ahead with a limited release, and then they found the game gave a 13-year-old boy in Portland a seizure. According to Stephen, the investors sent the company's directors to Portland to check it out.

That was the men in black that people saw. After that, Stephen said they disbanded the company to avoid any more damage to their reputations. But he truly believed that Polybius was ahead of its time and could have changed the face of gaming. It was an interesting story and not many people believed it. There was no way to verify it and the post itself didn't exactly scream, I'm legit. As just one example, Stephen spelled the very long company name in a bunch of different ways. And the moderators at Coinop didn't buy it either. They added to the original post saying that Stephen Roach was a fraud and that one of them was actually flying to Ukraine to get more information.

But after that, there weren't any updates. Nobody was ever able to find out more about the game, but they were able to find out who Stephen Roach was. According to writer Catherine Despira, he was real and not a programmer. According to Despira's reporting, Stephen ran behavioral modification centers for teens. Basically, parents would pay him to kidnap their wayward kids and take them to these centers to fix them. Insanely problematic, and in a lot of cases, not very legal.

Which was why Stephen had traveled around the world doing this, and he'd eventually end up in the Czech Republic. So at this point, the whole thing was starting to fall apart. There was nobody out there who could actually verify that Polybius was real, and people were starting to think that the whole story was just a way to drive more traffic to coinop.org. Because Stephen Roach did give a follow-up interview to a small gaming publication called GamePulse and said that someone named Ulrich Kohler came up with the company's name. And it turned out that the founder of Coinop was named Kurt Kohler.

By this point, it had been six years since that original post. The internet was looking more like we know it today, and people were able to poke holes in stories a lot faster than they could before. And the consensus was that Polybius had never existed, which is either kind of disappointing or a big relief depending on how you look at it. But like we've seen in other creepypasta stories, just because the original source wasn't real, that didn't mean that it didn't take on a life of its own. And in the years since that little post on coinop.org, Polybius has become the most famous game that never existed. The Stephen Roach comment is one of the most interesting parts about this entire legend, and not because I think it's real.

But the way the community responded to it tells you everything about what people wanted from this story. They wanted there to be someone who knew. Although when we think about who he really was, it's a good thing that it wasn't real. I really love that whoever did make up this story was able to blend all of these real events that happen in Portland into one big story. It's the same air of believability we saw with Ted the Caver, another early creepypasta. It took something real and turned it into something terrifying. And with how the early internet worked, it wasn't easy for people to separate the truth from the fiction, at least not at first. And as we're about to see, it doesn't matter that it wasn't real.

Because people took the idea of Polybius and turned it into some. something all on their own. All right, so we can all agree that Polybius never existed, or at least the 1981 CIA experiment version of it never existed. And the closer you look, the more obvious the hoaxes, starting with the name itself. Polybius was actually an ancient Greek philosopher and historian who was from, get this, a place called Arcadia. So there's your first hint right off the bat.

Polybius was famous for his love of puzzles. He invented something called the Polybius Square, which is a five-by-five grid of letters you used to communicate in secret code. And he also is famous for saying historians should only record something if they've actually talked to someone who experienced it. Maybe something people should have thought to do before deciding the game was actually real. Then there's his name itself, which means many lives in Greek. So you've got the king of puzzles born in Arcadia, whose name translates to extra lives.

pretty much the perfect person to dedicate a video game to. And the cool thing is, even though the legendary version of the arcade game, Polybius, isn't real, people have tried to actually recreate it based on the descriptions in that coinop.org post. The first version of it came out in 2007 by a developer called Rogue Synapse. The company's owner even registered zenislercion.com to host it. If you give it a try, let me know. And this is far from the only version of it. In 2017, a developer named Jeff Minter released his version of Polybius for PS4 with VR support.

As a part of the marketing, he even claimed that he played the real Polybius back in England when he was a kid. But even though that wasn't true, he did have a cool connection to the game. Minter worked with two remakes of Tempest, which people had linked to Glebeas because of the similar gameplay. And the game came to life in a lot of other ways, too, by becoming immortalized in pop culture. starting of course with The Simpsons. In 2006, right around the time that Stephen Roach made his post, a Polybius Arcade Cabinet appeared in the episode, Please Homer, don't hammer him,

with a mark that said, property of the U.S. government. The episode didn't acknowledge it beyond that, but it was a cool nod to the game. Polybius has also appeared in shows set in the 80s, like the Goldbergs and Papergirls. And more recently, it also showed up in Loki, where it's in the Loki Variant's hideout. In those other examples, the game was just in the background.

And that seemed to be the case in Loki too. But you know Marvel fans, every little Easter egg is discussed and dissected. And the appearance of Polybius got the full treatment. People noticed it because it fits so well into the multiverse concept that Marvel was setting up. Maybe Polybius isn't real in our world. Maybe it existed in another one. The thing that gets me the most about these pop culture, appearances is that each one creates a whole new generation of people who know about Polybius,

even if they weren't around for its original appearance. A kid who spots the cabinet in Loki and goes down a rabbit hole has a completely different experience of this story than someone who found it in the early 2000s. But they end up in the same place, convinced that something is there, even though they can't say exactly what. And my lasting takeaway from this story is how Polybius plays with memory. People read that one short website entry, maybe they remembered some of the weird stuff going on in Portland back then, and the story took on a life of its own from there. I love it when this kind of stuff goes from an internet urban legend or creepypasta into something real, and I might just have to go track down one of those PS4 versions of the game.

Portland historian Joe Streckert once compared Polybius to H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, the book that warps your mind once you open it. I love that analogy, not just because it describes the urban legend version of Polybius, but because it also describes the version that we've created. It's like some kind of demonic spell brought to life, one that jumped off a website and into reality. Sure, it may not control your mind or drive you insane,

but Polypius is here to stay. And with technology tracking us more and more every day, who knows what our video games might do to us. So if you're ever walking through an arcade and can feel a certain cabinet calling, you better not have any quarters. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a crimehouse original. I'd love to hear from you. Have you had any weird encounters with an arcade game? Do you have memory of Polybius?

Or do you think you do? Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And if you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad-free, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top

of the Twisted Tales show page and be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another story guaranteed to keep you up at night. Until then, stay curious.

And remember, there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it.