QAA Podcast - Polybius Lives! Part 2 (Premium E325) Sample

Episode Date: March 1, 2026

In 1981 an arcade cabinet began popping up all over the Portland area called Polybius…or at least…that’s the claim. Released by a company called Sinneslöschen, the game used a graphics rendering technology that was impossibly ahead of its time and men in black were reported to be monitoring the machines. Kids that played reported having migraines, hallucinations, and memory loss while others became vehemently anti-arcade. But, just as quickly as the machines appeared, those same men in black soon took them away. No one has seen one since. In part two of this two-part episode, Jack LaRoche delves into the possible origins of this internet legend. From a South American company commissioning cabinets to be built in Europe to uncovering a pedophile sex trafficking ring, the more Jake, Julian, and Travis hear, the more unbelievable the story becomes. Jack LaRoche bsky.app/profile/coyotespeaks.bsky.social Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Produced by Liv Agar and Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast's Premium Episode 325. Polybius Lives Part 2. As always, we're your host, Jake Rakitansky, Jack LaRoche, Julian Fields, and Travis View. This video game. The story goes that Polybius was a video game released in only a handful of arcades around the Portland, Oregon area in 1981. It was highly addictive, but had devastating effects on the players. Memory loss, migraines, nausea, and terrific nightmares were all commonly reported. Men in Black were routinely seen fiddling with the cabinets, writing in notebooks, possibly harvesting player data? All of this lasted only a month or two before the cabinets were removed by the same secretive men in Black, never to be seen again.

It's an episode about the overlap of LSD with cabinet arcade culture. Well, somebody needed to do it. There are machine elves. They're working in the cabinets. I speak to them directly. I know. My like TV executive, like, Hollywood brain is just going crazy. I'm like, everything here's a show. It's such an interesting setting.

The musical, Polybius, the musical. I'm still on to it. It could be beautiful. The musical. You see, the musical is interesting. Wouldn't that be cool, like smoke machines, neon? Kind of like Tommy meets X-Files. That would be so cool.

Isn't Polybius the musical just like, Kailtra? A little bit. Well, yes. I mean, the music we would obviously design to brainwash the audience to become QAA patrons, but, you know. Well, there is a very good pulp book that came out. It was last year or the year before by Colin Armstrong called Polybius. That is very much a nice, harder take on it. So maybe you'd want to adopt that into a musical. Yeah. Okay, copy that. Yeah. It's a great book. Get on it, On it. In the previous episode, we examined how this legend might have come to be, how moral panics erupted around video games at that time.

Older generations were worried about the addictive nature of the games and their economic impact on the young players. Likewise, there were actual reports of physical harm coming to those who played certain games, most commonly migraines. To top it all off, the FBI really was examining arcade cabinets in that area at that time, and military recruiters were hounding particularly skilled players to enlist. If all of this were true, was Polybius real? Stort Brown established that prior to 2003, all mentions of Polybius on Usenet were in reference

to the philosopher, rather than the arcade game. Likewise, the memories of intense discussion of Polybius were likely people misremembering Pink Floyd's Publius Enigma. When then did Polybius first show up? Most people first learned about Polybius through GamePro magazine. Wow. Blast from the past, right? Yeah, but I mean, that was like mainstream at the time.

I mean, there were only a handful. GamePro EGM. Yeah. Before the internet was widespread, the best place to get information about upcoming games and more importantly, cheat codes and walkthroughs was a gaming magazine. GamePro was one of the best selling at the turn of the century, with a monthly circulation of around 500,000 issues. Wow.

I can still remember how exciting it was to flip through one at a friend's house or in the supermarket. Oh, yeah. I loved these magazines. This was to see the pictures of what an upcoming game was going to look like. Oh, there was nothing better. Extremely exciting. Going through some of these old magazines, I think I might have actually had this issue at one point. That's awesome.

I remember some of the ads in particular that were in it. and it's all available, you know, on the Internet Archive for anybody curious to actually flip through a magazine. But in issue number 180, published in September 2003, there was a supplemental article by Dan Electro, a real surname Amrich, that raised a few eyebrows. Enticingly titled Secrets and Lies, the article addressed six video game urban legends, deeming them either true, false, or inconclusive. To the dismay of readers everywhere, Electro slapped a false on the idea that topless Laura Croft was programmed into Tomb Raider.

Wait, I think I might have had this issue as well. I remember reading the debunking of that. Being very, very disappointed. Yeah, there was a naked Chunli rumor too. It was basically like any hot girl in game. It was like, what if you could see her naked? And then it became a legend. Yes, that was like a very, I remember that being a very popular rumor that you could get,

Lara Croft to, there was some way that you could de-d-robe her. There was a specific code that supposedly did it, and the rumor was that in the second Tomb Raider game, if you entered that code in, it crashed your game without saving it. Oh, yeah, to punish you, to punish you for wanting to see those big natural polygons. Yeah, exactly. I remember there were other, like, secrets that I discovered, like, being able to do the handstand when you're climbing up on a cliff. like I remember discovering that for the first time.

Oh, those old games, a different time, simpler times. He's drifting again. So when it came to Polybius, however, Electro's label was inconclusive. Jake, would you like to be Electro? Yes, of course. The government made an arcade game that erased kids' memories and gave them horrific nightmares. Using games for military training is one thing.

Using games for mind control, well, that's a lot of. something else. But there is a cryptic tale of an arcade game called Polybius that appeared in only a handful of locations in Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s, credited to a company called Sinislotian. Polybius, named for a Greek historian who also dabbled in cryptography, was an abstract puzzle game that reportedly caused nightmares and memory loss in those who played it. Sinislotian is German for sense-deleting, and some supposedly swore off games for good. And to seal the deal, one arcade owner claimed that black-coated gentleman would periodically come to collect data, but not coins from the machines. It would be way funnier to have the FBI jangling around, like, their pockets full of quarters being like,

we did it, boys, we found the money for the next Iran contra. Unfortunately, the main thing that's missing is proof. While a rhyme reportedly exists, it hasn't actually been located. A title screen is all anyone seems to be able to produce. And these are easy to create in Photoshop. The company names font is the same one Williams used on several of its games, making cut and paste easy for an aspiring prankster. Also, nobody seems to be willing to name names

or authenticate any of the tales floating around the internet. Nothing can be verified by a reliable source. But still, what if it's true? Yes, the Jake approach to journalism. But still, yeah, it's the but, yeah, it's the but. still. Yeah. I wonder if Travis is almost here, I feel like, if we work on him a little more,

he'll be like, directionally correct. It's like all conspiracy theories. It's like the army doesn't need to disguise it. They just release like three pretty decent shooters, honestly, called America's Army one, two, and three, and make it free to download. And then, like, hit you up and be like, hey, you've sniped 150 domes. Like, we think you might be good at doing this for real. Yeah, this is like how 60s and 70s, paranoia, I think, seems, I don't know.

esoteric and interesting and cool, whereas, you know, releasing like soldiertrainer.com and having, like, everybody go there on purpose, knowing exactly what it is, like, way closer to reality. 500 kills and you get a job offer. Yeah, there we go, baby. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to Patreon.com. com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian

and Annie, 10 episodes of Pervers with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis Vue. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners.

Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying, not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.