The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 26: Polybius: The Addictive Mind Control Game That's More Truth than Legend

Episode Date: June 26, 2022

Was Polybius real? In 1981, an arcade in Portland was the scene of countless gamers coming down with migraines, having heart attacks, seizures and strokes. Local teens were suffering from amnesia and having hallucinations. All due to a mysterious game that seemed to arrive out of thin air.   The game was called Polybius.   And even though playing the game was dangerous, it was highly addictive and caused some teens to become hyper-aggressive.    Fights started breaking out at the arcade. One player was stabbed to death. All traced back to people who played Polybius.   Why would the government allow the public to play such a dangerous game? Because the government created it.   Let's find out why. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thewhyfiles/support

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commercial. I got a packed calendar today. I'm sorry about him. Anyway, check out Spotify for Podcasters. It's free, no catch, and you can start today. Are we done? We're done, but you need to check your attitude. Excuse me, but I don't have all day to sit here and talk about Spotify. Look, this would go a lot faster if you would just let me get through it without... In 1981, an arcade in Portland was the scene of countless gamers coming down with migraines,

having heart attacks, seizures, and strokes. Local teens were suffering from amnesia and having hallucinations, all due to a mysterious game that seemed to arrive out of thin air. The game was called Polybius. And even though playing the game was dangerous, it was highly addictive and caused some teens to become hyper-aggressive. Fights started breaking out at the arcade. One player was stabbed to death, all traced back to people who played Polybius. Now, why would the government allow the public to play such a dangerous game? Well, because the government created it.

Let's find out why. If you've never heard the urban legend about Polybius, here's how it goes. In 1981, a Portland arcade received a video game called Polybius that had gameplay unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. The player would stare at random geometric patterns and strange shapes, causing them to fall into a sort of hypnotic state. The game was known for its psychedelic images, unsettling soundtrack, and subliminal messages. And if you played Polybius,

it could cause all kinds of physiological effects. Amnesia, anxiety, night terrors, aggression, insomnia. It could also cause physical effects like migraine headaches, nausea, vertigo, even heart attacks and strokes. Polybius was created by a company named Sinuslöschen, which in German roughly translates to sense deleting. And after playing, two Portland teenagers disappeared without a trace. Now, some say they were abducted.

Others say they were recruited. Whoa. Now, this game was so addictive that players would line up around the block and get into physical fights in order to play it. People reported that the Polybius machines were watching players and collecting data about them. And that data was periodically retrieved by men in black suits who serviced the machines. And the story goes that these men in black could change the game's attributes in order to elicit different responses from the players. Mind control?

Yep. Grab my hat, please. Thank you. The game was only released in two arcades and only for a short time. Then it disappeared as quickly and as quietly as it arrived, never to be seen again. Now, this is an urban legend and it's a good one. But how much of it is true? Well, actually, more than most people think. But it wasn't just any game.

You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Zor and the Kodan Armon. To get to the truth of the story of Polybius, you have to dig pretty deep. And if you Google Polybius, you'll get a bunch of blurry images of an arcade cabinet. There's no way to tell if these are photoshopped or an actual physical cabinet existed. If one did exist, I doubt there's photos of it. Also, there's only one known screen capture of the game's title screen. The screen cap shows the name of the game, the year, copyright,

and says it was developed by a company named Sinuslöschen. Now in German, this translates to sensory deprivation or sense deleting, but it's not a good translation, so probably not a native German speaker. There's also no evidence of a company ever existing in Germany with the name Sinuslöschen. No company anywhere had that name, so no help there. Now the font used for the title itself is actually unusual for the time. The memory required to produce this effect was pretty significant in the early 80s. Only games from huge companies like Nintendo and Williams were known to put so many resources into a title screen.

And the screen font is very close to a font used by Williams, but a couple of letters don't quite match, so again, not much to go on. Now, there are a few sources that say Polybius was mentioned on Usenet as early as 1994. Now, for you young bucks, Usenet newsgroups were a type of global message board used during the early days of the internet. And if something was happening on the internet, there was a newsgroup about it. Google has archived messages going back to the beginning of Usenet, but searches for Polybius come up empty. Now, what about the gameplay itself? Sources claim that Polybius was vector-based, similar to games like Tempest or Battlezone. Now, Tempest was a huge game at the time and known for its unique graphics. So it's reasonable that people who were playing arcade

games in that time remember Tempest. I definitely do. And Battlezone was used by the military as a training tool for tank crews. The army's version was called the Bradley Trainer. So the government creating arcade games? That's absolutely true. Now what about the story that people would get sick playing vector-based games like Polybius or Tempest, or actually die after playing certain games? Turns out, this is also true. An open mind is easy to expand. It might even be a good idea to heed the advice that one game player carries on his shirt. Maybe it's a warning. In 1982, 14-year-old Michael Lopez was playing Tempest with friends at the Malibu Grand Prix Arcade in Beaverton, Oregon. He began to feel a weird sensation in the back of his head,

and he started losing his vision. He became dizzy, stumbled outside the arcade, and threw up all over the parking lot. He then collapsed a few blocks from his home, screaming in pain. Apparently, the game's flashing lights and visual effects triggered a migraine or a seizure. Okay, then there's the case of Jeff Daly, who died after playing the game Berserk that same year. Daly had an unknown congenital heart condition. Apparently the stress of trying to break the game's high score triggered a heart attack. Same for Peter Bukowski of Calumet City, who also died of heart failure while playing Berserk.

Also in Calumet City, two teenage boys got into a fight over a game and one stabbed the other to death. And then there's Brian Morrow, who was playing Asteroids for 28 straight hours trying to break the record. He got sick and collapsed. Now, Morrow was pounding Coca-Colas for hours, so it's understandable that he'd get sick from that. Now, he survived. But when these stories stack up, you can see how they can lead to paranoia about the effects of playing video games. Now, it seems weird now, but in the early 80s, video games were a new phenomenon. And like always, parents are suspicious of anything new, fun, and seemingly addictive, like playing video games. Can you really blame them?

Now, a game developer's job is to make a game so fun and immersive and addictive that you want to throw money at it. I mean, that's just as true now as it was back then. Whether it's putting coins in a slot or microtransactions in a mobile game, the psychology is the same. Game companies want you to give them money and they want to give you hits of dopamine. Cool. A role of a game company or any corporation is to make money. So nobody disputes that they're transparent about it. But people tend to be more suspicious of the government than they are of corporations because the government not so transparent. No. And the government agencies really conduct top secret operations using video games at arcades. That's a rhetorical question, right?

It is because the answer time that players were collapsing. Arcades had reputations of being places for drug activity, gambling and petty crime like pickpocketing. Now, though the stories were sensationalized in the media, of course, people really were gambling over pinball games. Kids really were buying and smoking weed in arcades. So how does this factor into the Polybius legend? Well, during one sting operation, the FBI placed microphones and cameras inside video games to gather evidence on criminal activity. One of the games they used was Tempest. Tempest again!

Yep. Now, the FBI didn't care that Tempest was a vector game. All they cared about was that the cabinet had large bevels and a lot of room behind the glass. Perfect for cameras. And this FBI operation was so extensive that in the early 80s, there was actually a shortage of Tempest cabinets in the Pacific Northwest because the feds were all over it. And apparently the feds weren't very discreet about picking up their camera footage. Agents dressed in suits and ties would show up at an arcade, open the machine, and pull out videotape and then leave.

They didn't even bother with the coins. Stunards. Okay, but what about the CIA conducting mind control experiments? Can that possibly be true? That's another rhetorical question. Of course it's true. It's true. The CIA became convinced the Communists had found the key to brainwashing.

Now the Americans had to unlock the mystery of mind control. Early in the Cold War, the CIA was convinced that communists had discovered a drug that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program called MKUltra. The goal was to find a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies. MKUltra, which operated in the 1950s and 60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Now, some experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. And subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electric shock to very high doses

of LSD. Gottlieb realized that mind control was a two-part process. First, you had to destroy the existing mind. Then you had to find a way to insert a new mind into the void. Now, the CIA didn't get too far creating minds, but they did a hell of a job destroying them. The top-secret nature of MKUltra makes it impossible to measure the human cost of the experiments. Why is that? Oh, because the CIA destroyed the files. Yeah, that doesn't sound legal. It's not. That's your government, people. Enjoy. Now, we don't know how many people died during MKUltra, but we know some

did. And many lives were permanently destroyed. And the U.S. government has been experimenting on people against their will for as long as the government has existed. So it's not far of a stretch to think they would use video games for this purpose. Maybe they have. They have. Maybe they are. They are. You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map.

You battled krakens and navigated through storms Your spade struck the lid of a long lost treasure chest While you cooked a lasagna There's more to imagine when you listen Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. What the United States government did was shameful. And I am sorry. Now these stories are all true, but none of them are actually connected to a game called Polybius.

No such game has ever been found. And if you find a game called Polybius, it's either fan-made or it's a hoax. Freeware developer Rogue Synapse is known for creating fictional arcade games like the one from The Last Starfighter. They created a game named Polybius in 2007, and their version attempts to recreate the gameplay described in the urban legend, including psychedelic visuals and subliminal messages. It's pretty creepy. It's kind of fun. I'll link it below. You can play. It's free creepy. It's kind of fun. I'll link it below. You can play. It's free.

Yeah, no, thanks. I'm good. Coward. Oh, speaking of The Last Starfighter, that's a movie from the 80s where an intergalactic space force uses a video game to recruit star pilots. This probably leaked into the Polybius legend. Allegedly, players were disappearing, and it was said they were either abducted by the government or were actually recruited by the government.

I've seen them come and I've seen them go, but you're the best, my boy. Light years ahead of the competition. So the name Polybius was probably chosen specifically to troll people who were into conspiracies. What? Polybius was a Greek philosopher born in 200 BC in Megalopolis, and he's known for puzzles and cryptography. And you might have heard of the Polybius Square, which is a type of cipher named for him. Polybius also famously said you should never believe anything unless it could be verified with hard evidence and witnesses. Irony. So yeah,

I think whoever started this story was trolling us. Now, the urban legend of Polybius emerged in February of 2000 when a listing for the game showed up on coinop.org, a website that covers arcade games. Now, the entry for Polybius listed the game as having been copyrighted in 1981, but no copyright exists. And it talks about bizarre rumors and says the game's history is unknown. The person believed to have created the post and this entire legend is Kurt Collar, the owner of Coinop. After Coinop created their listing for Polybius, Collar tipped off GamePro magazine about it. GamePro referenced Polybius in an article about secrets and lies in video games. And as to whether Polybius was a secret or a lie, GamePro said the story was inconclusive.

That was a big deal. In the early 2000s, GamePro was one of the largest gaming magazines in the country, so this generated interest. A few months later, the story landed on Slashdot. And if you remember the internet in the early 2000s, a mention on Slashdot was a huge deal. A legend was born. Now, since then, Polybius has been all over the media. The subject of countless investigations. It's even been referenced in pop culture. Hmm. Never saw this one before.

When an unsolved mystery gets as much attention as this, there's going to be people claiming that they were involved. One notorious hoaxer is someone named Stephen Roach, who posted on CoinOp that he worked on the game. Did he? No. His story has been investigated and debunked, but it got him plenty of attention. that he worked on the game. Did he? No. His story has been investigated and debunked,

but it got him plenty of attention. And if Kurt Kahler invented the story to drum up traffic for his website... Worked like a charm. Worked like a charm. So is the story of Polybius true? Well, the psychology behind addictive games and social media platforms like Facebook are certainly a form of mind control.

The U.S. government has a long history of experimenting on its citizens, so there's no doubt in my mind that the government is doing that right now. People can become addicted to video games and have gotten sick and even died playing them. Government agents were using arcade games in secret operations. All of these things happened, and they all happened in Portland about the same time. Though, no, I don't think the game ever existed. But the rest of the story is completely true. And that's why, as far as urban legends go, the story of Polybius is just about perfect. Thanks for hanging out with us today.

My name is AJ. That's HeckleFish. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned anything today, comment, like, subscribe, share. It really helps out the channel. And what do you think about Polybius? Was it real? You have any more information about it. It really helps out the channel. And what do you think about Polybius? Was it real? You have any more information about it?

Let us know in the comments. And until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. you sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map you battled krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible.