This Paranormal Life - #045 Polybius - A Mysterious Government Arcade Machine Game

Episode Date: January 23, 2018

There is a legend in Portland, Oregon of an arcade machine that caused seizures, insomnia, disappearances and even suicide. A legend of government cover-ups, mind control experiments, and internet history wiped clean. Did the game even exist? Kit and Rory get to the bottom of it, on this episode of This Paranormal Life!Support us on Patreon.com/ThisParanormalLife to get access to weekly bonus episodes!Buy Official TPL Merch! - thisparanormallife.com/storeFollow us on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTubeJoin our Secret Society Facebook CommunityIntro music by www.purple-planet.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Can birds really defy gravity or did they unlock some kind of cheat code allowing them to fly? Smart. When you get sick, are you haunted and are antibiotics actually tiny ghostbusters? Answers to these questions and more on this episode of This Paranormal Life. Oh, welcome back to the podcast. It is Tuesday once again. Once again. Oh. Oh, yeah. We're going smooth. I'm feeling the groove. I'm feeling the groove.

I'm feeling the groove tonight. Yeah, we're joined by your favorite paranormal investigators in the whole wide world. My name is Kit Greer. This guy's name is Rory Pars. Exactly right, my friend. I'll tell you what, Kit. I think it's only fair that we give these people a little peek behind the curtains. The little ghost sheets.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear what you're saying yeah so it is it is monday night 11 p.m we are recording this episode to go live within a number of hours so within the next 12 to 16 hours i will sleep and then edit the podcast also record it what's a little bit frustrating as well is that i gave you a two week lead time on this episode and you have assured me that it is such a banger that you needed two weeks minimum three to pull off this quote unquote behemoth that's right this bigfoot of a case had to be hunted correctly you claimed i said is it bigfoot and you had to start over right all of this is true the slander true the the false accusations not false but what is true

is i do have a banger of an episode for you okay is it true debatable i'll leave that to the jury so not everything's true then like always we're just gonna dive right in nice let me paint a little picture for you we'll be talking oil colors water paints we're talking crayon on wallpaper your parents come in screaming that shit was expensive we only laid it down two weeks ago you're running about uh it's 1981 in portland oregon okay it's summer school is out you know the score you and your day ones are skateboarding around town without a care in the world and where's the best hangout spot the arcade arcade. I was just going to say the arcade. Everyone's not at the arcade. Playing classics like Donkey Kong, Frogger, Contra, the whole deal.

Nothing matters when you're at the arcade, you know. You're just pushing those little fun tokens into the slots, watching the world go by in the shape of a little Italian plumber trying to kill a monkey. You're damn right. Your kid is pulling on your trousers saying, feed me, papa. Right. And I'm saying, i'm saying off you little bastard i'm trying to kill a goddamn monkey the police social security waiting at the sidelines right for their turn on the machine though not to stop me and i tell them to off because i got a pile of quarters What kind of twisted arcade are children not allowed into?

This is Rory's arcade. And only neglectful parents get to play. Everyone's just hanging out, trying to beat each other's high scores and knock back cold sodas. Right. Well, one kid, let's call him Kyle, is meeting his friends at the arcade. So he posts up at Pac-Man, ready to throw down like usual. But no one's there what gives usually there's a crowd but he does hear people talking around the corner so he walks

around and everyone's crowding around a new game polybius oh damn it must be great but before you get a closer look a fight broke out between two kids in the middle of the crowd they went freaking primal on each other w wailing on each other, fighting over who got to play next. I mean, this sounds strange, but this is essentially Arcade 101. I've mentioned it a lot of times before that our arcade rules are like prison. You must approach and knock out the biggest child or man

or just anyone you can find. Your own son again. My own own son if needs be to assert dominance over the pack and show them that quarter stacks don't mean shit when big dogs in town that's what they called me every high score was big dog that was me and if it wasn't it was hacked probably but my little shit of a son you son. You beat him down and take his quarters. Even though that's his pocket money I gave him. Yeah, what the hell? All this over a new game?

One kid, Timmy, beat the crap out of this other kid and he got to play a bunch of rounds. It was a shooting game with some puzzle elements to it and he ended up getting the high score that day. Must not have been there. What, you? You've never heard of this place? Big Daddy wasn't clearly at the arcade that day, or I would have been taught. What, in Portland, Oregon, 1981?

Yeah. You were, what, minus 10 at this age? So I missed it, is what I'm trying to say. Not my fault. I wasn't there. That's what I said. Kyle was eager to get involved, so he hung around until the end of the day. Finally, Polybius quieted down for long enough to play it. Excitedly, he put a quarter in and started. It played like a regular shooter, but something was not right,

and he felt very uncomfortable. The music was weird and dark and he could have sworn that the screen's display was flashing every now and again super fast. Is this thing broken already? Kyle kept thinking he could see something in his peripheral vision. Something dark lurking as the screen continued to flash. It felt more and more odd until suddenly... Hey Kyle we're closed that's your last game. game as the screen continued to flash. It felt more and more odd until suddenly...

Hey Kyle we're closed, that's your last game. Game over. Damn. He looked back and he had died. Oh well. I wonder what everyone was so fired up about before, it's just a dumb shooting game. While Kyle walked out of the now dark arcade, said bye, grabbed his skateboard and rolled home. Get out of here Kyle! Shut up dad! Your arcade's cage closed go back to big daddy he said he'd kick my ass if you weren't home before the street lights turned on

it's so depressing please kyle i'm so scared of your father big daddy is like he's definitely such a spindly nerd it's so true it's like uh like the one older kid who thinks he's tough because he hangs out with all the like preschoolers and we'll just beat any of them up they're like oh shit it's big daddy it's bd he like thinks he's grown a really tough beard but it's really puby yeah tiny yeah thin and wispy and blonde even though he has very dark hair so accurate he has one really bad tattoo and he thinks he's the shit because of it we all know a big dog big daddy whatever his name is wait what was it before it was i think it's become big daddy over time which is way creepier it's so much creepier you do not want a big daddy setting high scores at a

kid's arcade no don't be that guy whatever you did in life don't be big daddy what would you do if you ran an arcade one day a man with a pedo stash and a trench coat walked in and knocked out the biggest kid there and all the kids are like who are you i'm big daddy arcade owner no i'm shutting this down before it begins i've heard i've heard stories about you you've been trying to come to every arcade in town and do this not here not anywhere the way he gets inside is by hiding inside a polybius machine and then he bursts out the sides i love that the name's big daddy no no no get him out stop it there's like there's definitely like a list of names on the wall of the arcade that are not allowed on the high score list.

Right. Yeah. A lot of them are starting with Big and ending with Daddy. Yeah. Big Dog is definitely on the line. But as he left the arcade, he couldn't get the game out of his mind. And when he went to bed, he lay there wide awake for hours.

He felt like he could still see those shapes in the corner of his eye as he finally drifted off. Next morning, he woke up to a crazy migraine after a night of insane nightmares. I get that. Do you?

I feel you, brother. The yuge. I call that a calm one sorry so what's a bad one a bad one i have sexual nightmares i do you know what i regret asking so let's just cool cool no side note though, I also once played Halo for over 24 consecutive hours. And later that night, when I blinked, I could see the UI in real life. So that's just a little fun fact. So I understand this man. I understand that he was seeing things from the game, post-playing the game. Because we tell a lot of jokes in this podcast, but was that a joke?

No, that's legit. That's legitimate. Yeah, that and the nightmares. The sexual ones. Okay. Yeah. We'll just move past that. Yep.

Yeah, I remember being a kid. I think my only experience close to that was I once stayed inside with friends. Nightmares? Your own sexual nightmares? No, no, no. The gaming one. Right, okay. It really is just you because it's not even the story either.

You just brought that up. You've been trying to shoehorn that into every conversation we've had in the last week. You once entered a room and yelled sexual nightmares. And everyone left. It was a restaurant. It was insane insane people were in the middle of meals and they just left they sensed the crazy from so far away and so early on sometimes i feel like people don't want to listen to big daddy you're wearing it's affecting my self-esteem for sure i remember as a kid but uh it was like you know back in the day one of those summer days you're off school uh sun's shining everyone's out having a good time

like in this story yeah yeah i stayed inside with my friend playing uh legend of zelda Ocarina of Time for so long that my friend's parents forced us to turn off the Nintendo 64. And we were amazed to find that when we looked at a bowl of fruit in his kitchen, the oranges were pink. Jeez. And we thought, this is bad. That is bad. We have to sleep this one off. I was quite similar when I was growing up.

We had screen time, which was allocated time where you could look at screens and then you had to go outside and look at birds and pick fruit and stuff, things people do outside. I don't really know either. I f***ing didn't listen to screen time at all. I had a Game Boy SP in the bushes. Well, it's a couple days later and Kyle told the guys he would meet them at the arcade again. Well, that afternoon, he gets to the arcade.

Hey, guys, you see that Polybius game? Did you see the high score Timmy set? But his friends are looking at each other weird. Dude, didn't you hear? Timmy's been missing for a couple days now. Whoa. Kyle looked around, and right enough he saw a bunch of missing posters all over the arcade walls with timmy's face on it call this number if you see

timmy now that they thought about it weird stuff had been happening recently lots of kids weren't making it to the arcade anymore people were getting migraines and even insomnia like kyle felt the same night he played polybius for the first time how much how much time has passed this is just like a couple days okay couple days weird he thought and he decided not to play polybius that day good call well it's closing time again and all the kids are piling on into the streets crap Crap, Kyle thought. I forgot my skateboard. So he runs to the front door of the arcade. Damn, it's locked. It's cool.

I'll just run around the back. So Kyle goes around the back entrance and stumbles through the dark of the arcade. I guess the door is still open. And all the lights and sounds are off. Weird. But he could hear something. Some talking. As he got closer and closer to the sound

he could see that one machine was still on it's polybius except the back of the cabinet was open and two agents in black suits no are taking readings from the machine before they twist their heads to spot Kyle. This is mad. No. Did the events I had described to you really happen? Is this testimony from Kyle? There is no Kyle. What?

I'll level with you. There's no Kyle. But. I'll level with you there's no kyle but i'll level with you i'm kyle you look over i'm really 40 years old you've never noticed i'm 40 but woven into the story i've just told are real claims real people have made about the game okay polybius that was an interesting way to tell it i'll give you a little pat on the back for that and then a slap on the dick for selling us short but i hear what you're saying here what really happened i didn't say that shut up i feel like i was written in your notes we all know I'm very smart and cool, and everyone agrees with the story I just told. However, well, it's hard to get to the truth. For example, can we be sure that this game, Polybius, ever existed?

To get to the bottom of that, we can ask arcade-museum.com. This is where mega nerds, the likes of which you or I have probably never even met, the kind of nerds without which society itself would collapse instantly, they post what arcade machines they are in possession of, what condition they're in, and if they have any parts that they need or could sell. That's kind of a cool hobby, I think, to get into. Like, you know people who hunt for old pinball machines and that sort of stuff and restore them? It is pretty cool.

That's like the coolest side of being a nerd, I think. You know, in the same way like a grease monkey, like, hey, I'm going to get this old car and I'm going to work it up. I'm throwing some of my own parts here. Yeah, why is that cool? I don't know. But like instead of that like skateboard that goes under the car, the dude's like under a pinball machine, you know, tinkering away. It's like, yeah, just fire the old boy up there. I added a couple G6s to make those balls fly even faster.

You know, it's like a cool, cool. He's talking to no one. Everyone's dead. It's like I am legend. Everyone on the planet is dead. I'm so alone. Yeah, I know what you mean, though. Like there's something cool about like restoring

something to its former glory yeah yeah like you know building a little warhammer or a toy and you're like yeah i got a little axe on there you know some cool stuff like that or like playing like magic the gathering and shit you're like no yeah i'm gonna tap my three swamp mana and play that's not all that's four and you're not fixing anything up anything like that you know i think Like, yeah, I'm going to tap my three swamp mana and play down my four max. You're not fixing anything up. Anything like that, you know, I think is cool. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, magic. You are dressed as Yu-Gi-Oh himself.

Yeah, Yu-Gi. I'm dressed as Yu-Gi. Jesus. There is no O. His name is Yu-Gi. Okay. And yes, I am wearing a Naruto headband. Because in my fan fiction, it's one universe.

So watch your goddamn mouth. Because in the fan fiction, Yugi and Naruto are lovers. And he gave him his headband. We have a baby called Big Daddy. And that's me. I'm baby Big Daddy. Is that why the nappy?

Yes, that's why I'm wearing a nappy with the headband and the hair. We've named dropped Naruto so many times in this podcast. Enough for people to know that we are the nerds we speak of. Well, a quick search for Polybius on this site indicates that there are a few owners of real Polybius cabinets. Wait, for real? However, one owner commented on the site, Every time I play this game, my head gets warm and I have the urge to urinate.

And listed the serial number as 666. Oh, come on. So, they may not all be real listings. However, one such person that lists himself as an owner of Polybius, Rob Sherwin. He is a bit more of an internet historian, and he created a page for all things Polybius on his website, Jolt Country. Cool, that's actually a pretty cool name.

Yeah, it is. The links will all be in the show notes people that can be found at our Patreon. So he does a great job of bringing together some of the early evidence of Polybius. So, we have a screenshot you're pretty standard like bubbly retro text green with a kind of glowing hue around it yeah yeah pretty retro the right kind of time um yeah it's it has on there a developer which we'll get to um shortly this is 1981 copyright of sinis lotion incorporated of course uh so nothing weird famous producers of such games such as schlonky kong schlooper mario schlooper mario 2

schlack man the legend of schlalder that should be so funny. These are such cheap laughs. A popular game for the Schlooper Nintendo. Searches on the net did also pull up this extremely high quality photo of an early Polybius cabinet. Okay. I mean, it's, it, it looks like a gaming cabinet with that same um kind of uh pixelated logo on top of the cabinet yeah but pretty standard issue i mean it looks like the photo was taken in the 1700s yes this is also true very great it's like it's like it looks like a photo that's been uh taken in black and white printed in a newspaper, and then scanned into the internet. Yeah, absolutely. So it's very, very low res.

So like I said, this screenshot does offer up a little clue. It says 1981 Sinuslotion Incorporated. And apparently this roughly translates to sense delete or sensory deprivation. Oh, okay. Which is definitely creepy definitely creepy yeah that's really creepy now this could still all be bullshit but the more rob was posting about this on jolt country the bigger the case got and a man named jerry found the site and sent Rob a picture of his home arcade. Notice anything familiar? He has a Polybius? It looks like it. What? So he kind of sent this to Rob just like,

hey, what do you think of this? That's insane. Your research in Polybius? Here's my home arcade and he's got a cabinet sitting there. But who is this man this is uh just some guy jerry and in another comment section someone anonymously left this image in the comment section more pictures of polybius another polybius cabinet so i mean because it either exists or people are going to the effort of making their own fake cabinets exactly to kind of like extend the hype exactly which uh seems like a lot of effort yeah but we definitely can't rule that out is it possible they're still out there they didn't all just vanish into thin air well rob did source and visit the site of one of these photos and from what i understand it actually turned out to be bogus oh granted with a story this juicy

like scooby-Doo says, there's gonna be meddling kids. Scooby never said that. Scooby-Doo never said that. I don't think anyone in the show said that. I'm sorry. No one set up a mystery by saying there was gonna be meddling kids.

I read the spark notes of the Scooby-Ddoo series and i thought i'd like take a punt at like a cultural why would scooby be upset that there was he is a meddling well he's a dog oh you've done me there as scooby says but where did all this begin surely there we will find the truth. Right. Well, like all good paranormal tales, it begins on a forum. On the coin-op forums in the late 90s. However, no one really knows if this is the true date. Some have speculated that, I don't know, some Y2K shit. That this might have been posted in the noughties.

Right. when the other rumors started to circulate but that coin ops simply formatted this date to the 90s oh that's annoying damn you y2k you took my wife you took my house you took big daddy's high scores a man called stephen roach posted about polybius how he was commissioned by a company to build a video game. He says that they released the video game to a small market in South America. People got sick from it and they recalled it. Simple as that. And to make matters more confusing, one Polybius expert, a man named Kat Dispira, doesn't sound like conspiracy at all, said that there was in fact a man named Steven Roach who used to run behavioral modification programs. His company was based

in Mexico, but they belonged to a global institution and they basically acted as a child reform academy that used behavioral modification and brainwashing techniques to change kids behavior right and this ended up getting shut down by government authorities because of abusive practices that supposedly mr stephen roach was implicated in now he's a man on the run so these are pretty games. Making cutting edge games. After that, he learned Unity 3D and he knuckled down, started a Kickstarter. I mean, these are pretty wild claims. Yes, very wild.

I mean, there's got to be different Stephen Roaches in the world. If it is true that there's a Stephen Roach behind some sort of behavioral modification academy. Right. That sentence alone is one of the maddest things i've heard in 2018 steven roach running a behavioral science academy and if it does turn out to be the self-same steven roach that posted on coinop.com forums saying that he built a video game in the 90s then we may have a genuine conspiracy on our hands people okay so to recap what we're getting from this is that this man stephen roach at one point ran an academy where he would brainwash

children and i guess absolutely uh either turn them into some sort of sleeper cell agents or just modify their behaviors. That was shut down by the government and now he's moved on to creating a game that can essentially, throughout flashes and lights and colors, brainwashashed children or at least that's what he hopes and these are these are the test uh machines the polybius machines going out into the world is that is that correct absolutely that is well that is what is being inferred from this information is that the polybius itself is part of some sort of brainwashing program. Right. What if a grown-ass man played Polybius? What would happen then? Time to find out.

Big daddy. Surely someone who has one of these cabinets can rip the game somehow to a rom. Well, I Google searched this for, frankly, several minutes and was able to find no trace of the original game. So I guess the man in black that kyle met did a pretty good job of tidying this shit up yeah but you know what you just can't smash to pieces and pretend never happened memories thankfully some of these kids who claim to have played polybius back said that so sadly like you have so many memories you want to smash up

and you can't you know what's seared into my brain forever memories sure you know you can download roms of games but you know what you can't download your father's approval i wish i could uh torrent the love of my family i I wish I could stream a wife. Yeah, thankfully some of the kids who played Polybius back in the heyday have designed games to try and recreate its satanic mind-control gameplay in all its glory. Unfortunately, I do not own a PC. But through the magic of YouTube Let's Plays, I can show you some Polybius recreated gameplay. Okay.

Now, of course, people at home, this comes with a massive disclaimer. This is a very dangerous game. Remember, this was designed as a mind control program. If you're listening at home, by no means go to YouTube and search for this. Definitely don't download the game. Definitely don't click the links in our patreon show notes no don't do that if your mind is weak the game might break you i have an unbelievably powerful mind so the game is no problem for me but rory i know you've been having

a tough time recently so i don't know if you have the mental stability to play right yeah the nightmares yeah it's been a little bumpy road you i would say if your mind is a fortress my mind is a is a just a 24-hour garage you know you it's easy to get in and out never closed i mean it's fine we sell everything you you stubbed your toe before the podcast yeah like five minutes before and i had to literally wrestle you to stop you from deleting every episode of the podcast you were like it's finished it's been a bumpy month yeah well with that said i'll take i'll take the chance i'll roll the dice and i'll show you this godforsaken footage okay all right at the start is just booting up checking polybius rom check okay uh well that's gone jesus christ lots of things

flashing higher functions press fire enter code to access the code apparently seems to be it's 35 this is very it's so the game isn't very fun at this point uh the 34 but the person who who created this game to recreate polybius is obviously uh he's trying to recreate some sort of 31 utility access maybe this is the kind of access that the men in black maybe applied to the game 54 who access the diagnostics i feel like i might be activating a sleeper cell as we speak 12 one of our listeners currently attaching a silencer to a pistol and leaving their house 23 sorry 24 sorry sleeper cell all right oh 23 sit back down that's kyle it's not me here we go okay so the game has started and we're sort of we were floating through space It seems to be almost like an asteroid style game where you're in a ship shooting strange designs and strange cubes

The middle of it is kind of like it looks like some sort of satanic Sort of hypnotic mandala looking it is a little bit pentagram like yeah Looks like something out of Full Metal Alchemist. Yeah, very much so. It looks like a portal into a nether world is going to open up any second. But I mean, as far as like brainwashy and weird, I mean, it just looks like a bad game. Oh, a bit of text on the old window there. Just popped up and left really quick.

I don't know what that was. Wow. Okay, it really sets up the game here uh where it's kind of like just beams of light emitting from the center with these purple flashes even if this is like a technique to brainwash children this is a terrible video game because also surely one of the things you have to do when you're making this game is also make it desirable for children to play. Yeah, I guess.

You can't just make a brainwash game because no kids are going to want to play that. What was that text that popped up? You don't need to know about that. Give me the laptop back. Oh my God, someone's posted a list of all the words that pop up. Go on. All right, get this. This leads me to believe it might not be the actual rom

two minutes and 48 seconds into the gameplay it pops up for a split second surrender three minutes 11 seconds do not question authority 30 minutes 13 seconds submit. Submit! 3 minutes, 28 seconds. Consume! Ah, wow. So, like, we have to remember that this is just a recreation. This guy probably played this game back in the day, maybe once or twice, and is trying to recreate it, like, 30 years later. So, you know, interesting.

Even if it's not real real the effect of the game may still be very disturbing you may notice under the video there one commenter joao lucas commented i don't know why but all of a sudden i feel like joining the army another uh user stop right there criminal scum, commented BRB joining US Marines. However, others have called BS right there in the comments. One YouTube user, Brocialist Party of America, commented, guys, this video is fake. My father and uncle both played the real Polybius in Arcade as kids and they say it didn't look anything like this. Wow, and he sounds like a trustworthy guy i take internet comments as gospel some people have hypothesized maybe polybius was a perfect storm of conditions in the 80s that created simply an urban legend what we do know

is that in the 80s this thing of kids getting sick at the arcade it was real for example in the portland area alone a brian maro a 12 year old who's trying to set the world record for playing asteroids fell ill after playing for 28 hours straight right yes i mean yeah only a week later 18 year-old competitive gamer Jeff Daly died due to a heart attack after chasing the world record in Berserk. And the same happened to a 19-year-old one year later. So you can imagine lots of kids crammed into an arcade. They're going to start talking and making crazy ideas about why Timmy got sick, why Kyle passed out. Maybe there was something going on.

Yeah. And this sounds very far-fetched, but apparently it was true that FBI agents did stake out arcades in the Portland area during the 80s. Why? It was due to a series of drug and gambling busts in the areas. As one man, Todd Loto, explained, back in the early 80s, arcades weren't the safe haven that people think they were. Drugs were a big part of what went on. Gambling was big as well. So the FBI were coming to these

arcades, placing hidden cameras and tracking people through high score initials when they left. No, that's actually pretty smart it's pretty badass so you kind of have this like i said a perfect storm of kids getting sick playing video games legit men in black hanging out around these arcades and potential surveillance and busts going on yeah and it sounds like that these these arcades are essentially opium dens of drugs these kids are child to child exactly they are just like pack mules additionally we do know there's a man called bobby feldstein a portland local who at age 14 was abducted and eventually reappeared he believes this to be connected to the polybius legend maybe he was abducted by men in black. We do know the US government has been

involved in the creation of video games at least once before. I don't know if you knew this. A military shooting game available on PC and PS4 today called America's Army became controversial when players realized that the game contains crazys military propaganda and it turns out the game was actually co-developed by the u.s military as a training program for troops and as an education tool for kids to learn about fighting for uncle sam damn is that true that is true what a weird thing yeah like they literally like america's army, you can buy on the PS4 right now. But in training facilities in the United States, there are versions of this game adapted for deployment and for training. That's so weird and not appropriate.

Yeah, weird and wrong in some way. It's like the first time I played Call of Duty 4, and there's a mission in it where you're essentially in like a bomber plane yes from the point of view of the actual cameras that you would use on those military planes yeah you know people are just like little blob ants moving across the screen when you shoot a missile it's kind of just like dust gray smoke yeah because it's all black and white and grainy and halfway through you're like what if this was just controlling an actual spy plane and these were people it's like you wouldn't even know it's insane like that's exactly what it is like i assume

to do that sort of job you just see these little dots and blips and it's like all right try and hit that with your little target it's weird it's super creepy so i presented you with stacks of facts right well sorry if you got an issue with that statement i wouldn't go as far as facts i would say statements stacks of statements if what you're asking is do i think polybius is a real game or a real machine i think it's a little suspicious that there isn't more physical evidence existing right now because as we know you know the the fanatics out there who love arcade machines love pinball machines and all this stuff they have they have digital archive of every single game that's ever existed in any arcade all across the world. And obviously I realize that Polybius would be one of those arcade machines kind of snuck in the back. Maybe it's not even on a register.

But to be at this point in the world where information can be traveled so fast and instantaneously. And still all we have are rumors and stories and not anything physical to go on i find it a little difficult to believe is all i'm saying i think it exists as much as the legend of shmelda exists very fair but i agree i mean like i said the case of bobby feldstein uh the guy who says he was abducted to do with polybius we always look for a motive what do the people behind these stories why are they saying this well bobby runs the only like portland polybius walking tour okay so here we go uh and i guess now he's got a radiotopia show uh podcast so yeah i think it's a little convenient i think it's very

fun and i think that's why the internet has just like latched onto it so fast and everyone's enjoying it and i think that's why arcade nerds enjoyed making mock-ups yeah it reminds me of um did you ever hear that story about like i'm sure you did about the um the original theme song that played in one of the towns in the pokemon red and blue cartridge yeah lavender time the lavender town theme if you haven't heard about this you should absolutely look this up or is essentially the the original theme that played in this town this little like eight bit music was so creepy and eerie that it just made children go insane which obviously was debunked and it's not real but it's cool and it's it's the exact same thing um people have uploaded youtube videos it's like the original lavender town music and you can

listen to like weird creepy versions of the the music which obviously doesn't make people go insane um but it's that same idea it's it's a cool um like creepy pasta that the internet really hooks uh onto definitely so i think we'll have to chalk this one up to a no it's a no from me unfortunately it's a no from big daddy jesus christ we need to put this episode to rest so i hope you guys enjoyed that one if you've ever had your own experiences with polybius and you can tell us to f**k off and it is real please send it into this paranormal life podcast at gmail.com right if you enjoyed hearing like one of these more pulpy stories yeah let us know if you want to hear some more hardcore facts some creepy spaghetti if you want to hear that then absolutely get in touch the show notes to this episode as always

will be available on patreon.com forward slash this paranormal life from the two dollar tier just two dollars a month the the price of uh i don't know, what does $2 get you these days? Yeah, like a cheap coffee. A turn on Polybius? It'll give you probably four turns, right? Because a quarter? Wait. How many quarters are in $4? Holy shit.

It'll give you a goddamn afternoon on Polybius. It'll ruin your life. And trust me, you'll want more. You'll want more turns. Fighting Kyle. Big Daddy style. All the way to the precinct. Fighting Kyle, Big Daddy style. It's the worst start to a rap in the world.

And on the Patreon, from the $5 tier, you can get access to bonus episodes. If you can't get enough of these sweet, sweet, scary spaghettis. Above that, we've got merchandise, whatever you would like on social. You can hit us up, twitter.com forward slash thisparalife, facebook.com forward slash thisparanormallife. And of course, last but not least, check out our secret society. You are listening to This Paranormal Life. We will see you next week. Bye-bye.