In the videogame world, some titles have acquired a fame in a short time “dark and mysterious“: This is the case of Polybius, a cabinet Arcade distributed in very few games of the USA in 1981 and developed by an alleged German house called Sinneslöschen. This video game would have been created by the CIA with the aim of carrying out experiments on the mental control of the players.
However, it would be better to say “alleged“Wired, since there is no certain evidence of its existence. All we know in fact comes from self -styled witnesses and therefore it is quite probable that it is a simple metropolitan legend … even if perhaps, at least as inspiration, there is a background of truth. But let’s go a little more in detail.
The birth of the myth of Polybius
The myth of Polybius comes to life in 1998, when the specialized site of Coinop.org cabinets publishes the technical data sheet of a game called Polybius. It is a title on which you do not have much information, and all that is told is the result of the story of anonymous witnesses. First of all, it is said that only a couple of cabinets were made and that these were installed only in Portland, Oregon. The goal of the game was similar to that of Asteroidsthat is, guide a small spaceship on the screen and shoot the targets without being affected. It was an all in all simple game but what made it extremely particular was its graphics full of flashing and colorful images which, always according to the stories, would have caused cases of epilepsy among young people.
But it’s not over! Also according to the alleged testimonies, video games in some cases would have reported a loss of memory, nausea, suicidal tendencies, and often felt angry, overestimated or even frightened by the game. Specifically, the site reports that:
The strange voices circulating on this game are that it would have been developed by a sort of strange military technological group, which would have used a sort of algorithms owner of the modification of the behavior developed for the CIA or something like that, that the children who played us woke up at night screaming and making horrible nightmares.
In fact, these cabinets would have been periodically visited by “men in black” whose task was to withdraw the game data and then analyze it.
The discovery of the Roma
Things began to evolve in the early 2000s, when testimonies of people who claimed to have managed to get their hands on the Roma of the game began to circulate online. The Roma, so to speak, are read -only memories within which all the data relating to a specific video game were saved. This Roma, therefore, would have allowed Polybius to try firsthand.
It was soon noticed that, among the game settings, there was an unusual voice called “Higher Functions“(i.e. higher functions) that could only be explored after entering a code consisting of 8 numbers. Once the sequence was found – which according to some versions of the story would have been written with a marker on the Roma itself – it was possible to access a series of settings to say the least disturbing. It would have been possible to activate or deactivate some options to stimulate insomnia among the players, as well as the nightmares, the conditioning from television. or the level of civil obedience.
So, according to all these stories, the CIA would have periodically changed these settings and its “black men” would have been commissioned to collect the game results. In practice this conditioning how would it have been possible?
Simple: through the use of subliminal messages and disturbing images within the game itself. For a few moments, in fact, it would have been possible to see words like “on the background”surrender“or”obey“, as can be seen in the following image. This, among other things, is taken from a version of Polybius Downloadable online and made starting from the testimonies of those who claim to have played us.
The truth behind Polybius
In all likelihood, Polybius never existed and it was a hoax. In fact, there is no evidence of the existence neither of the notorious cabinets nor of the Roma, given that according to legend these would all be destroyed by the secret services to cover up the tests. Among other things, it is good to remember that in those years there was still a lot of talk about the secret MK Ultra project, through which the CIA secretly experienced methods for mental control with human experimentation. This, of course, has done nothing but feed theories of all kinds.
However, the interesting aspect of this story is that despite the tests on the existence of Polybius, there is likely that there is a fund of truth. On November 29, 1981, a Portland newspaper reported the news of two kids who began to feel bad after playing respectively to Asteroids and Tempest. In those cases the probable causes of malaise were linked to stress in wanting to overcome the record, at the consecutive game hours and the amount of sugary drinks consumed. In the following months, however, in all the USA, various cases of children affected by epileptic crisis were reported due to the rapid intermittent lights of the cabinets. Here the video game began to associate with something “bad”, at least from a part of the public opinion.
To this piece of truth, another is added, that is, that in that period the FBI actually gave way to several verification operations in many games in the country. In fact, the agents discovered that some managers illegally changed their cabinets to transform them into slot machines and for this reason they went to control the machines in person, so as to make sure that everything was regular. They even came to make fake cabinets with cameras inside, so as to frame any criminals in the act of inserting the money in the rigged machine.
In all likelihood, therefore, the union between the fear of video games, the cases of news of children with health problems and the sighting of agents in the game rooms has started the legend of Polybius.
