Did Polybius exist? What’s the real story here?

Do you know what the earliest references are?

>But the legend is probably piece together from a few real stories.
Are there lesser known stories?

youtube.com/watch?v=_7X6Yeydgyg

>Game that has no single unit to prove it exists. Purported are clear constructions by people who heard the story.
>Game was made by a company that doesn't exit.
>That you can't see anymore because the government took all the machines away.
>With no footage of anything purported to be era specific.
>Also no arcade has a record of ordering one.
>Also only distributed in around 3 arcades.
>No shipping company has record of delivering one.
>They also cause you to go crazy.

It's bullshit. It's all bullshit.

That could be one piece of it. Also reports of Tempest players in Portland getting sick back in 1981. According to wiki the FBI raided arcades in that area 10 day later to look for gambling, and had been investigating by looking at high scores and stuff leading up to that. Seems like a reasonable basis for the legend.
As far as people can tell, this is the first reference
coinop.org/Game/103223/Polybius

If you can cite something older than that, it would be huge.

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user?

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I saw it. But, I’m still not sure.

news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19811129&id=arRQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=V-IDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6688,7639998

skeptoid.com/episodes/4362

>triple parenthesis
>ignoring an hour and eight minutes of proof that the game was always fake

This is "I want to believe" at this point. How the fuck does that documentary not convince you?

Congratulations on being mentally challenged.

Well once a kid had a seizure in the local arcade and this Nigerian guy thought he was dancing so he was also on the floor with him.

I have to see what other investigators have scrapped up. Ahoy himself admitted that there were tons of arcade machines that got scrapped that he might’ve missed.

I don't know what to tell you then. The exhaustive point of Ahoy's video is that there's no verifiable mention of a game called Polybius existed before the Coinop posted a page on it. The man who posted that is unwilling to engage in an interview to discuss his sources, including the source of the only screenshot of the game, and is clearly using it as a piece of promotion by evading questions with a sales pitch about getting more information soon to share that never happened.

The only people claiming there's proof for Polybius before that are proclaiming their, or repeating someone else's personal affidavits. Which are meaningless to actually prove things because they're all taken in the form of relay AMAs. You are on Yea Forums. You should be aware people can shoop stuff.

Stories about arcade machine scores being monitored (The Last Starfighter) and machines driving you insane (novel called ARCADE) were both around in the mid 80s.
retrobitch.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/arcade-polybius-legends-first-appearance-in-fiction/

Because you don't care about the truth, you just want a fun story about how magic is real.

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That’s why I came here. If anyone can find a reference before that coin op article—if it exists—then it’s the autists on here.

No, it didn't exist, /x/kids. Jesus fuck.

There was no game named "Polybius." But that doesn't mean something similar didn't exist.

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Maybe, but I haven’t scanned the Usenet archives. And I can’t now that Google took them down.

Someone redpill a clueless user out. This game didn't exist? This sorta thing fascinates me.

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A lot of old timers swear up and down that it was discussed on usenet and offline arcade circles as far back as the early and/or mid 90s.

Poly-Play + dudes dying while playing Berzerk + FBI raiding arcades over drug-dealing + Reagan mentioning the federal government "testing the effects of video games" on children + a few additional details = Polybius

Paulie Beast is real. It's like a Vive or VR headset but on a Tube, oval screen. Mostly used in arcades and CRTs. Imagine that but reversed. Notice how VR is terms of how each eye projection resembles an old school oval or concave edges. Now imagine projecting a split optical illusion with subliminal and pulsing frequencies?
T. Played Plastic-Life

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Do you have any links?

I've seen those guys too. It's impossible to get a straight answer out of them. I mean "What was your Username?" and "Where did you discuss it?". Using those search terms it'd've been cake to find if it was actually mentioned. And People exploded on this a decade ago when this started hitting big. No one's come up with anything.

What am I supposed to be seeing here?

This is nonsense. It's poorly researched, poorly edited, and missing important details.

Let me explain the process that it takes to put a game in an arcade.
-Has to be programmed. Involving a team of programmers, obviously.
-Has to be coded onto a ROM board. This requires hardware manufacturing, or the sale of form factor encoders.
-The ROM board must be compatible with a cabinet or have a custom one constructed, again more hardware manufacturing.
-The manufacturer or their distributor then have to solicit video arcade to sell their game either directly or through mass market.
-An arcade must buy one of them.
-The board (or whole cabinet) must then be shipped to the arcade.
-Delivery of the game must be endorsed and COD for delivery charge, if any, must be paid.

That's without the difficulty of finding the alleged development company that similarly doesn't exist, and only is accredited this one game, which only appeared in one or two cities depending on the version of the story.

The US government connection solves that. Since they could've bypassed plenty of these layers of record keeping, and by my estimation is in fact the only organization who could possibly have gotten away enacting exactly what is described through false fronts and directives of secrecy.

But let me tell you how insane the search for Polybius is: the public legitimately have access to official documents detailing the US government secret programs attempting to harness psychic powers and use mind control. And this isn't one of them. Specific requests after the Freedom of Information Act return that the government spooks have never heard of this.

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>Ahoy himself admitted that there were tons of arcade machines that got scrapped that he might’ve missed.

Believe it or not, some arcade machines are lost to time. Mostly prototypes and the like.

To extend on this, lot's of kid at the time gen X, The "lost" generation, had fucked up home lifes where the mom and dad worked, the start of consistent divorce, separation of family. Moms would take their kids to malls to cope with other moms and kids to fill their shallow void with shopping. They would leave their kids unattended, usually around arcades or mall rides, etc. These people left their doors unlocked, and kept their keys in their car. Now imagine a stray kid, on a monday evening, in a empty, unsupervised arcade, with blinders on the side, face down on a screen. CONSUMED by this screen of illusion?

>There was still vibrant on the yaefh feshe man telodwww es eryh bot with a newer base at the bottom

For a moment this sentence made me worry I was having a seizure

Yeah, and it’s not hard to imagine Polybius was one such prototype.

Care to elaborate or are there too many dicks in your mouth?

I don't know if any of that shit's survived.

It was well known 20 years ago. People were saying it originated in the mid-90s back then as well. I don't know if it DID, but I remember people saying that it did even back then because I was there.

Not that guy, but does that video mention Poly-Play? Or discuss the history behind it? Because the similarities are so heavy that anyone who fails to notice that Polybius is obviously inspired by Poly-Play is outright retarded.

I will give you infinite blowjobs if you can find me even one link on this.

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>There was still vibrant on the yaefh feshe man telodwww es eryh bot with a newer base at the bottom
The fuck?

I think he very briefly touched on it. The two look very similar imo.

Just an article about a kid getting sick playing Asteroids in Portland, Oregon 1981. Same year and location as the myth. Just a source for the post it's replying to.

But while this caveat supposedly lends credence to there being a seed of truth in this whole affair. It only really kills all the mystique. Since taking this as truth: the only real way 'well all of the machines were recalled and destroyed/lost in the 80s.' can be true is if every scrap of alleged proof, including the title screen image is a reconstruction passing off as evidence.

Which means all the information on it is as reliable as any admitted fake. Being that it's at best an alleged construction of one or many people's recollection.

>Retards dox themselves as being woke with some copypasta meme ffrom the golden era
>Govment is like "oh shit, goyim know, act fast"
>Have some bootlicker cyber goon type up totally convincing official report with some symbols, word express, and the 2.6 GPA in arts class in his high/trade school years.
>Type up some documents released by glow in the dark niggers to validate its legitimacy

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nigga, offline discussion doesn't have "links"

very little was "online" back in the 90s

and even if it was on usenet it wouldn't make any difference because usenet doesn't exist anymore

I'm convinced it's similar to fingerboxes

>and even if it was on usenet it wouldn't make any difference because usenet doesn't exist anymore

Wrong.
And I was alive and hanging out at arcades near Seattle in the 90's and never heard shit about this.

The "photos" were ORIGINALLY admitted to be mockups. They were never intended to be "real".

I swear to God I’ve played this before. Wasn’t this like galaga, but with cubes and geometric shapes? I could have sworn I played this back in the 90s at the arcade.

>There was still vibrant on the yaefh feshe man telodwww es eryh bot with a newer base at the bottom
kek

He save it for the last 5 minutes. I mean why fucking continue an effort to discredit a myth after dropping an obvious answer?

You probably played something else with a similar cabinet design.

>Using common sense deduction makes you a neckbeard

Then he's a hack who was more concerned with getting youtube views than he was with doing serious research. He has no credibility.

>poorly researched
How so?
>poorly edited
How so?
>missing important details
lmao like WHAT?

CoinOp claimed the image was from a trusted source before everyone called bullshit on it, and added "maybe it is"

Polybius never existed.

The rumor of the game came about because sometimes, inner-city arcades would get black, unmarked cabinets with unnamed games inside. It was how arcade companies prototyped and beta-tested their games. If you were a kid in the 1970s/80s, you went to the same arcade every day, and one day there was a black, unmarked box, OF COURSE there's going to be a mystique around it.

To add to this, a lot of inner-city arcades were hotbeds of drugs, pedophilia and human trafficking, so police raids did happen from time to time.

If you're a young kid who just wanted to play games and were used to the creepy older men who hovered around the area, then one day you saw a mysterious black cabinet, and then shortly after that, the police showed up, and the next time you went there, the cabinet was gone, it's no wonder urban legends started cropping up

>Exhausted almost every option to cover bases
>Gives most likely answer at the end when everything else is smoothed out

ADHD Fags: I DON'T HAVE MY ANSWER IN 10.4 SECONDS HE'S A HACK

>He should have just dismissed this out of hand when something else can be found that is somehow similar.
>This is somehow 'better research' than categorically documenting attempts to prove every claim made about the alleged game and only being able to prove them false.
Dude just go back to /x/.

>It would take explicit proof to convince me that I am wrong about my deep-seated beliefs, but all proof I've ever seen is fake because I know I'm not wrong and no real evidence exists because my worldview hinges on a bunch of paper-thin fantasies put on the internet by people almost as retarded as me.
I mean this honestly, if you believe that Polybius is or ever was a real thing, you are too stupid to live on your own.

>hotbeds of drugs, pedophilia and human trafficking

That vaguely reminds me of some skit or something, I don't remember to well, about some dude sticking his dick out at a fake arcade machine as a joystick.

>Hey kid, wana tou-play my Polybius?

That was a bit on Robot Chicken.

Fuck I think your right. Based robot chicken.

I found it 50 seconds ago but captcha kept me from posting it youtube.com/watch?v=5hXoyZi6mac

Come ON. Do you fucking retards think DED BORT is real too because there's a creepypasta about it? The goddamned "company" that "made" Polybius is a spooky-sounding german compound word that translates to "Sense Delete". Do you think if there were some ultra-secret government project to make a mind control video game, they'd call it "evil-mind-control-o-tron, a dastardly video game by free-will-destroyer interactive"? Why don't you idiots feel any shame for your immeasurable stupidity?

Dead Bart is real though. Matt Groening is my uncle and he told me about it.

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ALSO
Polybius was an ancient Roman historian and one of the first purveyors of Objectivism. He was strongly in favor of seeing things for himself and not accepting truth heard secondhand.

youtube.com/watch?v=B-CCeiMIQhc

That's a pretty interesting detail from whoever made it up. They put a decent amount of thought into the name in that case.

Children, generally, are really bad with details. No drugs required. I moved out of my childhood home at 11. when I was 19 I had a completely wrong image in my head about what it looked like. I thought it was brick; it was wood paneled. I though the roof was a center- single split 45 degree angle: it had a dome over the furnace chimney and four plane roof centered on it that was maybe 15 degrees. I though the car park was rimmed in apple trees. My grandfather laughed at how stupid that would be to clutter the driveway and drop things on the car.

And I still think I'm a smart person and everything.I just wouldn't have been able to pick the home I lived the majority of my life in at that time out of a lineup of random images.

Not to be a dick but care about primary sources is "Objectivity".

"Objectivism" is about twisting your world view to argue you're always right until/unless you're rich.

Yeah that's the one. You're right. It's been a long day for me, no worries

based Yea Forums poster, confusing all the retards here.

There's been recreations at least. Does anybody ever think about putting creepypasta style games on cartridges and selling them to used game stores? I wonder if that's already being done.

youtube.com/watch?v=jiJIhrLadVI

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As far as I know: no. Stuff like Ben Drowned was a hacked rom. Though I don't know off hand if it was on a cartridge. I wonder what the point of saturation would be. I couldn't expect everyone that looks at a game in a pawn shop to stat uploading videocapture to somewhere and obsess about it. And Fucking Gamestop probably wouldn't inventory a game that old, or that they couldn't verify was official.

I think you'd need to send it to a Let's Player or the AVGN or someone that's already flagged after gaslighting them to discuss "Mushroom Kingdom Madness II: The Toad Warrior" and sending them a hacked copy of Super Mario Kart.

Yeah, there's a chance it would never sell or somebody would buy it and never play. Figuring out how to distribute it would be interesting. Though it might be cool just to have that exist somewhere as a rare thing, even if only a few people play it.

Personally I think it existed but was never actually tested in a public place.

Very unlikely, since most store owners (Whether it's flea market or official game store) will usually play those games to make sure they work, and if it's clearly hacked then they won't accept it. You have to be lucky enough to live in a place where garage sales are common and have enough stuff to give away to make your own garage sale. Once you do sell your spoopy video game, it's nearly impossible that you'll ever know the reaction of your crappy scary ROM hack anyways, so the effort's pretty much not worth it.

w-what

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this is a good story because in spite of so many people thinking three letter agencies "planted" this game to collect data, it was actually only tony stark dies and everyone else is fine

Maybe it would be best to distribute it around a college campus or somewhere like that. Just leave them lying on the ground somewhere.

I doubt they play the whole games though. I was thinking of an original creepy game, but if it's a hack you could hide the content carefully or keep it until the later parts of the game.