Apr 2018 *
With so much talk of video games recently, I keep going back to one of my favorite conspiracy theories on the arcade game Polybius. For those that may not have heard about Polybius here's a quick description on what it was quoted from Wikipedia
Polybius is a fictitious arcade game that originated from an urban legend created in 2000. The original game's actual existence has never been authoritatively proven,[1] but it has served as inspiration for several free and commercial games by the same name.
The urban legend is that the game was part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment, with gameplay producing intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. Finally, all of these Polybius arcade machines allegedly disappeared from the arcade market.
Now, while it says it's fictitious there are many people who swear to have seen it and even played it back in the 1980's. There are even a few pics that have been posted to show what seems to be actual arcade cabinets of the game. Those could easily be faked, however.
Here is a video of what people have theorized the gameplay would look like.
And it even made an appearance on an episode of The Simpsons
So what do you think? Could it have been real? Or just a creepy urban legend?
Polybius is a fictitious arcade game that originated from an urban legend created in 2000. The original game's actual existence has never been authoritatively proven,[1] but it has served as inspiration for several free and commercial games by the same name.
The urban legend is that the game was part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment, with gameplay producing intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. Finally, all of these Polybius arcade machines allegedly disappeared from the arcade market.
Now, while it says it's fictitious there are many people who swear to have seen it and even played it back in the 1980's. There are even a few pics that have been posted to show what seems to be actual arcade cabinets of the game. Those could easily be faked, however.
Here is a video of what people have theorized the gameplay would look like.
And it even made an appearance on an episode of The Simpsons
So what do you think? Could it have been real? Or just a creepy urban legend?
Early 80s would be accurate as vector graphics were pretty popular at that time. Vectorbeam, Cinematronics were some companies making vector arcade games.
I don't know if you know about the Vectrex console from MB/GCE? That machine was as its name indicates all about vector games. Most of these not really my kind of games however I did like Berzerk, which was like a very early Gauntlet type game.