The Truth Behind Polybius

since the first video game ever pong was released in 1958 video games and the mediums to play those games have become common household items around the mid 80s in the burgeoning era of the United States new Americana culture its influences drawn from the post 80's industrial grunge pinball machines and awesome films like Bill and Ted the local arcade had become a cornerstone of this new and exciting computer game industry sweeping across America and the world teenagers would spend their weekends and their pocket money hanging out at the local arcade falling in line to play all the newest released video games during what is called the Golden Age of arcade with its roots in the late 70s and gaining major traction through the mid 80s a large volume of games began flooding into the arcades as the free market did its thing and businesses moved in on the lucrative new demand some of those games stayed in circulation for years and some of them disappeared from arcades altogether possibly sentenced to the great arcade game graveyard to be repurposed as a different newer and better game but what if among those troves of early one-hit wonders and blinkin you'll miss it failed experiments what if one of those games was actually an experiment far more insidious than expected I'm talking about a test vessel for some sort of mysterious black budget government experiment on the public now I know it sounds crazy but hear me out there is a story about a certain game where this exact thing allegedly happened that game was called Polybius the story tells of a completely unheard of relatively inconspicuous new game appearing in several arcades in the suburbs of Portland Oregon in 1981 this game is described to have been proving extremely popular to the point of addiction now this isn't unusual in itself for those of you old enough to remember the adolescent camaraderie and competitiveness of hitting the highest score boards on Galaga pac-man or other classics but what was weird about this was that Polybius had become so addictive that sizable crowds were commonly forming around the machines and sometimes fights even broke out over who would get to play the game next all of this over some random off-brand game no one had ever heard of it's a bit weird sure but still not so unusual the legend describes how these machines were also visited by men in black they apparently collected unknown data from the machines this data allegedly being some form of metric measuring player's response to the game's psychoactive effects along with a log of the names of the players getting the highest scores the questions surrounding why in the hell names of players would be collected specifically led to a lot of debate of the nature of what was going on the most popular hypothesis that emerged was that the government seemed to be carrying out some sort of experiment sending subliminal messages to the players through whatever content the game contained those that play the game supposedly suffered from a series of unpleasant side effects including amnesia insomnia night terrors and hallucinations now if that wasn't weird enough on its own approximately one month after its alleged released in 1981 Polybius is said to have disappeared without a trace seemingly overnight there's almost no photo evidence in the existence of the game but there is one photo which people believed to be the real thing in the photo we can see a title screen with the logo and what appears to be the name of the company who created the game as well as a date 1981 the company in question is called cinesín this word is made up of two German words cine which means sense or senses and lotion meaning to extinguish or to delete a company named literally delete senses as unusual enough on its own what's weirder though is that it isn't even a word or saying used in the German language instead reading more like a word that someone was translating from another language into German casting more mystery over this already unusual case is that the company Sina's lotion has no association with any other titles and doesn't even have any record of existing shady men and black memory-loss hallucinations mysterious companies and things disappearing without a trace this is a story worthy of any late-night public access Twilight Zone spin-off and of course has left many wondering just what in the hell was going on as if you hadn't figured already everything I've explained so far has alleged to be a hundred percent true so let's take a look at what we do now the earliest polybius was ever - was February 6th in the year 2000 as an entry on a website called coin op org sometime prior to September 2003 the owner of coin op org submitted a tip-off to the videogame magazine game pro about Polybius Polybius then received some mass market attention in the September 2003 issue of GamePro as part of a feature story on videogames called secrets and lives the article declared the existence of the game to be inconclusive and this article is what sparked the initial interest in people who began talking about this quote ever elusive game soon people came out claiming to have play the game others remember it suffering from some of the side effects and stories came out of people being present when the men and black came to collect the data with accounts of people seeing them access extra menus not available to the public eventually people claimed to own original cabinets or boards of the game and at one point videos appeared on the internet showing what appears to be someone disclosing the location of a retired police cabinet of course most of all been hoaxes practical jokes or publicity stunts of custom arcade cabinet creators creating imitations and looking to show off their work among the sea of questionable material and endless dead ends there is one video however that is considered genuine the video reveals very little it's just the title screen and there's no footage of the actual game being played as genuine as this one article seems among the rest it still undoubtedly leads to more questions why no game footage where is the Machine located and who uploaded the video it seems that polybius tends to create more questions than it songs but not all hope is lost if we probe a little bit further some interesting facts can be unearthed that leans towards a plausible answer to this mysterious game it turns out that a man named Kirk Kohler is behind the website coin-op org which is where the first story of Polybius was mentioned which would also make him the man who sent in the story to GamePro magazine this was a critical factor behind the Polybius story gaining its modern-day attention and popularity with having a story like Polybius in a magazine and owning coin-op org Kirk Kohler was able to generate a lot of traffic to his website through the Polybius story it also turns out that mr. Kohler is familiar with the German language though he isn't exactly fluent he's a web developer arcade game collector and he was also responsible for a completely different story surrounding a Taco Bell location not accepting a $2.00 bill all of that means that he has the necessary skills resources and knowledge of games to have created this whole thing as a hoax after being questioned about his involvement with polybius he was ambiguous about his involvement and never made any solid statements to confirm that he was in fact the creator behind the story however all of the evidence points against him and a YouTube channel named ahoy has made an hour-long documentary about all of this describing and documenting all of the evidence against Kirk Koehler as the sole creator of this elaborate video game myth thank you so much for watching if you enjoy the video let me know by leaving me 'like and if you have something to say say it down in the comment section i'd love to hear from you if this is your first time here think about clicking subscribe them and while you're at it feel free to click that bell so you'll know whenever I put out a new video new videos every day from video game playthroughs custom cosmetic console mods history of videos and more thank you all so much for watching and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 36,076

Rating: 4.6588631 out of 5

Keywords: The Truth Behind Polybius, Drumblanket, polybius, hoax, mystery, non-existent, creepypasta, CIA, Sinneslöschen, Arcades, Portland, video game, Steven Roach, Cat DeSpira, Urban Legend, Video Game Urban Legend, Video Game History, Kurt Koller, arcade game, The Truth, Truth, Myth, Oregon

Id: Lk8lrKMeGBM

Length: 9min 32sec (572 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 15 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/dr_lazerhands]

do you always post your own videos to subreddits for karma?