46: The Video Game That Kills: Polybius | Red Thread
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You're a young man in the 1970s. Or the 80s, I mean. Life is free and the air is wild, hot, filled with excitement and fervor. You make your way to an arcade. Maybe you'll meet a friend. Maybe a cute girl. Who knows? You get to the end of the arcade and in the shadow of the corner you see a game called

Illuminously lit, but with no occupants in line. You step up to it. The top of the machine says, Polybius, what is this game? What could it be? You lean in to play it. It's just then that Jeffrey Epstein steps out of the restroom and shoots you in the head. You're dead. This has nothing to do with Polybius. This is the red thread. Oh, hell yeah.

That's 45 other... You're taking inspiration from 45 other intros, I see. Yeah, that was pretty good. That was like the chat GPT red thread intro. It almost felt like D&D for like three seconds. I was going to say, it felt like a choose your own adventure for some reason. I was ready to jump in and make my own choices there. I was having fun.

Yeah, I was invested. That wasn't written. That was all from Isaiah's head. All from his imagination. How crazy is that? Genius! You just imaginated that. I'm just free gaming it off the bat, ready to go. That's high concept. That's high concept, Isaiah. I'd go as far as to say it was high art, Caleb. That was beautiful. That's going up in a museum. We'll just print that out on a piece of paper. I almost busted. I almost busted in my pants.

All right, welcome to Red Thread. This is Red Thread. Hello, hello, hello. We're talking about Polybius this week. You guys out there have probably heard of it. I've heard of it. It's a bit of a niche internet folklore. Yeah, it's a pretty cool one. You guys know about it? I've never heard of this in my life.

You're a gamer. That's embarrassing. You're a gamer and you don't know about the secret game? You make games. You're not just a gamer. You make games now. You can't make games and not know about it. You need to know about Polybius if you're going to make games. Okay, Black Pine's my game now. I made it actually. No! That's how it works. Years ago. So I actually... I mentioned Polybius and the Conspiracy Iceberg and then I was going to make a dedicated video on it. So I went down the whole research rabbit hole and I feel like...

There wasn't enough for one of my videos, like an hour length or whatever, so I dropped it and figured I may cover it in the future with something else. But I think it's a very interesting... It's a fun game. It's a fun story, at the very least. I don't know how long this episode will go, because like you said, there's not a lot of meat to the bone, basically. It's a bit light on the details, but hey...

I love it still, so we're going to talk about it. I'm one of the three hosts here. I get to make decisions like this. I want to talk about Polybius today. And that's what we're going to do.

So what is Polybius? No, we're not talking about the Greek historian who wrote the famous The Histories about the rise of Rome. We're talking about a very creepy arcade game from the 1980s. Rumored to send its players into madness, Polybius has become something of an internet legend. Was it real? Was it all a hoax? Or was it a cover-up for some strange experiments conducted by the CIA?

Yes, obviously. Of course. That is what happens. It's CIA. As soon as the CIA is injected into a theory or a rumor or a story like this, I believe it. 100% makes it real. It has to. I agree. I have a quote here before we really go on from Todd Luoto from Showcase the Polybius Conspiracy. And this is the quote. There are a number of people ranging from gaming historians and journalists to famous authors who first heard about a synthetization

sinister unnamed arcade game as teenagers beginning all the way back in 1981 and extending to the early 1990s well before initial online reports in all of these tales the game didn't have a name yet it shared many similarities with what would eventually become the polybius legend so i guess the the context there is or the belief there is that

Polybius has been haunting arcades for decades and no one has realized. It's a spirit of itself that's taken on the form of many different game cabinets, but it's all been haunted by the Polybius spirit, basically. Or the CIA may have been conducting these experiments through a bunch of different arcade cabinets. Maybe. That's what I'm here for. That's what I think happened. I agree with that as well. Good luck convincing me otherwise. I'm strapped in. I'm dug in on that now. Thank you. You said the CIA word.

that's over today as soon as that it's like winter soldier moment as soon as you hear the cia you just stop that's my activation you've activated my trap card polybius

You've activated my Greek historian card from Megalopolis, Arcadia. You've activated my rent a U-Haul truck and drive it directly at... Okay, never mind. Wait a second. Don't you mean a Penske truck, Isaiah? No, ma'am. No pickles, please, on the burger. Thanks.

All right, Isaiah, what is Polybus? Well, I am glad you asked. It's almost like I have four pages worth of description to answer that question ready to go all up here. So we don't actually have any concrete evidence or footage on what the game was or could have been like.

And for context, we are going to talk like the game is real until we get more into the theory. You know, I'm not reading that sentence. I'm not reading that because it is real. It is real. It is real. I don't know who put that disinformation in here. It's so real. There's a picture of it at the top. I see it. That's it. That's the CIA trying to already sow discord and doubt.

Polybius is generally universally described the exact same way in all the stories. The name Polybius can be broken down for an interesting meaning. Poly in Greek means many and bios or bios means life. The game was created by a company called Zenis Lotion. Zenis Lotion, yeah. The German name can also be broken down. Zen meaning senses and lotion to delete or erase.

The first stories about the game began in 2000 on a website called coinop.com. At the time, they were cataloging thousands of arcade games, and many visitors to the site often sent in their own knowledge on strange, relatively unknown and obscure games.

Almost unceremoniously, a post went up on coinop.com calling for assistance with a game called Polybius. We can still find this post in web archives here. Everything technical about the game is listed as unknown, manufacturer, controls, display, and screen orientation. The only information they have is the year it was released and the genre, abstract puzzle.

They note that they found English strings, insert coin, press one player start, and only, leading them to believe it is a one or two player game. They also note the name of the developer, the previously mentioned Zenoslotion. But in the post, there's some interesting information under the about section. Quote, the game had a very limited release, one or two backwater arcades in a suburb of Portland.

The history of this game is cloudy. There were all kinds of strange stories about how kids who played it got amnesia afterwards, couldn't remember their name or where they lived, etc. The bizarre rumors about this game are that it was supposedly developed by some kind of weird military tech offshoot group, used some kind of proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA or something. Kids who played it woke up a night screaming, having horrible nightmares.

According to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in black coats would come to collect records from the machines. They're not interested in quarters or anything. They just collected information about how the game was played. The game was weird looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements. The kids who played it stopped playing games entirely. One of them became a big anti-video game crusader or something.

We've contacted one person who met him, and he claims the machines disappeared after a month or so, and no one ever heard about them again.

Maybe this wasn't like a mind manipulation experiment by the CIA. Maybe they were literally just funding the CIA using the machines. Like they would come and get those quarters and then reinvest it into the CIA. Yeah, this was like right after the Bay of Pigs invasion. So they were at like an all-time low. So we got to make money somehow. So they make a really cool arcade game. I love the idea of just like CIA agents like wearing shades, like dark shades, mysterious vampels up. They're in suits and stuff and they come in and just take like

three dollars and quarters out of a machine and leave that's it that's their entire operation that's so stupid what's also stupid to me though is like why in terms of believability let's say why would they make a machine as an experiment and only release it into like one or two backwater arcades why wouldn't they just like go broadly and just dump it into as many

places as possible. Within the conspiracy, stuff like this is always because they don't want to draw too many eyes.

They need like data sets. Yeah, but that bunch of contradictions with them showing up, they directly show up and start interfacing with the machines while wearing CIA outfits and stuff. Stop poking holes in it. Yeah, stop, dude. What are you doing? Why are you being lame? We're trying to film Red Thread right now. This guy's lame. This guy sucks. This guy is lame. Hello, police? Yeah, we've got a lame-o here.

Lame-o! It's not illegal to be lame. Yeah, but it's highly frowned upon. They said they're on their way to execute you and make it look like a self-defense situation. They're gonna kill you. What, you mean a self-end situation?

Self what? Oh, that. You said self-defense. No, they want people to know that he was killed by someone else on principle. Oh, to make me look even lamer. Right, exactly. I get it. Yeah, that's okay. That's awesome. I like that. Cool.

That's amazing. Yeah, so you've got you have 15 minutes to act right because they are on the way. I guarantee it. 15 minutes to be cool. I've spent my entire life trying to do that. I don't know if I'm going to make it back in 15 minutes. Yeah, you have 15 minutes to undo. You have 15 minutes to find the cure to being Australian. Oh, no. The CIA, weird military offshoots, men in black coats. Now that's prime red thread content, baby. Yeah.

The game was most likely based on existing games at the time, such as Berserk and Tempest or Cube Quest. Cube Quest is from the Byzantine era. Yeah. Cube Quest. They've got the years next to all of them, and I assume Cube Quest is 1994, but it's written as 1094. Yeah, that makes sense, dude. It's the first video game. It's fucking ancient. It's a Golic.

Charlemagne led his troops to find the circuit boards that created the first Cube Quest. Well, maybe that's the story that the video game Cube Quest that was released in 1994 was based on. That's true. So true, King. Cube Quest. Berserk was released by Stern Electronics in Chicago. It was a relatively simple game that has a humanoid figure that tries to escape a room while robotic enemies keep inching closer and begin to shoot the player.

But on April 3rd, Reserk went from just a game to actually claiming the life of an 18-year-old boy. I actually know this story. I covered it in the Disturbing Video Games Iceberg. This was a huge controversy at the time. Was it above or under... I think it was a South Korean guy that died playing...

I think it might have been World of Warcraft at like an internet cafe. No. So my, uh, the iceberg was about video games that are disturbing, not disturbing things that have happened with them. And this one was pretty low because the controversy at the time is that the game itself was killing players. Right. Not just like sitting, not just like this one guy was so like the World of Warcraft guy. It wasn't anything with World of Warcraft. This guy just couldn't quit playing and died at a desk. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

That's crazy. Imagine dying at your desk from gaming. Yeah. Chad?

That's pretty cool. Yeah, dude. Dying with a smile on your fucking face. Yeah, how would you prefer to... He died. I'm about to die in about 11 minutes from being lame, so... I was about to say, you better... You gotta turn this around quick. Yeah. Yeah, dude, you better hurry up. They're gonna make it look like I was addicted to WoW. That's how I die. To make you look even cooler. Yeah.

If I die playing a game, it better be Black Pine, right? Ayo! Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Wishless now. Wishless now. Died doing what he loved. Oh, I would like to say that that's why I chose Polybius as this week's episode as a subtle advertisement for Black Pine, but no. Nine minutes. That was just fortuitous. Nine minutes. You have nine minutes. Fortuitous.

A fortuitous decision. You know, just because you said fortuitous, it's six minutes now. They're closer. You knew when Charlemagne invaded Russia or whatever. Fortuitous. Fortuitous is a word. Fuck you. Oh, yeah, I like it. It's a good choice of word. It's not exactly cool. I've made Jackson so hostile, he's lashing out at everyone. Fortuitous. I'm like a bear in a cage right now.

Alright, would you prefer serendipitous? Do that one instead. I just imagine Jackson curled up at his desk like scratching the door. I'm going to start growling. That's pretty cool.

In Calumet City, Illinois, Peter Bukowski walked into Friar Tuck's game room to relax and have some fun playing arcade games. According to the media at the time, he played Berserk for around 15 minutes and then went to seek another game to play. Popping some loose change into another game, Peter suddenly dropped to the floor and as others rushed up to see what was wrong and how they could help, Peter died of a heart attack.

Newspapers reported that the game Berserk had brought on myocardial inflammation, which ultimately led to a heart attack. The corners did not exactly blame the game or say it was, quote, deadly. They instead revealed that there was weeks-old scar tissue on Peter's heart, ultimately making it more weak. Others who were also in the shop at the time said that Peter had been running up a set of stairs before playing his game, which could have added to the stress his heart was under.

They always blame video games for this stuff and not stairs. Yeah, there was also... I don't think it's in here, but two weeks after this in another city...

There was a kid, two kids got into a fight in an arcade and then they went out to the parking lot and one of the kids stabbed the other kid. And there was never evidence, I don't think, that they were playing Berserk. But the story became that they were fighting over who gets to play Berserk.

And that's what led to it. So these two. So that got roped into this. So for a while it was like, is berserk causing a lot of berserk related deaths? Well, to be fair, we don't know what caused the scar tissue on his heart. It could have been berserk. That's true. That's fair. There's nothing to say it's not berserk. I've never played it. You know what? I've never played it. You know what? Just for that, Jackson, I called it off. Half a tortoise for me.

And they're back on. They're going to get very confused. There was like a 94% chance lightning was just about to strike you. Would that be the funniest thing ever? If he's like, how fortuitous and the audience sees a flash of light and then the camera just explodes.

How would you guys feel if I died under mysterious circumstances today? Would you feel at all to blame? Oh, I'm making 18 of these things about it. What are you talking about? I'm going to make a big video about it.

Big video on you. And then me and Caleb are starting a podcast about it. I don't know what you're talking about. It's going to be called the Red Thread. It's going to be called Fortuit, but it's like cut off at whatever number of letters you got out. Fortuit. Fortuit. Genius!

You know what? I'm going to leave it up to them. They can do with you what they want. Oh, sweet. Thanks. You're a good friend. I try. And then we move on to Tempest. In this fast-paced game, players had to survive as long as possible, clearing through the enemies on the screen. The visuals and gameplay are often described as intense, with bright colors popping in front of a black background, drawing and locking the players into the game.

As a result, many players experienced dizziness or motion sickness after they played the game, some believing, therefore, it was dangerous. If I remember right, Tippus gave people seizures. I feel like that was the... Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the reports were about motion sickness and dizziness, but I'm sure with those flashing lights and shit like that, then yeah, seizures were probably something that happened. But would you call VR dangerous then these days? Because it gives motion sickness to people.

No. I mean, if you strap someone into VR and then just start flashing lights as fast as possible, yes. But otherwise, no. I feel like if you took VR as it is and put it back in the 80s and had people wearing it, people would call it dangerous like this, basically. We'd have stories about how the Oculus Quest is killing people, giving people heart scar tissue. Isaiah, did you ever, because I know you guys grew up

in a conservative area or whatever did you guys ever go through video game panic or video game shame were you ever like shamed into not playing video games uh i remember i remember being like never out of playing them entirely but i remember like seventh grade there were other students you're like guys my age you're like oh you play video games that's lame you know but uh i never cared

Right, you too. And they would play it sometimes. I guess I just played them, I guess, too much, which I did, like, admittedly play them too much. Yeah, but you play, like, Call of Duty and, like, mainline stuff, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, if I was playing, like, Pokemon, I would have got beat. Like, would have been it for me. I just didn't have any friends to know whether or not, like, my friends, I had one buddy who played GameCube.

And he, so he was even more of a dork than I was. But other than that, now I just pretty much just played video games. I didn't really, I thought, uh, yeah, like close age friends and stuff I wouldn't think would have caused any trouble. Uh, but like religious institutions or whatever, like, cause you both were raised religious, right? I know Isaiah was. Caleb? I was not, no. Oh, okay. Well, I thought there might've been like pressure from that side of like kind of calling it evil or stuff like that. Cause I've always seen stuff like that from the eighties and nineties. Uh, well,

Well, no, I definitely like I wasn't allowed to play like M rated games for a while, but I feel like that's pretty normal. Yeah, that's normal. There's a little bit of like I heard from adults like video games rot your brain, but yeah, stuff like that. My parents never really cared.

As long as I wasn't playing anything explicit, they didn't care. So yeah. Okay. Our experiences are kind of similar apart from the fact that I was playing GTA Center. I think my grandmother bought me GTA Center. That's badass. I know. I do remember my parents being like, if you go to a neighbor's house, like M-rated games are off limits. Like if they're playing GTA, don't you dare stuff like that, right? Turn around and stare at the wall. This is actually a funny story.

So, wait, what were you about to say? No, no, you go ahead. I'm going to have a very similar story to what you're about to talk about. When I was in, I want to say the fourth grade, fourth or fifth grade, I was at... Do you all know what Upward is? Is that a thing in other parts of the country? For the world? No, so Upward was...

It exists here in the South. I don't know how far expanded it is. It is basically like a weekend basketball thing. So I was homeschooled, right? So there wasn't... I was homeschooled for fourth and fifth grade.

or fifth and sixth grade. I mean, so I didn't play basketball at school. So upward was like through a church program and it's like practice one night a week. And then you play little basketball games against other upward leagues on Saturdays, right? Think of it like a junior pro kind of thing. So,

uh at one i remember there were these older kids who they were like sons of someone at the church or whatever by older i mean like 15 16 and i remember they would bring an xbox and there was like this little kitchenette room with the tv next to the gym um so one day they they uh brought in left for dead 2

And I was like in the fifth grade and I was like standing behind them like this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. That is a good game. And they were like, do you want to play? And I was like, sure. And I played like the first level. And I remember I was so scared because I'm like, I shouldn't be doing this. I shouldn't be doing this. That I started crying. I thought you were going to piss your pants. And they were like, are you okay? And I'm like, I have to. And that was it.

And like the next day I told my mom, I was like, I played an M-rated game. Yeah, that's how much of a goody two-shoes I was. Yeah, that is very cute. And very lame. So I'm glad you've taken the pressure off me for a bit. Mine's similar but different. My mom, like I wasn't allowed to play GTA or whatever, but my parents didn't really...

check, I guess. I never had GTA. First console I had was an Xbox original with Halo Combat Evolved. That was my only game for years. Yeah, same. Same. Moved to Texas and then my mom, we went to GameStop on the day after Christmas and

or like right or it might've been the day before Christmas. And I was like, can I please get a new game? And she's like, of course. And, uh, I had just gotten, I just saved up from selling animals at the show at the, at four H I bought an Xbox three 60. So it was right after that came out, maybe 2009 or something. So maybe a couple of years. So it was like not super new. I bought, um, I think there was a Turok game that was on Xbox three 60 that I bought, uh,

I bought just like shit games, terrible games. And I asked my mom, yeah, exactly. Cause they were cheap. And then I was like, there's this game called saints row. Can I get it? It looks kind of fun. Yes. And, and she was like, yeah, sure. Yes. Saints row. The first one. And, and,

Bro, it's way worse than GTA in terms of how fucked up it is. And my mom had no idea. And then I got Mass Effect as well. And the guy, the fucking guy behind the counter was like, you know, this has nudity in it.

And my mom like looked at me and she was like, what? I didn't know that. I don't think it has nudity in it, but, uh, he's a liar, mom. He's a liar. Yeah. And then she went through all my games and I got in trouble. She made me play. Uh, she made me show him, uh, show the games to her. And I was like, yeah, saints rose. Oh,

oh awesome it's not fucked up at all did she sit there and watch you for 15 hours in Mass Effect until you finally get to bang Liara or what no no I actually ended up getting it because I think I proved to her that it wasn't that that guy was like full of shit or I just like I mean there's like from what I remember in Mass Effect 1 it's like slight under boob maybe and butt yeah a little bit of butt in the sex scene that's it

Yeah, it's nothing bad. But it was funny, though. They let me get Saints Row, but not Mass Effect. Yeah, Saints Row is pretty bad. Like, definitely not for kids. Oh, yeah. I remember as a kid trying to convince my dad I should be allowed to play M-rated games if they're war games because that's patriotic. He didn't go for it, but I remember making that case.

Yeah, don't you want to raise a little patriot? Don't you want me to love the troops? Don't you want me to love soldiers? Yeah, you should let me play this in. I'll get back to the episode. I apologize for taking us on that journey. I liked it. Thank you.

So Polybius described by the people who have played it, uh, described by the people who've played it as a fast, intense psychedelic game with certain puzzle elements. As the game increased in speed, players became hypnotized, similar to Tempest above it's repetitive flashing lights and gameplay kept players locked in round after round.

Photos of the machine itself reveal a pretty boring, uninspired design. The black design features nothing but the blocky text at the top, the font similar to other games like Robotron 2084. Compared to other cabinets, it seems extraordinarily muted and low budget. The cabinet features a screen, red joystick, and a single white button in most pictures that have been found.

And there's a picture of Polybius. I think that's, I don't know if any of the pictures are verified in the sense that like this proof of them being legitimate cabinets instead of just things that people, fans of the story have made. So what did it do? We can break the effects of Polybius into three categories, physical, psychological, and behavioral.

Physical, the intense flashing lights and graphics in the game would apparently cause some players to experience nausea, dizziness, severe migraines, and even seizures. Psychological, many players experienced amnesia, forgetting what they were doing while playing the game, but also forgetting what happened after. Convenient for an internet urban legend.

Another clause thrown in by the CIA. Strange hallucinations would also plague them, suffering from disturbing visions. They couldn't get any reprieve in the nighttime either. Terrifying night terrors keeping many players up at night. Behavioral, but through all of this, the game was so incredibly addictive that players could not stop. They were obsessed. Through all of the side effects, they wouldn't or couldn't stop playing.

Those around them would notice a change in their behavior and mood. They would become more irritable and paranoid, and it wasn't a slow shift that might be explained by general video game addiction, but, rather, a sudden and abrupt mood change. Even more deadly, the trauma that players endured from this game brought on bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts. So, let's get to the theories.

Let's recap what we know. Polybius was supposed to be a game that came out in the 80s in Portland, Oregon that affected its players with side effects like amnesia, night terrors, suicidal thoughts, and more. Not much is known about besides it having an abstract puzzle gameplay focus and it being almost supernaturally addictive.

Several anecdotal stories emerging about how the game apparently affected people. It fits into the weird spot of being a definite urban legend and a possible hoax or a genuine piece of lost media with potentially explainable elements that will be lost to time due to the niche proliferation of the game cabinet itself.

It's time, however, to dive into the theory surrounding this game so we can attempt to determine how realistic it is to believe that Polybius even existed in the first place since no physical evidence has ever been found, although it was definitely real and that was another clause by the CIA. So, Caleb, would you like to explain the truth to us? No.

Okay. I will. I will. Yeah, I will actually. I just said no because I thought it'd be funny. Let me block him on Discord real quick. No! One of the most prevalent theories is that there was significant involvement in the creation of Polybius by none other than the CIA. The CIA has legitimately tinkered and toyed around with the idea of mind control. We know that already. Go and watch our MKUltra episode.

We also know that they've tinkered around with the idea of mind manipulation. Go and watch the JFK episode to see the CIA manipulating JFK's brain using bullets. I like that. That was pretty good. That was pretty good. Uh, Oh,

That works pretty damn good. Yeah, I'm keeping that one. Thanks. Using psychological manipulation and aids like drugs, hypnosis, and sleep, and sensory deprivation are all things that the CIA have done, and MKUltra's victims often had no idea that they were a part of these experiments. This has led to the understandable notion that anything involving government spook-looking guys and mind-altering states was an experiment conducted by the CIA.

This led to speculation that maybe Polybius, if it existed, could have also been a tool for the CIA. The side effects of playing Polybius, the nausea, the amnesia, the dizziness, and behavior changes are similar to how patients reacted under MKUltra. So could this game be a similar operation conducted by the CIA in order to test the effects of psychological manipulation on an unsuspecting group of people?

Yes. Man. Oh, that's so... I think yes. Easily. For one, yes. 100%. But also, I was trying to mess with you by highlighting the page...

Over and over and I kept like underlining and under underlying words and I was trying to delete words as you were reading them, but they ah man Jackson's girl didn't give me editing access You were CIA you're trying to say I was trying to CIA you but the other CIA prevented this CIA Doing it. It was a she's pretty double double ruse there on my side Let's see

The stories also say that the men in black would show up in these backwater arcades in Portland, then go up to these machines, extract some sort of information from them, and simply walk away afterwards. They apparently did not try to be discreet and one day picked up the machines and never returned them.

It's not like the government didn't have a history of investigating game stores. In the 1980s, the FBI conducted raids on several arcades. The main reason behind these, however, were to do with illegal gambling and tampering with the machines. One notable raid came out just 10 days after two boys fell sick from playing video games in Portland. 12-year-old Brian Moura had been playing a game called Asteroids for over 28 hours in an attempt to break a record.

But he ended up with a sore stomach. Where are his parents? What? Oh my God. From anxiety and too much coke, dude. They were gaming hard back in the day. That guy was having a great time. 28 hours at a cabinet just chugging coke. That's how I want to go out, man. Belly hurts. How much money would that have been? That would have been so much money, surely, in quarters. And also, where are the parents? How? How do you even do that? They were hoping he'd die.

They gave him $200 in quarters and told him to not come home until he has the highest score. That's like 50 grand now. Then there was Michael Lopez who developed a migraine from playing Tempest. Well, that's important. If every time I developed a migraine from playing a video game...

All of this led to some level... Go ahead. I was just going to say, every time you get a migraine, it's reported in the newspaper. It would be constant. Why is this even here? How is that... There's an FBI raid. Migraine from playing StarCraft 2! It's too stressful.

All this led to some level of authority scrutiny leveled against arcades and video games at the time, which could help explain why government officials were hanging around the arcades themselves. I'm going to be honest, this does not seem like a good reason for any federal authority to be interested in arcades. It's giving them headaches. For drinking too much Coke. Yeah. My belly hurts. And my friend has a migraine.

Okay. I wonder why this boy was sick after playing Asteroids for 28 hours straight and eating nothing but Coke. We'll have to raid them and find out. Like, obviously. It's a miracle he didn't die. I don't know how he didn't die. 28 hours straight Asteroids. 28 hours straight just gaming hardcore. And then the other kid, Migraine, I mean, I'm surprised he lived. Yeah.

Apparently, the FBI had been lingering in arcades, taking photos of high scores and peeking around. At the time, these stores were hubs for criminal activity and some arcade owners used to modify the machines in order to facilitate illegal gambling.

According to Skeptoid, the FBI even set up their own fake arcade that was filled with hidden cameras to try and lure and catch criminals. What a fucking... What a bunch of lame asses. They try to... What criminals are operating in arcades? Dude, fun ones. Yeah, the coolest 12-year-olds. Yeah. Criminals, yeah. Good fun criminals. Um...

Not only that, but the government had used and altered video games to train particular personnel. A tank simulator called Battlezone was turned into a game that mimicked the M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and given to their Bradley gunners to train.

It was also doomed to in 1996 with US Marines ordered to be modified to suit their soldiers in specific missions. That's so cool. No, that's cool. That's fucking... Isaiah wasn't even wrong. It does make you more patriotic. And you could have used this excuse. What am I saying? Call of Duty's training you for the war. Hoorah.

So the government is no stranger to utilizing games and arcades to assist them in their needs. We have to remember, too, this was around the time that there were heightened fears of surveillance, experimentation, and all that during the Cold War. Games were very misunderstood at the time, and heavy speculation surrounding theories with arcades and Polybius being a tool to experiment with mind control and subliminal messaging is understandable.

In 2017, a request was sent to the FBI to release information under the FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, regarding Polybius. In response, the FBI said, and paraphrased, we have no idea what you're talking about. That's really funny. That's proof that it's real, though, to people, I think. Why did they respond, right? Yeah. They're hiding something. We don't know what that is.

I love the idea of just a FBI grunt worker getting a freedom of information request for Polybius and going through the records trying to find it. There's nothing there. Just being utterly confused about what this nerd is talking about. I'm not sure what to do about this. Polybius, what is that?

Oh, you mean Alex Mora, who had a bellyache in 1984? Yeah, I was going to say, you mean the kid that got a migraine? We've got files and files of that. Don't worry, we've got you covered. The person who requested it, their house gets drone-striked. That'd be funny. They get too close to the truth. Has there been any drone strikes on U.S. soil? There was that time in North Carolina they accidentally dropped a nuke. That's true. They also bombed...

They bombed somebody in Philadelphia. Somebody got bombed. The Black Panthers got bombed in Philadelphia. Yeah, that's true. And also a group of miners who were protesting in West Virginia were... I don't know if they were bombed, but they were shot at by government airplanes in the 1930s. Jeez. What was the name of that place? I was going to make a video on it.

I don't see, sadly I don't see any drone strikes on US soil. One of the main 9-11 theories is that the US fucking, you know, controlled the planes that crashed into 9-11. Does that count as drone? If they like automatically control it, maybe? That would be a drone strike, I'd say. The Battle of Blair Mountain, that was the name of it. 1920s, not 30s, my bad.

Alright, so misremembering. Maybe the people involved collectively misremembered Polybius, snowballing the shared memory into what it is now. A big internet urban legend. But are most people misremembering the same things? Possibly.

Possibly, certain mistaken events mixed with the change of stories over time could have contributed to this. Polybius was apparently similar to other games like Tempest. The intense screen visuals caused players to feel sick and nauseated after playing, fitting the description of Polybius. A writer by the name of Patrick Kellogg believes that people who think they played Polybius probably just played Cube Quest or Tempest or some other game like that and then attributed

their memories to this new hot internet thing that kind of sounded similar to what, you know, the experiences they had when they were children. Described as ahead of its time compared to other arcade games, it was hailed as hallucinogenic and neo-psychedelic. We're talking about Cube Quest here. All traits that the apparent Polybius had.

It was a Laserdisc-based game and they were very unreliable, meaning maintenance often had to come in and check the machines, which could explain why people believe they saw the men in black tampering with the machines. It could have simply just been, you know, the janitor or the company sending out repairmen, basically. You know, when you're a kid, you kind of like your imagination runs wild and you believe anything or you like blow up situations.

situations in your head that you then remember 20 years later and when it's reinforced by these stories online about Polybius, you know, it can kind of like your childhood imagination can kind of like warp things to fit that kind of puzzle. So that's definitely a possibility for why a bunch of people believe that they played Polybius back in the 80s. Maybe they just played Cube Quest. How about all of it being made up

But after all that, could it be that Polybius was just made up? Another internet forum rumor and tall story that escaped the forum it originated on, maybe. While some believe that Polybius existed, many more have instead come to the conclusion that it never existed. I feel like that's reasonable. No. That's just not real. It's an urban legend. Yeah, it says the guy who's paid off. It says the Fed. He doesn't want us to know it existed. I mean, yeah, I...

I don't want to be lame. I don't want to ruin this. I don't want to... No, I believe it. I believe it. Yeah, you better not want to be lame when I still have those guys on speed dial. Yeah, I don't want to die. I don't want to die. You don't understand, Caleb. This is life or death for me. Can we just... That's awesome. Keep this not lame. Let's see.

A quick look on Reddit brought up a post from three years ago. Anyone else believes that Polybius is real? Any witnesses of the actual arcade game? Most responses are united in their conclusion that it was all made up. Most people also want to believe because the world would be much more exciting and interesting if things like this were real. But unfortunately, there is absolutely no evidence at all. To explain how the hoax may have started, let's go back to CoinOp.

The owner of this website was named Kurt Kohler. And while he encouraged and accepted information from volunteers about games, everything that went on the database was approved by him. In 2003, he reached out to a popular magazine at the time called GamePro, where he told the story of a creepy, mysterious game called Polybius. GamePro ended up publishing an article in September of that year called Secrets and Lies, where they featured Polybius alongside other strange games in their theories. That's very interesting. That's cool.

the government. I wish we could go back. Maybe it was because I was a kid again, but still like I would love to go back to 20 years ago where I would have like 100% believe shit like this. Just like if it was in a book or something and I read it, like read that Polybius was a thing that was real. I would have just believed it.

I would have been like 100%. Well, this is why like the thing it lasted for so long because a bunch of people who were in that position did believe it. Yeah. I actually for I remember for a while because I heard about Polybius when I was a kid. I thought it was a normal arcade game. There were urban legends about it wasn't till years later. I was like, oh, it never existed. Yeah.

Same. It's got cool art. I thought the game was always real, like the cabinet was always real, but the experiences people had around it were fake or made up. Yeah, that's the same way I felt about it. I didn't know shit about it. It didn't even exist, allegedly. Allegedly. The way Caleb wants us to think.

Dude, yeah, it doesn't, it's not real. It didn't exist. It never existed. It's not real. It didn't exist. It never existed. It's not real. It didn't exist. How fortuitous. Home school kid moment. Of course, this brought the theory even more to the mainstream public. All thanks to Kurt. Maybe this was the intent of Kurt Kohler to create a spectacle and folk story to both advertise the website and create entertainment for himself. He was a sick fuck. Kurt,

Kurt Kohler, however, maintains that the submission was made by a man named Christian Oliver Wendler, who used the name Cyberoni online. That's a great name, actually. Cyberoni. I like that. Cyberioni. It's pretty cool at this point, but it starts to become insane very shortly.

Oh. Interestingly enough, Cyber Rioni was apparently the teacher slash master of the first Cyberage religion. Something called Logilogy. Cyber Age. Cyber Age religion. Cyberage. Dude, I don't know. Cyber Age religion. Something called Logilogy. Logilogy. Logilogy. How do you say that? Logilogy. Logilogy. Logilogy. Logilogy. Logilogy. I don't know.

lojaloji here's what cyber yoji means on the lojaloji website I feel like this is made up what are we doing right now this is weird hey so this is from the website Caleb what does cyber yoji mean

Well, Padawan, the Cyber Yoji is basically a human being which learns to control and reconfigure his nervous system in a way that he becomes capable to use his skin's nervous system to create additional vibration patterns similar to an assist struct, but much more variable. Of course, obviously.

When the main purpose of becoming capable to use it is to receive the holy software of cosmic consciousness and also to perform telepathic broadcast for sending messages to the mankind to lead it to higher levels of spiritual development. Okay, so remember this Christian Oliver Windler is the one that created this Logologi or whatever the fuck it's called, religion. And he himself is the Cyber Yoni or Yogi, which is like, I guess the religion's Jesus figure.

By that description of what a cyber yogi means. So yeah, he has very high level thoughts of himself. I don't see why we should have believed him, honestly. Alright, we're continuing on with the website FAQ. Frequently asked questions on the website. Excuse me, Mr. Windler, do you believe to be a supernatural superhuman being with the ability to save the world?

Well, superhuman, no. I'm only a cyber age child born of the year of Pong. And I guess that I only did the right thing at the right time that I slept and tumbled into this enlightenment. AKA, he took a lot of acid. I'm just terminal.

I'm just a terminal in the network of cosmic consciousness. I'm an evaluator, and there were thousands before me, and hopefully I can help this mankind to survive that there can be some more after me. I am definitely not almighty. I am definitely not almighty. So I only sometimes get new orders how to complete my mission, but in general, I feel more like an engineer who has the order to design a jumbo jet, and when he makes a mistake in his schematics,

He has to bear the responsibility for the death and sufferance of many, many people. I feel like we could do a deep dive on this religion, this website alone. This is crazy. Oh my god. Mr. Windler again, who or what is Pong? Pong?

TV Tennis was the first successful video game. It was built in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell. I am a great fan and collector of historical video games and driven by some visions, I have also begun to analyze the basics of the special meditative effects those are often created by them.

Because these findings could become very valuable for neuronomic purposes. This is weirdly written. Yeah, it's very, very odd. So remember, this Christian Oliver Windler person, the cyber yogi of the Logologi religion, was the one that uploaded the entry onto the coin op website of Polybius. Mr. Windler, you don't have to put up with people like him speaking down on you.

I wasn't ahead of it. What? Polybius is like one of the greatest creations of all time. I'm talking to Mr. Wendler. Thank you. Mr. Wendler, you don't have to deal with him. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, my lojaloji apprentice, Isaiah. How? You were born in the year of Dong. I don't know. Thank you, Sensei. When were you born? The year of GTA 2 or something? You were born in 1998, right? 99.

99? Okay. What's the most popular game that came out in 99? Most popular video game that came out in 99... System Shock 2. Okay, you were born in the U.S. That's pretty badass. That's pretty good. And Resident Evil 3 and Crash Team Race. Oh, the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater. There you go. That's cool. I'll take that. I was born in the year of Super Mario 64. Whoa, you're like a grandpa. That's crazy. Yeah.

Oh, Silent Hill. The original Silent Hill came out in 99. I'll take it. You had a good year. I had a really good year. Yeah, you did. Do you want to read this part, Jackson? Yeah. If we follow the trail, was Cyber Yoni the original creator of Polybius? Many think so. He had previously done other online pranks, like fabricating an apparent lost game called Phoenix, but he did come out and say it wasn't him. And we all know if a liar with a history of doing the very thing you're talking about said it wasn't him, you have to believe him.

The website is full of extremely long-winded cyber theological concepts and explanations that explore his self-created religion. It all sounds like it would fit nicely in the Tron universe, but ultimately it speaks to the character of the person who is effectively the originator of the Polybius myth because he uploaded it to that website. If

If someone with a history of creating these hoaxes, whether for self-entertainment or enlightenment through spreading his theological teachings, when people like me come to his religious website looking for answers, and he himself prescribes a stealth description of a video game, Connoisseur, or Historian, it's a bit hard to believe that he wouldn't remember more about the game that he himself is archiving.

That's not even to mention how on the nose a lot of the references are in Polybius. The name itself, Polybius, is coined from the Greek historian by the same name who is well known to be a critic of historians not verifying information firsthand. Again, very on the nose for a game of which existence is owed only because people aren't able to verify it essentially.

Again, that's very on the nose. To further compound on this point, everything we've learned about Christian ties up nicely in the name he attributed to the developer of the game. Sinuslotion, was it? Isaiah, how do you pronounce it? Sinuslotion. Sinuslotion. Sinuslotion, meaning sense delete.

like senses your senses delete it ties in rather neatly with these overall theological beliefs on his website as well as the broader implications of the game itself being something that breaks brains everything about the game its existence and its creators are simply again very on the nose uh but isaiah you believe it's real so why don't you talk about why it is real of course i'll thank you for asking so

Even beyond that interesting tangent regarding Kurt, some do still believe that Polybius is real because it is. A key part of this belief, or at least the evidence supporting the belief, is that a man named Steven Roach has claimed that he was an employee at Zenith Slotion and was directly a part of the Polybius development. He left post on CoinOp about his time as an employee at the company. His post was rambling and had a lot of typos. At one point, he misspelled the name of his own company.

He talked about how he set up the company himself with other amateur programmers when they were approached by an American company to develop an arcade game. He did not mention the name of the company. It was the CIA. Yes, correct. Now you're getting it. The name Polybius was suggested by a man named Merrick Vouchasek, who had studied Greek mythology at university. It was bold and mysterious, perfect for what they were aiming for. A quote from Stephen Roach.

I think it's about time I laid this to rest. However, entertaining the speculation, my name is Stephen Roach, who is primarily based in the Czech Republic. Zinništlotion was a company set up by myself and several other mainly amateur programmers in 1978 that worked on component parts for printed circuit boards that saw programming as a limited but very profitable sideline.

i think the fact that it wasn't the focal point of our business took the pressure off of us and hence we created some quality work which quickly gained a reputation within the industry after this part of the message steven begins to describe why polybius disappeared and why people seem to have had memories of the game while also being while also seeing odd men in black like figures around the machines uh quote continues

We received heartening collated playtesting figures and were then told that the game would receive a temporary limited release, which buoyed us significantly. But shortly after, we received terrible news. A 13-year-old boy from the Lloyd District of Portland, Oregon had suffered an epileptic fit while playing the game only six days after the machines had literally been installed. Well, thank God it wasn't a migraine.

Yeah, and also Portland, Oregon's getting slapped by these evil arcade machines, right? Because the first Berserk one was Portland, wasn't it? Yeah, I think so. They're having a rough go of it up there.

Maybe we just shouldn't give them video games anymore. Yeah, what's happening in Portland? The whole time they're playing it, they're like, I can't believe this is real and happening to me right now. Like, they don't understand it's, like, fictional. Yeah. They're just screaming the whole... It's a whole arcade room of people screaming at the top of their lungs as they play Pac-Man. Like, why?

Uh, one of the senior employees that I knew very well contacted me to tell me that it caused immense ripples of panic throughout the company who were of the opinion that they had created a monster as such. It may sound laughable now, but please bear in mind that this was 25 years ago when the video game industry was in its infancy.

Every effort was made to withdraw the game from the public domain as quickly as possible, but the scaremongering was already out in force and a lot of the children were queuing up or daring their friends to play the supposedly nightmarish game. Wait, okay, if that was true, if that was true, then everyone would have heard about it. It would have been in all the newspapers at the time. Surely there would have been like... I assume he means at this one arcade.

Someone had an epileptic fit and then everyone in the town basically descended. Jackson, if me and you were 12 years old and we heard that there's an arcade machine down the street that gives you seizures, I am making you play that game. 100%, but I'm just saying I think there'd be newspaper articles written about it, at least in the local city, surely.

It depends on how widespread it is, how well known this story is. This is a guy from the game company talking. Maybe the owner of the arcade room just told them this. They may want to come get it. The kids are starting to catch on, whatever, right? Yeah. There's a lot of kids having epileptic fits to your game. Can you please come get your cabinet? Yeah, they're spending way too much money here. I need them gone.

This is kind of what we're shooting for with Black Vine. Yeah, if you add a cryptid that gives epileptic people seizures... Oh, dude, imagine the success scale. That's so bad.

Imagine this. It's a dedicated monster that just like flashes. It walks up to you and like opens the palms of its hands and it's the perfect frequency to cause seizures. Scientifically perfect for it, yeah. That would be true fear playing a video game. Yeah, what the fuck? You would have created the most immersive game possible. Yeah, like people with super intense epilepsy live streaming the game crying.

Like, please. I don't want to play this anymore. Turn this off. Just a warning. Give us a warning. Something. We can't do that. No. It's out of our budget. Yeah, on top of that, it is a completely silent enemy. It's like it's a placeholder almost. The only thing it does, it's just a cube that flashes. It's got no textures or anything. It flashes.

It floats like over the terrain at a speed that's just like a little bit faster than the player. And it just goes around to the front of the player as well. Doesn't even follow behind. So like as the player's sprinting and they're like, no, please. Like you can see it out of their peripheral coming around. It's going to lock them in into like the viewpoint though for it to be successful.

Yeah, well, it makes you come around to the front. You can't F4 either. It locks up your entire computer. It's a giant cube that kills people.

And then you'll get a reputation and people will buy the game a lot, I bet. Yeah, and then it cuts to a documentary clip of Caleb being like, we really wanted to try something new with the game. Something, you know, something to shake up the industry. Yeah, we really just got new liability insurance. We wanted to test it out. Yeah, we wanted to test it out.

We wanted to take this baby for a spin. We noticed other video game companies were too afraid to kill their audience. We said no. Like the olden days. It's old school gaming, dude. We need 28... We have an achievement for playing 28 hours straight and having to get your stomach pumped.

It's like a Todd Howard interview segment. It's Caleb like... See, the problem with video games is that no matter how scary you make the game, the player's always safe. But here, we wanted to change that. Yeah, there's... Normally, in a game, the player is safe when they stop playing. We want the game to...

You know, it's a cliche. If you die in the game, you die in real life. We want to make that a reality. The game, they up, whenever you upload the game, it has like a virus that installs the cube on your laptop. Actually illegal things, yeah. So it's like a time bomb just at some point in the future.

You just have to own it on Steam. If you have visited the Steam store page, you don't even have to buy it. Yeah, it's now like a random percentage chance every time you log on. Oh my lord. We'll push the new build out. If the cube... I love the idea of it just being a gray cube. Just no effort at all into it. It's got like writing on it.

That's what's so funny. Because it's like, you wanted to kill people so quick. You didn't even take the time to build a model. There was no fanfare or anything. No sound effects, just seizure. It's just an act of domestic terrorism. It's just a modern day penicillin thing. Oh no, paracetamol murders. Oh my gosh.

There's some Twitch streamer who looked at the game and two years from now they boot up stream and just... That's funny. So good. Where are we at? Oh, yeah. I was reading Steven Roach. Okay. My stomach hurts.

One of the senior employees that I knew very well contacted me to tell me that it caused immense ripples of panic throughout the company. Who were of the opinion that they had, quote, created a monster as such. It may sound laughable now, but please bear in mind that this was 25 years ago. This was 25 years...

I just have that my brain's just making up bits with it now like Caleb gets pulled over and it's like alright ID sir Caleb just hands him like a gif of the cube gives it to anyone that does him wrong have you considered the power of the sun officer um you need to add that you need to add it into the game now maybe not the version that actually kills people but at least a reference to it

The cube. The cube. What is it? A cube quest? Cube quest. It can be the cube quest cube. Yeah, you go on a long, windy quest in the game to only end up dying from a seizure. That's great. Behold the Tesseract. Flashes at a million miles per hour. Oh, man. Is this real? Is Polybius actually in The Simpsons?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was references. It's referenced. It gets referenced in a ton of stuff. Yeah. Um, crazy, which is why I thought it was real for so long. Cause I, I'd look it up and it'd be in TV shows. I'm like, okay, so this was a real game, but it won't. Yeah. Um,

Every effort was made to withdraw the game from the public domain as quickly as possible, but scaremongering is already out in force and a lot of the children were queuing up or daring their friends to play this nightmare. I already read that. Company directors descended onto the town to assess the situation, which may account for the reports of strange men in black suits hanging around, and the machines were often taken in daylight, causing minor but noticeable incidents. As far as I was made aware of, only seven machines were distributed around the area, and no one

and no other health-related incidents were reported. I heard off the record that the company made a one-off settlement to the boy's family and no more was heard, apart from all the internet-based speculation and resulting paranoia.

We disbanded Zenith's lotion shortly afterwards because we didn't want to restrict ourselves to the stringent deadlines of other companies and favored distancing ourselves from the game in case any lingering recremations, which could have done a great deal of damage to our personal and professional reputations, which was our livelihood. And with some of us having very young families, this was extremely important to us. You know what? Like outside, if I didn't,

read a bunch about the Logologi religion just a second ago, this whole explanation seems believable to me. Broadly speaking. I believe him. I believe him 100%. Whatever's written on this page, I'll believe. Thank you. See, that's the kind of dedication I need. Whatever the most recent thing is that was said out loud, I believe. For my acolytes. That's such a funny idea. I believe that shit.

He just said it and then something else gets read. It's like oh man. Whoa. Oh my god. Give it that way. Whoa It's crazy I'm so lucky to be surrounded by so many smart people who are we saying things People do live their lives like that including myself they really do dude. That's how I interview mr. Beast

You should have shown him the cube. Hey, Mr. Beast, look at this. Check this out. But if you consider this, it just destroys all the cameras in the room.

Then you would have been a hero to the subreddits, Caleb. Not even destroys, but like, you know when gamma wave radiation hits a camera sensor and it makes it green? It's just like... A really violent effect. MrBeast is like, his skin's vibrating. He's just staring at it like... It's all called a cabra too. Like you cracked open the arc of the cabinet. Yeah.

Your soul is mine. Yeah, but Caleb's completely fine just holding it in his hand. I'm protected. I'm wearing a lead suit. Why are you wearing a lead suit for this interview? No reason. Shit, I don't know. It's for my own protection. I don't know. You might find out, idiot. You might find out. Take a look at this cube. I really like the idea of having a cube that kills people. Yes.

I just love how much Isaiah loves it honestly. It's just funny. It's so funny to me to low effort murder someone. Yeah. Like you don't even make it a scary model. It's just... No effort. At least give them a good time when you kill them. Dude.

Why is everything that's evil and demonic or has great power so intricate? There's so much effort. There's so many steps to it. It's not like a rock or a piece of limestone. Just put a white fleshy cube in your video games. It's so easy. A capsule. It's not like a texture placeholder that kills people with epilepsy. It's not even white. It's just the empty texture. It's just a cube. I love this.

Just the idea of making it a little bit faster than the players so they think they have a chance. That's awesome. Oh,

I can't get someone for the love of all that's good. You don't have to include the epilepsy part, but when Black Pine gets mod support, someone needs to make the monster. I'm adding that in myself, dude. That's going to be encrypted. That's going to be, you're going to, you're going to walk out of a job and you're going to look out in the woods and you're going to see. Loading every cube.

It's just gonna be a cube. And you better fucking run, dude. You better run. That's gonna be the scariest monster. Yeah, that's gonna be the scariest monster in the game. It's gonna be so scary. It's gonna be the scariest because you know. It's clipping. It just clips through every tree to get to you. It's gonna be the scariest monster in the game because you know what's coming. What's coming is epilepsy. That's it. That's the only thing that's coming. Fuck.

It's not the monster. That's really funny. I'm about to have the worst headache of my life. And remember, you can't alt F4 anymore. That's been removed by the virus. You are about to have the worst headache of your life is just written in MS Paint on the side. Yes.

Of the cube. No, it's like the mission log at the top, right? Or whatever. Like if there's a mission objective. That's so funny. Yeah, all the text on screen is just overwritten. Lowercase, you are about to have the worst headache of your life. So mean. Oh my gosh, that's awesome. The player can see the flashing out in the woods and just like an MS Paint on the screen. It says, are you ready? Like...

That would actually be so funny because it would come out of nowhere. It would actually freak people out. It would have nothing to do with anything. It would be so out of place. That's the worst headache ever. That's a funny phrase. You're about to have the worst headache of your life. If I was playing a video game and I saw that in the mission list or whatever, I'd be fucking terrified. Yeah, that's actually scary. It is. It's like breaking the fourth wall just to let you know that you're about to go through pain. I...

I had tears streaming down my face. I've been awake for 48 hours working on this stupid YouTube video and it's hitting me in just the right way. That is literally the funniest thing I've ever heard.

I don't even remember how we got here. All the creatures in the game are like the Cthulhu, the Wendigo, the cube that kills you. The cube that gives you a very bad headache. Or the cube that gives you the worst headache of your life. Are you liable if you give people headaches? You are. I'm sure, yeah, we can't actually do that. But we can have a cube that...

maybe has an emissive that turns off and on and it could just chase you around and be I mean that would be especially as a reference to this that'd be so fucking funny we absolutely can do that I can make that happen

Should it be its own mission or should it be like a little... No, it can't be a motion. I want it to be like a 1% chance of spawning in anywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that it just has a 1% chance. You can load into the game and it's in the RV. Like...

You know what would be really funny is if you start hearing like 3D audio from super far across the map and it's just Isaiah fucking laughing his ass off coming towards you. And it's the cube is just coming and it's just him laughing. It could be his face stuck in the cube. That's actually really scary. That's a terrifying thought.

Once it does appear for the first time after that 1% spawn rate or whatever, then it never stops showing up. It's always there. Your game's fucked. Yeah, if you uninstall the game...

It downloads a virus onto your computer. It's in your registry. It goes straight to your router or modem and just kills everyone. It's like Clippy. He shows up on the desktop now somehow. Oh yeah, dude. Start sniffing all your packets.

That's really funny. It's just so mean. It's so funny. That would be so, I mean, really after this episode, if my game turns into malware and we add the cube, that's Isaiah's fault. This might actually be a dangerous topic for your video game. We might have just reduced the sales with people. This isn't actually a thing now. Yeah, I just think people haven't been brave enough to do it yet is really what it boils down to.

Yeah.

I'll finish this up because Isaiah's having giggly for a little bit. Yeah, I can't. I can't do it. The interviewer retouches on his involvement with the company. We're talking about Stephen Roach here, not the cube. The interviewer retouches on his involvement with the company and game. It was apparently a puzzle-based shooter set on a moon base where the player had to clear waves of alien invaders while managing puzzle numbers on screen. He said that the rumors surrounding the game were exaggerated and likely just kept building up.

up as an internet legend. All the rights were signed over and he doesn't believe that there are any copies of the game or parts of the game that still exist today. And apparently the name of the company and how it translated to a raising sense was purely accidental. He relates all of this more to Chinese whispers than a hoax and honestly, to me, it seems believable. Like he's, how he describes everything, like I could see that being a reason for why a game showed up in the 80s in arcades and then was removed rather quickly. Like,

Like it had a limited release. It caused some issues. It had bad press. So the company was like, fuck that. We're getting this out of the arcades. Like perfectly reasonable explanation for it. But then there's, but then there is also another potentially weird layer to this. We don't know who Steven Roach really is. There's no proof of identity and definitely no proof of company and definitely no corroborating evidence supplied by other credible sources. Yeah.

Although the cube's coming. It's so ominous that you hear it giggling like that. That is really funny, the cube. That's what you're going to hear in the forest. You hear a laugh. Yeah, you're going to hear that laugh in the forest. You just hear like a small laugh. And then if you react to it in any way aside from running, it just goes, it just starts cackling and coming after you.

However, in investigating the name, it was discovered that in November 1998, a man also named Steven Roach and his wife were arrested in the Czech Republic for having a school that illegally imprisoned its students. Stop laughing now. This is serious. This is a bad thing to laugh at. Violated their human rights and also abused them.

So if that's the same Stephen Roach, Jesus Christ. There's even a support site for the victims in the document. It's linked. We don't know if this is the same person. We don't know if the Polybius Stephen is even real. But it is strange that he mentioned he was from the Czech Republic and this happened in the same place. Surely there's not many Stephen Roaches in the Czech Republic. That doesn't even sound like a Czech Republic name, right? Stephen Roach sounds like a guy from America. Yeah, like here's some typical...

Czech Republic names. Valentin, Evzin, Berno, Nad Artis, and then you have Steven Roach. There can't be more than one Steven Roach in Czech Republic.

The person who conducted the interview found out about this after he'd spoken to Steven and later said this, quote, Regardless, the coin-op page has since been edited to state, quote,

Quick update. We just wanted to go on record here that Steven Roach is full of himself and knows nothing about this game. We have it on good authority. No, Polybius is not a Tempest prototype. No, Polybius is not a Vector game. Does the title screen look Vector? No, it does not. So they seem to know a lot about this Polybius game that no one knows anything about or has any proof about on the coin op page. That seems hoaxy to me. Caleb.

Why is it still relevant today? Honestly, honestly, Jackson, the mystery of Polybius still intrigues many to this day and is often featured in popular media. If you look up references to Polybius, there are many in modern media that refer to the urban legend and as such have submitted as a piece of Internet history.

Simpsons, Summer of '84, Stranger Ting, Loki, Nine Inch Nail music videos. It goes on. The legend of Polybius is like an onion. You peel back a layer to find another. We don't know what the truth is. There's no evidence.

But we can't help ourselves from believing or wanting to believe in the existence and the implications of the CIA utilizing arcade cabinets to manipulate brains because a world of Polybius would be far more interesting. And in that sense, maybe there is a level of mind control involved in Polybius after all. Oh, my God. We've all been mind controlled to believe Polybius. Crazy. Fuck. Fuck. All right.

You gotta go to sleep, Isaiah. Yeah, he's a maniac. This guy's having a maniac. Just the idea of like, just MS, you're so mad that you're communicating to the player with MS paint and the messages are like, I'm gonna kill you. I hate you so much. You will die immediately. I don't have the words to say, I feel like.

That's such a funny line. You're about to have the worst headache of your entire life. At least put that in the game as an easter egg, like on little notes on the ground or something. It has to be. After this is over, I need to ask you guys a couple questions because that's going to go in the game. It's going to be great. Can't wait to see the cube in all its detail-less glory.

all right that was polybius i think we're all firm believers in polybius and uh yeah it was real yeah it was real i'm sorry the cube got me i love the cube so much i love him um

thank you all for watching um and um yeah i believe polybius is i think it's a really cool internet story and um if you say no you're fed yeah yeah i think at the very least it's a it's a fun like scp style thing yeah i agree yeah it's cool it's cool

Thank you very much for watching this episode of Red Thread. Go check out Black Pine. Go get yourself a nice headache. You can go find... It'll be linked below, so you can go check out what ends up in the game eventually as a reference to the Red Thread. Our integration into the universe will be in the form of a headache, so that's pretty exciting. Love it. Thank you very much for watching. We'll see you next time. Stay red. Bye. See you, bud.

Bye.