Полибиус: 1981 жылғы аркада ойынының құпиясы

Fictitious 1981 arcade game

[[File:Polybius, coinop. org. jpeg|thumb|An alleged start screen, attached to an article on coinop. org. The legend describes the game as part of a government run crowdsourced psychology experiment based in Portland, Oregon. Gameplay supposedly produced 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. Supposedly, all of these Polybius arcade machines then disappeared from the arcade market. This urban legend has persisted in video game journalism and through continued interest, and it has inspired video games with the same name and even a movie.

thumb|A E FOIA request for Polybius returned no results. The alleged original Polybius arcade game is generally believed to have never existed, and the legend a hoax. Magazines and mainstream news of the early 1980s do not mention Polybius. Aside from the mockup cabinets and games inspired by the myth, no authentic cabinets or ROM dumps have ever been documented. Dunning records that the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided several video arcades in the area just ten days later, where the owners were suspected of using the machines for gambling, and the lead up to the raid involved FBI agents monitoring arcade cabinets for evidence of tampering and recording high scores. Dunning suggests that these two events were combined into an urban legend about government monitored arcade machines making players ill. He believes that such a myth must have been established by 1984, and that it influenced the plot of the film The Last Starfighter, in which a teenager is recruited by aliens who monitor him playing a covertly developed arcade game. Dunning considers "Sinneslöschen" to be the kind of name that a non German speaker would generate if they tried to create a compound word using an English to German dictionary. Ben Silverman of Yahoo! Games remarked: "Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the game ever existed, no less turned its users into babbling lunatics Still, Polybius has enjoyed cult like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era." Offbeat Oregon History says "There remains a possibilitya tiny one, really too small to measure — that the legend is true." Portland Monthly calls it "one of Portland's craziest urban legends", comparing it to the CIA's MKUltra mind control program of the 1950s 1970s. To complete the illusion, Rogue Synapse's owner Dr. Estil Vance founded a Texas based corporation bearing the name Sinnesloschen (without umlaut) in 2007. He transferred to it the "Rogue Synapse" trademark and a newly registered trademark on "Polybius". Its website says that it is an "attempt to recreate the Polybius game as it might have existed in 1981". In 2016, Llamasoft announced Polybius for the PlayStation 4 with PlayStation VR support, released on the PlayStation store on Tuesday, May 9, 2017. In early marketing, its co author Jeff Minter claimed to have been permitted to play the original Polybius arcade machine in a warehouse in Basingstoke, England. He later acknowledged that his game was inspired by the urban legend but does not attempt to reproduce its alleged gameplay. It has a central cameo as the "main attraction" in the Nine Inch Nails music video "Less Than".

Polybius has cameos in many TV series, such as The Goldbergs (2013) and The Simpsons (2006). The Loki (2021) cameo gained its own acclaim on social media, including that the game seems catastrophically integral to the multiverse, and is a key example of Loki interplaying conspiracy with reality. An IGN alum said "Loki has a Polybius arcade machine and I'm losing my goddamn mind." For Paper Girls (2022), CBR reported that the Polybius cameo conferred the series with 1980s science fiction credentials, and differentiated it from Stranger Things (2016). The Polybius Conspiracy is a 7 part podcast published in 2017, adapted from a canceled feature film project. In 2017, a 68 minute feature on Polybius by Ahoy was uploaded to YouTube. As of March 2024, it has 9.3 million views. In 2020, Stuart Ashens released the comedy movie Ashens and the Polybius Heist, a sequel to Ashens and the Quest for the GameChild.