You are now listening to Cryptid Cocktail Party.
Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of
Cryptic Cocktail Party, a show where we have
a few drinks, share a few laughs, take a dive
into the unknown. I am your host, Dave, joined
once again by my wonderful co -host, Sarge. How's
it going, Sarge? Holy shit, I missed you. Never
let me take vacation again. Well, how was it?
Did you have a good time, at least? Yeah, yeah,
I had a blast. I was up in New Hampshire, land
of cheap cigarettes and alcohol outlets, state
-run alcohol dispensaries. Yeah, right on all
the major highways leading in and out of the
state. Yeah, just please buy our alcohol. They
got a death grip on the sale of it. I believe
you can only buy beer and wine from private places.
You have to buy alcohol direct from the state.
Yeah, well, liquor. Yeah, you can buy beer and
wine pretty much anywhere. It's just hard liquor
you have to get from. a sanctioned state -run
supply store. And I'm blown away at the amount
of discount cigarette stores you can find up
there. Oh yeah, dude. New Hampshire loves two
things. It's cigarettes and booze. But I mean,
hey, it gets cold. That's right. What else are
you going to do? And like the third thing you
guys seem to really enjoy is the concept of a
general store, a place where you can buy a pickle
and a revolver in the same building. Yeah. I
mean, do you not have those in Massachusetts?
We do, but New Hampshire seems to have most of
them. Yeah, that's fair. You know, we like to
keep things simple, rustic, you know. I got no
problem with it. Back when America was great.
You know it's a good general store when you can
walk in and find cheese that is 12 years old
on purpose. It wasn't like accidentally left
there in a barrel. An old wooden barrel that
you can just reach in and grab a pickle out of.
Oh, yeah, dude. Barrel pickles are always the
best, too. You can't go wrong with a good barrel
pickle. They are the best. Well, I'm glad you
had a good time, man. I'm glad. I loved it. I
love New Hampshire. It's one of my favorite places.
Awesome. Yeah, I am currently fighting for my
life. I am sick as fuck right now. I know. You
don't sound yourself. I feel like my head's going
to explode. I probably have COVID again. I work
in a fucking petri dish. Yeah, you got the sniffles
a little bit. Yeah. If I sneeze, I'm not going
to edit it out, but I will just bleep it out
because I think that's way funnier. What you
should do is instead of bleeping it out, you
should insert a car horn. Like an old -timey,
like a wooga one? Oh, like a clown horn? That'd
be even better. Oh, that could be good. Yes!
Yeah. We'll figure it out. All right, Sarge.
Before we begin, I just want to real quick give
a huge shout out to Chris Collari from Scared
All the Time and Brennan Storr from the Ghost
Story guys for filling in for Sarge while he
was gone. I appreciate it. I'm sure Sarge appreciates
it as well. It was a huge help making sure that
the show kept going in his absence. So thank
you to them. Yeah, thanks for covering for me,
guys. I apologize. For what? uh for making them
do my job for me no they didn't mind hopefully
they had a good time all right sarge are you
ready to get into today's episode fuck yeah i
am let's do this i'm refreshed and ready so today
we're gonna be talking video games something
we both love and enjoy oh yeah i went to fun
spot up in new hampshire because of my love of
video games the largest arcade in the world One
of the best. It's definitely, what is it, four
stories? No, it's like three stories, I think,
and it's just full of every video game. Some
video games you probably don't need to have there,
but it's many video games. That's valid. Well,
as I'm sure you were aware. Back in the early
80s, hell, even up to like the early 90s, arcades
were like a huge deal. Like everyone went to
arcades. Kids, teens, adults. It was a huge cultural
moment all across the country. Like the world,
really. It was a place for everyone to come and
have a good time. And for the most part, it was
a place for kids to go and like stay out of trouble.
Like keep them off the streets. You know, if
they're in the arcades, they're not running rampant
in packs through the streets of whatever city
you happen to be in. Yeah, of course. Do you
remember Dream Machine? I do remember Dream Machine.
It was like a chain of arcades. I still have
a Dream Machine token somewhere. There was a
Dream Machine in the Fox Run Mall. I fucking
love that place. There was a Dream Machine down
the street within walking distance from my house
up until about six months ago. Really? That recently?
Yeah. It was like the only thing still thriving
in a failed shopping mall that they just recently
closed. That is wild to me. I mean, I guess it
makes sense. I feel like if you brought arcades
back now, they would probably go do gangbusters.
I feel like everyone's like nostalgia is really
big right now. I feel like if you brought them
back, like I think you might. Yeah. Well, I feel
like they did bring them back because you got
like Dave and busters. Yeah. But also, I mean,
but also now you have like barcades. Like I feel
like barcades are huge right now. Like you got.
Right. Was it Barcadia National Park or whatever
the fuck that one's called? There's tokens in
Dover, New Hampshire. They're everywhere. Tokens
is more like pinball, I feel like, but that's
still whatever. Yeah. It's crazy though. There's
arcade. I mean, if you go to, to where beach
up in New Hampshire, where I was on vacation,
there are three arcades all, all within like
maybe a hundred feet of each other. Yeah. Arcades
were huge. I mean, like I said, they're not as
big as they were now. Cause you know, right we
have fucking xbox and ps5s but yeah of course
at the time like arcades were a huge fucking
deal well yeah because you you needed a giant
cabinet to house your video game yeah and so
putting it in a huge retail space was the only
way to get enough of them together to make it
worth your while yeah but in 1981 a story started
circulating out of portland oregon about an arcade
cabinet that was unlike any of the others Nestled
among the familiar titles like Pac -Man, Galaga,
Asteroids, a new cabinet showed up. Plain black,
no logos, no flashy artwork, just a name across
the title screen. The game, Polybius. Are you
familiar with this story at all? Yes, it's one
of my favorites. This was actually suggested
to us by our good friend Cam over at Narragansett.
And I've actually wanted to do an episode on
it. I wanted to do one early on when I first
started the show, but didn't really know if it
would have been a good fit for the show. But
I think now, since we've been covering more and
more conspiracy stuff, more strange bullshit,
I think this is the perfect time for us to do
this episode. So you said it's one of your favorites.
How familiar are you with this Polybius? game
so um i am addicted to youtube uh and i i love
to watch just weird shit like yeah you know there's
great content creators out there like mr ballin
and nexpo and um they they talk about all kinds
of crazy stuff like this and um i think nexpo
might have done a thing on is it polybius or
poly i don't know polybius polybus i never actually
pronounced it Out of my own mouth? No, I actually
struggle. It's Polybius is how it's pronounced.
Okay. Yeah. But yeah, I heard the story of it
and I was very intrigued. I'm still somewhat
intrigued by it because I love the idea of, well,
let's get into it and then I'll talk about it
afterwards. Okay. So like I said up top and like
we've been discussing pretty much this. for the
entire intro, is arcades in the early 80s were
like neon churches for kids back then. The air
reeked of cigarette smoke and body odor, the
floor stuck to your shoes, and every corner glowed
with the games we all know and love today. Like
I said, you got Pac -Man, Galaga, Donkey Kong.
But in 1981, a new game hit the arcades across
Portland, Oregon, and the surrounding suburbs.
It didn't look like the other cabinets. There
was no cartoon art on the cabinet, no brand logo,
just a plain black box with the title screen
glowing a strange word. Polybius. Now, the kids
who played it said the game was unlike anything
else and not like in a good way. The game was
like a dizzying mess of pulsating geometric shapes,
flashing lights, and puzzle -like mechanics mixed
with like breakneck action. It was like a really
fast game. Almost like Space Invaders, right?
Yeah, but it didn't sound fun. Like it was...
It was more addictive to the point of obsession.
You'd pump in quarters not because you wanted
to beat your friend's score, but because you
just couldn't stop yourself from playing it.
It's like Tetris, I feel like. I feel like for
me, that's my version of it. I recall coming
out of my bedroom one night and seeing my parents
playing Tetris at midnight. And they would tell
you that it was rotting your brain just so they
could get you off of it? Right. Exactly. See,
I had the two -hour maximum on the video game
consoles daily. They did not. But not long after
this fucking mind -numbing game showed up into
the arcades, some side effects started to occur.
Players started reporting brutal migraines, nausea
that wouldn't go away, insomnia so bad that some
kids said they stayed awake for days. Others
described terrifying hallucinations like shadow
figures out of the corner of their eye, distorted
voices whispering over the hum of the arcade,
and nightmares that left them drenched in sweat.
Some even reported memory loss, forgetting their
own names, or not remembering how to get home
after playing. And then things got a bit darker
with the reports. Some of the kids started suffering
from seizures, breakdowns, even suicide attempts
started cropping up in the weeks following. Polybius
showing up in Portland. So not great. These are
all side effects of Four Loko too, though. But
none of that kept the kids away. The pull of
the game was too strong for them. Then, just
to add some more high strangeness to the mix,
the men in black started showing up to the arcades.
strangers in suits who didn't look like cops,
but they didn't look like gamers either. They'd
show up not to empty quarters from the coin box,
but to pull the cabinet open and extract something
from inside, like notes on high scores, gameplay
logs. Like they were there not to collect the
cash from the machine, but data from the machine.
Right. And they came back regularly, like every
week or two, like they were on a schedule. Some
arcade owners even swore that the cabinets rebooted
on their own or powered up without anyone touching
them as if they were being controlled remotely.
This makes me think of The Last Starfighter.
Do you remember that movie? Kind of, yeah. It
was a kid playing, you know, he played this video
game and he absolutely loved it. And it turned
out it was like an alien federation recruiting
him to fly Starfighters in space. Yeah. It was
fucking great. It's also kind of like, what was
that? Ender's Game? Yep. Where they think they're
playing a video game, but really they're fucking
just out there killing everyone. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that was a popular trope because I think
the Robin Williams movie Toys also used that
briefly. Did it? I don't really remember that
movie. You know what's weird is that I've seen
that movie, couldn't tell you anything about
it. Yeah, the movie's mostly a fever dream. Like,
none of it makes any sense. I watched it and
remember hating most of it. even though i loved
robin williams and joan cusack it was just a
fucking literally a fever dream yeah that sounds
like the last movie that was made with like 1980s
cocaine oh the good stuff yeah the stuff that
brought us alf and small wonder all right and
then there's a story of bobby feltstein he claims
that after a late night session of Polybius as
a teenager, he blacked out. The next thing he
remembers is waking up in the Tillamook State
Forest, not prison, State Forest, 60 miles from
Portland with only fragments of memory. Those
memories being marched through underground tunnels
with strange men in suits at his side. I feel
like this would have been a way more fun story
if he woke up in a prison, to be honest. It would
have been, sure. Now, the thing about this, though,
is that Portland does have tunnels underneath
it, the Shanghai tunnels, where men were allegedly
kidnapped and smuggled onto ships. So the setting
made his story just a little more unsettling.
And today, Feldstein still talks about it, even
running a Polybius walking tours of Portland
to share what he says happened to him. Really?
I didn't know that. That's awesome. Yeah, and
I would love to go on one of those tours. And
then, just as suddenly as it appeared, Polybius
was gone. Within a month, maybe two, the machines
vanished overnight. There was no official records.
There was no photos of this thing. There was
no ROMs. The only thing anyone had to go on as
to like the origins of Polybius was a strange
company name linked to the game. And that is
Sinuslution, which I probably horribly pronounced
that. But when translated from German to English,
it means sensory deletion. Oh, okay. Not. A great
name for a company, but it is what it is. I thought
it was like a portmanteau of synergy and solution.
No, although that seems like you would see that
for a commercial for a company where you're not
quite sure what it does. You know what I mean?
Yeah, like if you're watching a business channel.
Yeah, it just flashes random words like synergy,
solutions. Yeah, I could definitely see that.
I think it's pronounced sin -a -slu -tion. Sin
-a -slu -tion. Sure, I don't know. They're spending
too much time on that. Sin -a -slu -tion. But
that right there was enough to fuel the conspiracy
theories. You know, maybe it was a CIA experiment,
part of MKUltra's long shadow testing subliminal
messages to arcade games. Or maybe it was a recruitment
program using the flashing chaos to pick out
potential fighter pilots, like you said, like
Ender's Game or... Whatever that movie was that
you said that I'd never seen. Or Last Starfighter.
Yeah. Last Starfighter. Louis Gossett Jr. plays
an alien. Great movie. Or maybe it was just a
data harvesting machine tracking psychological
responses under the guise of a video game. Whatever
the truth, the theory stuck and Polybius became
the stuff of like a whispered legend. But here's
the reality, Sarge. Polybius... Never existed.
At least not in 1981. No! Fuck! There's zero
evidence. You got me again, internet! Yeah, the
internet tends to do that to people. Like I said,
there's zero evidence. There's no arcade distributor
logs, no firsthand accounts from the time, no
pictures of the thing. The name Polybius doesn't
even show up anywhere until the late 1990s when
an anonymous post appeared on the arcade collector
site coinop .org. And it's that forum post where
we get pretty much all the information we have
on the game and the legend itself. The Portland
release, the kids getting sick, the men in black.
And from there, the story spread to retro gaming
forums, Usenet threads, and eventually into the
pages of GamePro in 2003. That's when Polybius
jumped from obscure rumor mill shit to a mainstream
urban legend. And it was the perfect blueprint
for this myth to really take off. And the reason
why it felt kind of real at the time was because,
as is true with any good urban legend, a few
real things actually happened in Portland in
1981. Oh. In November. A kid collapsed from a
migraine after a long tempest session. Another
teenager got sick after playing asteroids for
28 hours straight because no shit. But also...
But also around this time, the FBI raided arcades
in Portland. Agents in plain clothes were looking
for machines rigged for illegal gambling. So
government agents really did hang around arcades,
watching and even writing down high scores. So
you combine sick kids with government suits in
arcades, and it's easy to see how rumors of a
quote -unquote dangerous new game under surveillance
could snowball into the story that it is today.
That's fair. But as for the fake company Sinneslöschen,
this seems to have been invented in the 90s.
Researchers traced it back to a German retro
computing hobbyist with the handle CyberYogi,
a guy known for creating elaborate hoaxes about
quote -unquote lost games. He never admitted
to it, but his fingerprints are pretty much all
over the early Polybius lore. Then in 2006, a
man using the handle Stephen Roach claimed online
that he worked on Polybius. He said the game
was pulled after a kid had a seizure and that
the company behind it disbanded shortly after.
And then that kid who had a seizure went on to
join the Goonies. Famous Oregon crew. As which
one? Chunk, naturally. No, it sounded plausible.
until people realized that he offered zero proof
and coinop .org itself labeled him a fraud which
is pretty funny oh that makes me sad why because
i mean you know i want it to be real this is
great it is pretty good but unfortunately it's
not um now um now some years later it just wasn't
meant to be Journalist Kat Despira even uncovered
that a real Stephen Roach in Europe had ties
to shady quote -unquote behavior modification
programs for kids, which only made things creepier
but still didn't prove anything about Polybius
or that the two were even the same person. Like
the Stephen Roach who made the forum post could
have just been using the shady Stephen Roach's
name as an alias, which is more than likely the
case, or they just have the same name, but who
knows. It doesn't help the conspiracy theories
at all. But still, even knowing the story is
fake, it doesn't die. Polybius has appeared on
The Simpsons as a gag cabinet stamped with property
of the U .S. government on it. It's been the
subject of documentaries, YouTube deep dives,
and even a fictionalized podcast series called
The Polybius Conspiracy. Also, an indie developer
named Jeff Minter, he released his own VR game
called Polybius in 2017, deliberately leaning
into the trippy visuals that the legend promised
that the game had. I'd actually heard that some
retro gaming folks actually created their own
fake Polybius game, and you played it through
an emulator. See, I would play the fuck out of
that. Me too. It was like a top -down scroller,
like you were in a spaceship and you were going
up. It was kind of a lot like Asteroids, honestly.
But I fucking love stories like this. There were
games that disappeared. So in the 1980s, with
the release of home consoles, that's what kind
of killed arcades for a lot of people. So there
was tons of arcade games that just never went
any further. And so I was actually following
a Reddit thread about this one game that people
were talking about. It was like a racing game.
And all these people remembered playing it, but
no one could find any record of it. simply because
the arcades all closed and no one really kept
records of what games they had. And then somebody
actually found a cabinet of this game in Australia.
Because for a while, people actually thought
it might have been like a Mandela effect situation
where they remembered playing this game, but
it was like another game entirely. And it turned
out... in a country club in australia they found
this one cabinet of this game and i guess it
was like pretty normal racing game but then if
you crashed like the sky got a little bit more
cloudy the next time you raced and like every
time you crashed i guess it got worse and worse
and it was like really not graphic bloody but
like really um that's just uncomfortable shit
would happen after you crashed This sounds like
a creepypasta that someone would write on a forum
somewhere. It does, but it's real. It's a real
video game. I just can't remember the name of
it. That's pretty rad. If you can remember it,
let me know and I'll put it somewhere. I don't
know. I'll look it up. Stories like that is one
of the reasons why this story kind of perpetuated
the way it did. If you're saying games just disappeared,
who's to say that this game... couldn't have
existed i mean we know it didn't exist but it
helped perpetuate the myth kind of right and
the reason why it endures today is that polybius
is the perfect myth like it taps into the paranoia
of the 80s government mind control shadowy surveillance
the fear that new tech was warping the brains
of our children and it mixes in with like pure
arcade nostalgia it's sinister but it's also
fun to imagine like yeah i I was on board. Yeah,
like it's fun to imagine the idea that like somewhere
out there in some dusty warehouse, there's still
some black cabinet waiting to be plugged in.
And who knows? Maybe there is, maybe there isn't.
Who's to say? But anyway, so yeah, that's the
story of Polybius. I'm very sick, so this is
a shorter episode. I apologize, but hey. We're
here. That's right. You need to get your rest,
but at least we got Polybius out of the way.
Yeah. So how are you feeling so far? I mean,
not so far. That's the end of the story. How
are you feeling? You got any things you want
to elaborate on? I love it. I love stuff like
this. It makes me so happy. It taps into my childhood
memories of going to Dream Machine up in North
Conway and going to Nantasket Beach where there
used to be an arcade. fucking love stories like
this you see the old creepy video games and you
wonder like which ones were really popular back
in the day and which ones people just ignored
so this is this hits all the all the spots for
me hell yeah man i yeah definitely it was for
me too my my dad is really big into like arcade
cabinets and stuff like that for a while he was
buying and fixing fixing up and then like reselling
old arcade cabinets so in my house growing up
We had Streets of Rage, Streets of Rage 2, Bad
Dudes. We had Pac -Man. All those games were
just in my house at all times. So it was super
cool. That's awesome. So this, for me, definitely
is a fun story. But I didn't hear about this
until, obviously, much later after that. I probably
should have hit my dad up. Been like, hey, did
you ever hear about this? And been like... Do
you know anything about this fucking video game
cabinet that's cursed or whatever the fuck? But
yeah, no, it was a fun one. I think I even remember
there being like a TV show that used, it was
kind of like a serialized TV show, kind of like
Black Mirror, but when I was younger in the 90s.
I think I remember there being like a video game
story. where it was like back in the eighties
and it was like a video game that like made people
go crazy. It probably was. I mean, it was a long
time ago. Yeah. Well, yeah. Who knows? I'm out
of breath. Fuck. I'm done. All right. All right.
Let's wrap it up so you can breathe. All right.
Um, well, is, uh, is there anything you want
to plug or say to the audience before I say my
usual spiel? Um, Find me on social media, Sarge
the Destroyer. I'm all over. You just Google
Sarge the Destroyer. I'm the only one who uses
that name. All right. And if you want to follow
us on social media, you can follow us on Cryptic
Cocktail, follow us on TikTok, Cryptic Cocktail
Party. Leave us a five -star rating and review.
It really helps get the show out there. And,
yeah, I think that's it. And with that out of
the way, Sarge, for the first time in two weeks,
do you want to say goodbye? And I love you to
the audience. Of course I do. Audience, goodbye.
And I love you.