Polybius: Myth or Government Mind Control Arcade Game

I have obtained the ROM of polybius, you can download it at tommysworld.110mb.com... under Polybius, it is NOT supported it MAME.

Have got hold of the Polybius ROM, however, does anyone know how to get it working?

reply to post by Anonymous ATS


UPDATE: site moved to www.tommysworld.us.tf

www....(nolink)/?ndttll2fdam this is where to download it.

reply to post by WolfofWar


oK....EVEN WEIRDER. there arestings on youtube...but most are in spanish...what does that tell you. and they are most definately things in it that, such as CONSUME OBEY AUTHORITY SUBMIT. just weird #. if you can find a rom....go to online file hosting or something...but outside of us internnet...like .de or .nt or .jp or w/e. bc if its american its gonna get canned.

I have played this game, not on an original machine but a on a Commodore 64. Though I didn't suffer amnesia or nightmares the game certainly does something to your head.

As you begin it doesn't seem that odd, just many pretty colors and psychedelic patterns, but as you play you get sucked in, you become less aware of your surroundings and your concentration becomes more and more focused on the game to the point where nothing outside of the game matters. I was playing alone one night, the phone(10ft away!) rang eight times while I was playing and I didn't even notice! I played it for 6 hours solid and only stopped when my mother turned it off, though it seemed like I had barely played at all. It is a little creepy the effect it is has on you, but I reckon the only conspiracy is one by the game designers to make you play over and over!

This all happened in 1987, years ago, I was 14 at the time. Someone got a copy of it on tape and copied it and sold them to us.

Using mirrors and a laserdisc or something you could superimpose the vector graphics onto the images with 1980ish tech no doubt... so the tech was there, I think...

The existence of Polybius has been debated for many years. If you read the recent article from a former intelligence agent then not only did it exist but it has a current format already in circulation. He that Polybius was devised to identify children with special attributes. What these were he wouldn't say.

reply to post by Jones156


Where is this at?

reply to post by Jones156


That totally makes sense in fact it's what I was thinking the whole time I was reading this thread, that this was tied into some kind of MK-ULTRA program/experiment dealing with kids.....
I had never heard of this story until today, kind of surprised that I haven't.Is this something not alot of people know about?

reply to post by Skippy1138


Where is the article about this confession? I can't find it.

I agree, I'd like to read this article myself.

reply to post by miragezero


No idea you'll have to ask Jones.I haven't read the article he's referring to.I was just saying that as I was reading the THREAD I kept thinking CIA or MK-ULTRA experiment......

Yeah, I read the Cracked article too, and for some reason that I cant pinpoint (too many video games?), I am chomping at the bit for more regarding "Polybius".

With all the evidence available (not much) and common sense, I personally believe this to be just an urban legend, but the origins of it is what has piqued my curiosity.

While reading the article on Cracked, a bit of my memory seemed to get jogged from my brain archives, and that feeling of "I've heard this story before" kept getting more intense. I have memories of talking about this, or something extremely similar in the early 90's (coin op mortal kombat era, so very early 90's) with my friends. The problem is though, from reading the article and their sources, is that if this is an urban legend, it would seem to be one born of the internet age.

I know that human memory is one of the most unreliable forms of testimony, so I am totally open to the fact that I could be confusing this with something else, but I am curious if anybody else remembers this from the "pre-internet" days as well? If not, no harm done.

I am curious though as to the interview jones was referring to, as I would be very interested in reading it if he or somebody else could provide a source for the claims he claimed were made.

reply to post by Anonymous ATS


I found this youtube video...it looks slightly more genuine than the previous hypno toad-esque siezure fractal fest
www.youtube.com...

A very, very interesting thread. I wish this Polybius thing was real, because I would love to test it out. I would love to!

Oh well...guess we'll never really know. If any top-secret government sector had anything to do with it, the game has been made to never have existed at all. That's what they are good at...making things disappear forever.

Like the next man here, I too was as interested in the Polybius legend, as many others. However, after doing much research on the subject, over an on/off period of four years, I have come to the conclusion that the Polybius legend is a myth. It likely started out as a reaction to some defective cabinets of Tempest that gave a few epileptic people seizures, coupled with some speculation and rumors. However, some of it is likely based on partial truth. The supposed company, Sinnesloschen, which doesn't exist, may have come into the legend because of the game Poly-Play, which met a similar fate, yet still exists - albeit with a very small number of machines remaining. Also, Poly-Play was created in East Germany (specifically, the German Democratic Republic), by a company that existed during the time that the Soviet Union was still in power - VEB Polytechnik. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of the game cabinets were completely dismantled, and, out of the 1,500 or so cabinets produced, only a few escaped destruction, and are still around today. Poly-Play is emulated in MAME; however, claims that the game is no longer under copyright do not seem to be provable at this time, one way or another; it is only generally believed to be in the public domain. The remains of the company were salvaged after the fall of the Soviet Union, and a new company was created - Polytechnik Frankenberg GmbH, with some speculating that the copyrights for Poly-Play would have, naturally, gone to them. On this detail, I have no further information; however, there is a rumor going around that the "PCB" (you'll see why I put it in quotes in a moment) contains the word "Polybius" written on it. Upon visiting a website from an owner of one of the machines, I noticed that he had posted many photos of it, even from the inside. This includes the PCBs, of which there are not one, but four, each likely controlling a different aspect of the machine. All of the images are, unfortunately, low-resolution, created back in 2004 or so, before most people could afford a high-resolution camera; however, the person states that the characters on the PCB chips (and presumably, any writing on the PCB boards themselves) are all in Russian; therefore, if Polybius is written on any of those PCBs, it would be written as Полибий - using Cyrillic characters, the character set used for the Russian language. The site for the Poly-Play machine, including said images, can be found here:
www.andys-arcade.net...
The author states that he no longer has the Poly-Play machine, having needed to sell it, and, after contacting him, I found out that there are no higher resolution images that he created during the time that he owned it. However, I am in correspondence with him, in order to see if he can remember anything that looks like the Russian characters above, and if confirmed, this would help greatly in narrowing down the origins of the Polybius legend. Regarding further connections to Poly-Play, I have no additional information at this time, but will post an update when I receive more information from him.

Regarding the supposed ROM at the top of this page, I must immediately put this rumor to bed; I have tested it myself, and it is a simple hoax, nothing more. Before any potential slings and arrows come my way, I will show you how I know this. About four years ago, I went to the same site, and invested some time and energy into extracting those files, so as to discern their contents. Now, I'm not a hacker; I have very little programming skills, but after some careful thought, I decided to have a look in MAME's source code. Upon examining the code, I looked under the drivers for Tempest, and located the CRC32, MD5, and SHA1 hash values for each of the files mentioned in the code, and compared them with the hash values for the supposed Polybius ROM files. Upon comparing, the values were a perfect match. However, not being satisfied with only this, I also decided to compile my own build of MAME, and inserted the files, one at a time, pointing them to the polybius.zip in the code, and got an exact match when I ran it. What's more, the filenames in polybius.zip were exactly identical to the filenames inside the Tempest ROM zips. However, it appears that, in the last four years, the code for Tempest has changed, including more accurate ROM dumps, and not even the filenames match anymore, much less the hash values. Fortunately, I have saved all of the evidence, and if further inquiries are requested, I will most definitely upload it for you all, so you can look into it yourselves.

I leave you with a couple videos on the subject of the myth, which will give you more information.
www.youtube.com...
(Containing, among other things, a follow-up to the Steven Roach interview.)
www.youtube.com...
(Potential connection to Poly-Play)
Good day.

Excuse me for the double post, but by the time I realized a very slight error I'd made, it was too late to edit my initial post. It seems that, on Poly-Play, the four PCBs are actually four IC boards plugged into the system, and then there's the main board. Not sure if there's much writing on it, but there's Russian writing on every one of the chips on those IC boards. Again, I apologize for the double post - there was a minimal amount of confusion on my behalf.