If you’ve been in the arcade community for any amount of time, you may have heard of a game titled “Polybius.” Released only in a small arcade in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, it is infamous for causing severe side effects in those who played – nightmares, amnesia, depression, suicide… the works. Little else has been known for decades, but an employee of the developers’ company recently disclosed several details about it. The first surprise is who actually developed it. An obscure company named “Sinneslöschen” is listed on the title screen, and many speculated the game was commissioned to an unknown game developer by the United States military for unknown purposes. No matter what it says on the title screen, however, they actually hired a different company, one you’ve almost certainly heard of: Nintendo.
As you may know, Donkey Kong was Shigeru Miyamoto’s first game. It was developed in 1981, the same year as Polybius. Nintendo had been hurt by overestimating the appeal of their most recent game, Radarscope. Donkey Kong was a desperate gamble – an unconventional game made by an unknown designer – that could make or break the company… or so we assumed, anyway. It turns out that Nintendo had another ace up their sleeve. Hiroshi Yamauchi, then president of Nintendo, had heard about the U.S. military’s desire to build a game to be used for psychological attacks. He managed to get the contract and ordered Miyamoto to create the game, using the opportunity to make the game he really wanted to (Popeye, though it was later changed to Donkey Kong due to copyright) as incentive.
Miyamoto was given some kind of outline by the military, which has to this day never been discussed with anyone else. The normally cheerful man became quiet and withdrawn, not letting anyone (even Yamauchi) see his work on the game. The strict and forceful Yamauchi reportedly stormed into Miyamoto’s office to demand he reveal his progress. Nintendo’s president came out of the room, looking frightened. Miyamoto had somehow gotten him to back down, which those employed at Nintendo at the time unanimously agree had never happened before or since. Regardless, Polybius was finished and all the necessary information for production was handed to an army representative who came to Nintendo’s office. No one else saw the game. Miyamoto remained withdrawn for some time after, locking himself in his office every day until he emerged with a completed version of Donkey Kong. He was back to his cheerful self, with no acknowledgement of his strange behavior before. He had recovered, but the saga of Polybius was just beginning.
Creating a game takes a great deal of work. How Miyamoto managed to hide traces of his work on Polybius is quite baffling to the people aware of it. The solution to this was recently discovered by a Nintendo employee. In the employees’ lounge of Nintendo of Japan, there is a Donkey Kong arcade machine – one of the very first manufactured. Donkey Kong was made from modified Radarscope hardware, and it seems Miyamoto used this trick to hide remains of Polybius. A few months ago, an employee was playing the arcade machine. He was distracted by something, so he played in an unusual manner. The first sign something was happening was that the line on Mario’s face appeared to curve downward, as if frowning.
The employee, intrigued, kept playing in this odd way. The graphics started to fall apart. Pixels would ghost, leaving images behind when moved. Other times, they would move away from their usual places. While this was happening, the employee was startled by an angry shout. Miyamoto had entered the room and was furious. He yelled at the terrified man to never touch the machine again, and yanked the cabinet’s cord from the wall. Everyone in the lounge was stunned; Miyamoto was never known to act like this. He was known for being friendly and calm. After he regained control of himself, he apologized. There was nothing to worry about, he claimed. He was upset about something else and had lost control of his emotions. However, this employee had heard rumors of Polybius’ development, the last time he acted in such a strange manner, and didn’t believe him. He knew he was on to something. Later that day, he managed to obtain a disc with a copy of the original Donkey Kong code and took it home.
He copied the code to his computer and started looking into it. He couldn’t find anything of note, however, so he instead focused on playing the game and recreating the situation from the arcade machine. Like string unraveling, he found more and more oddities as he came closer to what he’d done earlier. As suspected, the game eventually devolved and led to a title screen displaying one word: Polybius.
The man posted what he had done up to this point online. The last thing anyone heard from him was that he was about to play the mythical game. It is unknown what happened next. He was found the next day, deceased via suicide. It was one of the most gruesome ever reported in Japan.
Someone who lived close by had been among those who read the man’s progress reports online and had saved them. His computer had been destroyed some time during the period in which he committed suicide, so the police found no evidence that any game was involved. The person who gave the disc to that employee confronted Miyamoto, showing him proof that Polybius was involved. Using it for blackmail, he managed to obtain an off-the-record summary of the game, which has since been made public online. The leaked details of the game, at this point, detailed something similar to Tempest, with the enemies being amoebas. The Tempest part is actually true – the game takes place against a solid black background where you control a human head that moves back and forth, shooting enemies that come at you with scaling that emulates 3D movement. The enemies are easy to mistake for amoebas, but on closer inspection are actually faces with different expressions on them. Miyamoto gave them some names and descriptions:
Hope: A twisted, threatening smile with no eyes.
Love: A blank expression, with lifeless eyes.
Truth: A sad face, with red tears visible below the eyes.
In a novel twist for the time, each enemy is dealt with differently. Your character’s bullets only work on the Hope enemy. Love should be avoided. Truth should collide with your character. There is a bright flash whenever you fail to do the right thing to an enemy, but the game does not keep track of lives and can only end if no buttons are pressed for thirty seconds.
The flashes have a physical and mental effect on the player. Due to this, most players will be compelled to quit after two or three. Three flashes make most players feel dizzy and nervous, as well as cause vivid nightmares for the next few weeks. If a player takes a few more, they will forget not only the game, but most things necessary for independent life. Players who are stricken with this kind of amnesia will have to be cared for for the rest of their lives. A very strong-willed person may be able to resist the amnesia stage and keep playing. After a few more flashes, they will be rendered unconscious for a time. After recovery, they will madly do anything in their power to commit suicide. The army kept one person who experienced this alive, actually. After nearly thirty years, he still must be constantly watched to prevent him from killing himself.
This was all the information Miyamoto was willing to give, but there were still quite a few unanswered questions about the game. With this information released to the internet, though, the hunt for more was on. Fortunately, someone claiming to be involved in the project has come forward online. For obvious reasons, he does not want his identity revealed and has avoided going into personal details beyond that.
Polybius used a pattern of lights the military had been working on to produce an effect similar to epilepsy in a person viewing them. The technique had been refined to the point where the light pattern could cause specific effects depending on how they appeared. For the flashes of light to have the desired effect, however, they had to be viewed with a degree of concentration. This is why a video game was chosen for the testing process. The arcade machine was to be used to test the effects on a wide variety of people without informing them of the seriousness of the experiment. Obviously, the plan was to test Polybius on innocent, unknowing people was horrible from an ethical standpoint. The rather cold Yamauchi was willing to go along with it for the money that would save his company, but Miyamoto wouldn’t. As the designer, the true nature of the game couldn’t be hidden from him. Miyamoto was shown three flashes immediately after being assigned to the project. He would keep getting them whenever the effects faded, until he finished the game. This was the cause of his odd behavior during the game’s development.
The natural question, after hearing all this, is whether the experiment was a success. The army detained several people who had suffered the effects during the game’s short test in Portland and, without exception, every last test subject responded in the expected way. However, attempts to create an antidote to the effects were unsuccessful. Tricking people into playing an arcade machine obviously wans’t a very practical way to deploy a weapon, either. Due to this, Polybius faded from memory…until, that is, technology made a few advancements. The level of concentration needed to make the flashes have their effect can be attained by reading text. The flashes themselves are fairly easy to display on any type of monitor, too. Now that computer monitors displaying text and linked to a limitless network are so common, I’m sure you can put two and two together. However, the military probably isn’t going to send flashes into your computer.
Then again, the secret is public now, and the flashes CAN be found in a common arcade game.
Written by KI Simpson.
The game can be downloaded here.
Crappypasta 