Polybius (urban legend)
Players supposedly suffered from a series of unpleasant side effects, including seizures, amnesia, insomnia, night terrors, and hallucinations.
[9] 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.
[2] Internet writer Patrick Kellogg believes that players claiming to remember having played or seen Polybius since the 1980s may actually be recalling the video game Cube Quest.
[13] In 2007, freeware developers and arcade constructors Rogue Synapse published a free downloadable game titled Polybius for Windows at sinnesloschen.com.
Its design is partly based on a contested description of the Polybius arcade machine posted on a forum by an individual named Steven Roach who claimed to have worked on the original.
[14] To complete the illusion, Rogue Synapse's owner Dr. Estil Vance founded a Texas-based corporation bearing the name Sinnesloschen (without umlaut) in 2007.
[20] 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.
[4] 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).
