Polybius

In the things I learned today department, a high schooler named Antonio dropped by bavastudio. He was grooving on the old video games in the space, and as it happens he’s a bit of an retro gaming geek so we had a lot to talk about.* There is nothing cooler than kids that dig so deeply into something that their passion for the topic becomes palpable. Oddly that vision of today’s youth is too often buried because the checked-out teen is both a lazier and easier vision to prop up.

Splash screen of the ostensible made-up video game Polybius

Anyway, while I was showing him the collection of 1980s games he asked me if I knew about the urban legend tied to the game Polybius. Admittedly I had not, and he went on to tell me about a story from the the early 80s wherein the US government was experimenting on young kids viz-a-viz a videogame called Polybius. Presumably the game was a way to measure the addictive effects of this relatively new medium. The cabinet was only introduced in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon for just about a month before it entirely disappeared without a trace.

Here is a bit from the Wikipedia article:

The game was popular to the point of addiction,^[2] with lines forming around the machines and often resulting in fights over who would play next. The machines were visited by men in black, who collected unknown data from the machines,^[2] allegedly testing responses to the game’s psychoactive effects. Players supposedly suffered from a series of unpleasant side effects, including seizures, amnesia, insomnia, night terrors, and hallucinations.^[3] Approximately one month after its supposed release in 1981, Polybius is said to have disappeared without a trace.^[1]

He also turned me onto a 2017 documentary about this legend called Polybius: the Video Game that Doesn’t Exist. Turns out it’s a thing and I first learned about it today in my makeshift arcade from a 15 or 16 year old Italian named Antonio that’s obsessed with retro gaming. That’s the world I want to live in.

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*I shit you not, the kid said to me “I really like your aesthetic.” He’s fucking Italian and talking to my stupid American ass about aesthetics in English. I am useless.