Claire’s Tech Talk: Coins and Conspiracies

We’re approaching October. Which means we’re approaching Halloween. Which means scary stories. And even this perfectly non-fictional tech column can tell a terrifying tale. Turn down the lights, grab the nearest blanket, pop Michael Jackson’s Thriller on and brace yourselves for possibly the most unnerving story in video game history.

Once upon a time, there was a website called Coinop.org.

Created by avid gamer Kurt Koller, the site offered information on many different video games – all of which were playable on a traditional arcade machine-style console. Think of it as a kind of Wikipedia for arcades, before Wikipedia was cool. The website still exists today, but as you can probably imagine, isn’t anywhere near as popular now as it was during its peak in the early 2000s.

Obviously it was only so successful then because websites were popular then, but not so much now. That’s why, right?

Well. Coinop.org was the first place (as far as we know) that listed the title, Polybius. Uploaded back in 1998, the year that David Beckham got a red card for kicking an Argentinian, was a suspicious entry about this little-known video game. And it got people talking.

The Entry.

Coinop’s listing on Polybius left a lot to the imagination. It was said to have been released in 1981, with very limited units distributed to arcades in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. Its history was said to be ‘cloudy’, and that children who played it suffered with side effects such as amnesia and night terrors.

Rumours suggested that the game was developed for testing purposes by ‘some kind of weird military tech offshoot group’, and also suggests that the CIA could have had something to do with its algorithms.

Arguably the most disturbing part of Polybius’ listing, is that ‘guys in black coats’ were reported to regularly collect data on how the game was being played – and weren’t interested in the money that the console was making.

The gameplay itself was allegedly, according to the entry on Coinop.org, ‘weird looking’ and ‘abstract’, with action and puzzle genres. It was also claimed to have been copyrighted by ‘Sinneslöschen’ in 1981.

So there are the facts.

But are they really facts?

The Urban Legend.

Many people have investigated the mysterious console that is Polybius. Many people have investigated the, dare I say, ‘fictional’ company known as Sinneslöschen. Many people have investigated tales of children going mad or being led to suicide by playing strange, unknown games in Portland, Oregon.

But everything points right back to the original entry on Coinop.org. There appears to be absolutely no trace of information on this dangerous, bizarre video game – prior to 1998. Given that it was said to have been made in 1981, and ‘witnesses’ appear to exist in the form of arcade operators from back in the day, why did it take 18 years for any information to surface?

You could argue a lot of reasons as to why it was never spoken of. If the FBI or CIA were involved, and they wanted to keep it secret, then it’s safe to say it wasn’t going to be spoken of. Just look at Area 51. Actually don’t look at Area 51, you might get shot*. It’s also a fair point to say that the internet wasn’t really a thing before 1998, and there weren’t many outlets to tell these stories. Someone had to be the first to mention Polybius, so why not Coinop.org?

Because it’s absolute tosh, that’s why. #AllViewsAreMyOwn

Seriously though, it’s not the most plausible of tales. When GamePro magazine printed an article about the myth, they were tipped off by, you guessed it, Kurt Koller. The man who built Coinop.org. Anyone seeing a theme here? Maybe a certain man, whose name rhymes with Bert Goller, wanted to drive a whole load of traffic to his new, oh let’s say, coin game-based website, and thought he’d take advantage of how popular conspiracy theories were.

That’s what British filmmaker and video game journalist Stuart Brown thinks. He created a video on his YouTube channel, Ahoy, called ‘POLYBIUS – The Video Game That Doesn’t Exist’. It’s a long one, but it’s extremely well researched, and Brown himself should really be making Netflix documentaries. He’s studied everything there is to know about the mysterious game – from playing the online ROMs based on Polybius’ gameplay, to researching every pixel in the only screenshot the internet has of its existence.

So, did Stuart Brown find any solid evidence? No.

While there’s no solid evidence that Polybius ever existed, there’s also no solid evidence that it was created as a hoax. Somewhere out there is someone that knows the truth behind this dangerous title. But until then, we’ll never know. But if you ever see a lonely arcade machine called Polybius… don’t play it.