The Energon Pub

So I'm sure any gamer worth their salt will have heard of Polybius. The story goes that in a few arcades in Portland, there was a game called Polybius. This game was extremely popular, to the point where fights broke out over who would play it next. However, men in suits regularly visited the cabinets, extracting data from the machine and leaving without a word. Later, people who played it found themselves suffering from hallucinations, nightmares, nausea, and some went completely insane and killed themselves. A few months later and the game was recalled, and has never been seen again.

Now it reads like a typical creepypasta or conspiracy theory. However, there is a great possibility that a game called Polybius actually existed (it was a vector graphics game similar to the Atari game Tempest). While I find it unlikely that the game itself actually brainwashed people (I'll come to that later) the game supposedly used rapidly flashing colours and geometric shapes. Whilst obviously that isn't enough to make people go insane, it is possible to make people feel sick and nauseous (a bit like Faces of Evil-Squaddalah!), so that bit has an element of truth to it. But how about the mind control, government conspiracy thingy? Well, it has more possibility than you would imagine...

Some of you may have heard of the CIA program known as "MK Ultra". This was a CIA operation used to test the possibility for psychological warfare and mind control (this is true, CIA veterans have actually admitted to the existence and nature of the project). Amoungst the many tests were experiments on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD on unwitting subjects. Operatives were trained to unload small amounts of LSD into people's drinks, food etc... to test the effects. Some of the subjects were volunteers, including soldiers and prisoners. Others were ordinary unwitting civilians.

Now LSD can exist in many forms, including a vapour. Could it be that the Polybius machine simply combined the already sickening visuals and sounds with sprayed LSD vapours?

We may never know, as almost all the MK Ultra files have been long since destroyed (not all, however, as it is thanks to a "misfiling" which sounds more to me like a deliberate leak, that the public even knows about it). Truth be told, it is starting to sound like an off the wall "WAKE UP SHEEPLE!" conspiracy theory.

HOWEVER.

I am pretty certain (around 80%) that there was actually a very obscure game called Polybius, and that it may have caused sickness in players (although this is most likely just due to poor design and hideous visuals than actual government meddling). Lavender Town is an example of the centre of a gaming creepypasta that has some grounding in reality (whilst it doesn't cause suicide, it can make you feel ill).

So.

I am now on a mission...

...To make a Let's Play of Polybius.

However, I need your help. If it exists at all, a physical copy of the game would be not only hugely rare, but also hugely expensive (due to it's almost mythical status and the fact it's an arcade cabinet). So getting an actual Polybius cabinet is unlikely to happen. However, there is another option: if I could get an emulator/ROM or whatever of the game, I could play it on my PC. I have yet to actually find anything of the sort (I did find oner Polybius emulator, but it was a prank that consisted of nothing but an, admittedly disorientating, start screen, and a message declaring it was an April Fool).

Which is where YOU come in. If any of you can find some way that I can play this game, I will try and record my playthrough of it, and report my findings to you guys (and YouTube when I get round to making an account).

TL;DR: There's this creepy game called Polybius which may or may not exist. I want to find it and record my playthrough to solve the mystery once and for all. Will you help me?

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

If Polybius existed, a playthrough would be on the net somewere, or at least a photo or two. Like Lavender Town however, there is no disproving the fact that people fell ill whil playing, and it was recalled and redone like Pokemon supposedly was, or renamed and heavely edited and re released like Polybius could have been.

If it were real and kept secret by the government, then good luck interwebs. You want to try and get more info on such an obscure thing though, I should recommend contacting /v/, they'll give you what you want, or disprove it with hard facts and links.

Or just be hostel and call you names. Probably the latter.

You see, a government conspiracy isn't like a truck that you can load facts into, It's a series of tubes!

Well, Polybius does technically exist, to an extent, there's a pc recreation of what it may or may not be http://www.sinnesloschen.com/1.php See here's the thing, if this is highly classified, illegal, "goberment" conspiracy, there's a good chance you wont find anything, without CIA knowing, and "disappearing" . IF it's just any innocent, and poorly designed tempest knockoff that was better than the source material, it could've fallen into obscurity rather quickly due to "sickness" so a ROM would be near impossible to find, assuming the game exists. Oh on the subject of lavender town, the "tone" does exist, however the sickness is part of the placebo effect.