Don’t Look Under The Internet
Episode Three
Polybius
[intro music plays]
[voices fade in as music fades out]
Mike: Boys, let’s fucking do this thing. Hit record on that gosh dang laptop.
Jason: Oh, dude, I’ve been recording for like a minute and a half.
Mike: Right, no doubt. Alright, well let’s get into the mix, boys.
Jason: Yeah! I mean, are you guys all ready to go?
Doug: Yeah.
Mike: Mhm. Born ready. I’m Ron fucking Swanson.
Jason: Doug, you wanna…?
Doug: Yeah. Welcome back, everybody, to another riveting episode of Don’t Look Under The Internet. We are here today to talk about a pretty interesting topic.
Mike: Hang on --
Doug: I think it’s really great.
Mike: Aren’t you gonna introduce us, Doug?
Jason: I think he’s in the process of doing that?
Mike: Like our name?
Doug: Like our podcast name?
Mike: No, my name.
Doug: Well, you’re different every time, so I was gonna let you take it from there, but I just want everyone to know what we’re talking about today which is, uh, Kanye Quest.
Jason: Yessir. Kanye Quest was that video game, right? Where supposedly a cult was involved?
Doug: Yeah.
[silence]
Jason: [laughs] What is the face?
Doug: You okay?
Mike: We’re talking about Kanye Quest right now?
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: Yeah, that’s the episode we’re doing.
[more silence, Jason laughs]
Mike: I thought we were doing Polybius?
Doug: What the hell is that?
Jason: No, I thought we were doing Polybius next week? Or two weeks? Whatever is was.
Mike: No…?
Doug: Well, all my notes are on Kanye Quest.
Mike: Oh… Uh… Mine too…?
Jason: Yeah. [laughs]
[silence]
Doug: Do you want to introduce the topic for us?
Mike: Yeah… It’s Kanye Quest…
[laughter]
Mike: Well, first of all, hi.
Jason: Hello.
Doug: Hello.
Mike: Jason, hello.
Jason: Hi, I’m Jason.
Mike: I’m Doug. Go ahead.
Doug: I’m Mike.
Mike: No, you’re Doug.
Doug: Right.
Jason: [laughs] God, we are not -- we are doing fantastic right now.
Doug: Today is a good day.
Mike: And my name is Mike. You can call me Micycle.
Jason: Okay, let’s --
Doug: Mike-cycle.
Mike: Micycle.
Doug: Alright, so, we are not actually doing Kanye Quest today.
Jason: No.
Doug: That was just a, uh --
[Jason laughs]
Doug: -- a little jokey, pranky-prank --
Mike: Scared me.
Doug: -- that we played on Mike.
Mike: When I tell you -- if you turn up the audio enough, you can probably hear my heart just thump thump thump thump.
[laughter]
Doug: Uh, no.
Mike: I was panicking so hard. Like, I did no research for Kanye Quest.
Doug: You were like “Aw, piss…”
Jason: All the color just drained out of your face. [laughs]
Doug: I know, your eyes -- you were like “Whaaattt??”
Jason: Like “UHM?”
Doug: Mission accomplished.
Jason: No, we’re actually doing Polybius. It’s a very, very, very well-known -- I think it’s been dubbed pretty much as an urban legend at this point?
Mike: Poly-bias.
Jason: But I mean, you can find evidence either way. It’s, well, you’ll see. It’s very interesting, especially for those that are interested in early, creepy video games. This would be -- you would definitely take an interest in this guy.
Mike: Let’s take a moment to -- so you have Pac-Man, right?
Jason: Yeah.
Mike: You’ve got your Froggers. You got other ones, like uhhhhhh -- like Mickey Mouse and the Ronald McDonald game.
Jason: Oh, yeah.
Mike: It’s like Ronald McDonald’s Funhouse or some shit? The one where --
Doug: The one that you got out of a Happy Meal or whatever?
Mike: Yeah. And then you have Polybius. An equally well-known game. Household, I would say. Almost up there with the Playstation 2.
[laughter]
Doug: The Playstation 2 is a pretty big urban legend, so I’ll give you that one.
Jason: Also the rumor was that every purchase of a Playstation 2 came with a free Polybius cabinet. [chuckles]
Doug: They just don’t want it anymore.
Jason: They don’t want ‘em.
Doug: They’re like “Just take it, please. Please take it.”
Mike?: For those of you who don’t know what Polybius is: essentially, back in 1981, it’s a very old arcade cabinet. I’m looking at you guys like you fucking don’t know what I’m talking about, we’ve been doing research on this.
Jason: No, we do, we just -- you said ‘essentially’.
Doug: And it made me smile because I didn’t say it.
Mike: Another ticker. It’s an old arcade cabinet. The gameplay was said to be very similar to Tempest and old vector games. Came out in 1981. It was rumored that playing this game would cause a lot of severe health issues: migraines, they would cause hallucinations. It would give you essentially the same type of effects that, like, LSD would. The other rumor is that the CIA and the FBI would frequently take information from Polybius cabinets which is kind of spooky. Can you imagine being in a fucking arcade just playing, like, I don’t know, Tetris or some shit? And being like “Oh, dang, getting the high score!” Some dude in black, Tommy Lee Jones, comes out of nowhere just like “Uh, excuse me, kid. I gotta get to that Polybius cabinet over there.”
Jason: “Excuse me, small child.”
Mike: Yeah and then just hooks up a whackadoo into the back of the cabinet and just a bunch of fucking 1s and 0s go into his little -- I’m assuming it’s like a big ol’ --
Jason: Handheld.
Mike: Yeah, handheld whatsiwhosit.
Jason: A Blackberry.
Mike: Yeah!
Doug: The Men in Black need Little Timmy to run the CIA because of his high score.
[laughter]
Jason: Exactly.
Mike: Uhm, but, my favorite urban legend about this is the whole, like, CIA/Men in Black bits about it. I think that’s my favorite of all the parts of the legend. Cuz it’s just so fun! Anytime the Men in Black come in --
Jason: Oh, yeah.
Mike: -- you know it was juicy.
Jason: You’ve seen the videos about the Men in Black, right?
Doug: Oh, God.
Mike: Which ones, there’s multiple?
Jason: There are multiple. My favorite one has to be -- there’s a video where a hotel concierge is standing, er, sitting at the desk and this very tall man in a black suit, black sunglasses, and a fedora --
Mike: Oh, that’s Valient Thorr.
Jason: Might be.
Doug: Yeaaahhhh.
Jason: So what happens is is he walks up and he says something to the concierge -- it doesn’t have any audio, it’s just a security camera -- and he says something to the concierge and she gets, like, immediately upset and then pulls a gun on this guy and tells -- I’m guessing? -- tells him to get the fuck out. He leans over and he says something and she immediately straightens up, disassembles the gun, puts it into like different pieces next to her, walks around, and just follows him out to his car and she’s never seen again.
Mike: Oh, she’s a sleeper. Oooohhhh flim flam.
Jason: It’s --
Mike: We’ve got sleepers working at the Hyatt Hotel.
Jason: There’s some cool stuff on the Men in Black, but --
Doug: We can literally do a whole episode on the Men in Black.
Mike: And fucking know what? We probably will.
Doug: Probably, yeah.
Mike: That’s right up our alley. Uhm, but I guess, for a general sense that is what Polybius is. Just an old arcade game. A lot of the fun mystery comes from who made it as well.
Jason: There’s actually -- so there’s a lot of speculation around that. I mean, so if you look at the very -- the screenshots you get of what the game looks like when you boot it up, it pops up in big block letters saying “Polybius”. There’s insert card/credits, however many credits are there, and says 1981 Sinneslöschen.
Mike: Props on the pronunciation.
Jason: I listened to that --
Mike: I was reading it and I was like ‘sin’ -- ‘sin es losh’ -- ‘sin es lotion’
Jason: Sine-slushie
Mike: Sine-slushie.
[laughter]
Jason: No, so it’s Sinneslöschen. If you look that term up, you’re not gonna find anything.
Doug: No.
Jason: Unless you really, really dig -- and I did find one company in like 2008 that held the title of Sinneslöschen in the US but it was only for like six months and they don’t even show it on the registered, you know, businesses.
Mike: They’re not part of the Better Business Bureau?
Jason: Right, exactly.
Doug: No, there’s… no info.
Jason: None whatsoever.
Mike: I wonder if -- so, spoilers, for like the end of the episode but, some fans made Polybius fan-made games. I wonder if someone took the name Sinneslöschen to make the game to make it look more, like, authentic? You know?
Jason: So, there’s -- that’s possible. There are some little tiny strings that are attached to the world Sinneslöschen. I know I didn’t -- we’ll talk about some of the companies that are thrown out there a little bit later, I don’t wanna kinda go into all that before we kinda know what we’re dealing with, which is this -- what we have is, like Mike said, we have this video game that was around in the 80s in only these select arcades.
Mike: Ooh! Sorry to interrupt --
Jason: No, you’re good, what’s up?
Mike: All this takes place in fucking Portland.
Doug: Second Portland episode!
Mike: Yeah! Portland again! Which, I don’t want to, like, detrain off of this, but we do have a small update on our --
Doug: Oh!
Jason: Oh my God, I completely forgot about that.
Mike: Yes! We have a small update on Strange Dreams.
Doug: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason: Sorry, everybody but we’re gonna get -- yeah, so, segue! You guys may remember we did an episode on the Willamette Valley/Happy Valley --
Mike: I hope they remember, it was only two episodes ago.
[laughter]
Jason: They could have my memory. If they have my memory, there’s no chance.
Mike: Yeaahhhh.
Doug: And they’re boned.
Jason: But, yeah, so, I remember telling you guys that I didn’t get a single response back from the dream survey. Well… I did.
Mike: This was like a few days ago.
Jason: Yeah, it was not too long ago and here, let me pull up the text right now.
Mike: While he’s pulling up the text, too, I just had a little bit I wanted to include with my Erratas story.
Jason: Oh, yeah, what’s up?
Mike: A little update with Erratas I forgot to mention, which was our last episode. When I was doing research for Erratas, my internet kept crashing when I kept looking it up on YouTube --
Jason: That’s right.
Mike: -- and then my whole YouTube app on my Firestick got corrupted. I had to shut down the Firestick, I had to restart it, I had to delete the YouTube app, add it back on again, and when I tried to look up Erratas again, the search categories were just all blank. It was just a bunch of, like, error Xs. And then I had to keep restarting YouTube over and over and over.
Jason: Somebody’s trying to Errat you.
Mike: Apparently. But back to your text message?
Jason: Uh, yeah, so it was on Friday, February 5th. I got a text back. So the last text we were sent from them was just a “Th;ank you for leaving a voicemail and participating in the Happy Valley Dream Survey.” And then I asked “Who runs the dream survey?”. We got nothing back. Until Friday, February 5th, where I literally just got one message back, just says “Me.” And that’s it.
Mike: Not a whole lot to go off of but that’s still pretty fun.
Jason: Well actually it tells us a decent amount. It tells us that these aren’t purely automated messages.
Mike: Yeah, that sounds --
Jason: There’s somebody looking at these. That’s not just sent out to whoever calls. Somebody is going -- and it’s still active --
Doug: Yeah, yeah.
Jason: -- which is the big thing. I mean, this is what, six years later?
Doug: Did you message them back after me?
Jason: Yeah. So after they replied with me, I asked “What’s the weirdest dream submission you’ve gotten? How do you know Karl?” And the last one being: “What are the right questions?” Because I did read there was someone who received the reply “9goeh5jit”. That’s what they asked.
Mike: And that went into the whole 5th of September.
Jason: Exactly. I’m trying to see if that still leads there or what. But we’ll keep you guys updated if this is actually still active. As of right now, I’ve got nothing else in my inbox.
Mike: Yeah, but fucking Portland, man. All the weird shit happens in Portland. Keep being weird, Portland.
Jason: Yeah, keep Portland weird, please.
Mike: Stay paranoid, Portland.
Jason: Yes.
Mike: I did the thing!
Jason: Please and thank you. Uh, what were we talking about?
[laughter]
Doug: We were talking about --
Mike: We were on like, who created --
Doug: Sinneslöschen.
Mike: Yeah, Sinneslöschen.
Jason: Oh, right. Right, right, right. So, yeahh. So Sinneslöschen is this company that credits itself for making Polybius in the first place as according to their title screen. There’s actually a little bit more to it. As we can’t find anything on Sinneslöschen as a company -- no records, no nothing -- we kinda have to look at a few other people, possibilities, people who might be able to -- and the first, the very first one that was discovered is somebody named Steven Roach and he actually -- so he was the self-confessed designer of 1981’s Polybius. But, again, it’s just his word -- it’s him just coming out and saying “Hey, I’m Steven Roach, and it’s me.”
Mike: Hi, Steve.
Jason: So I have one of -- part of the unedited post in front of me.
Doug: From where?
Jason: Frooommmm -- so the website that this is on, it’s literally retrobitch.files.wordpress. So it’s just a --
Doug: It’s like a backend.
Jason: Right.
Doug: Cuz Wordpress is like the backend of a website.
Jason: Right, exactly. So he’s just giving his confessional and it literally starts with him saying “I think it’s about time I laid this to rest.” And then he goes into -- and it’s by username Steven Roach -- He goes, and he outlines how he is -- his name, Steven Roach, and he’s permanently based in the Czech Republic and he goes to say
Mike: That’s not Portland.
Jason: No, that’s not Portland at all. He said that it was -- the game was created between him and a few other amateur programmers in 1978 that worked on component parts for printed circuit boards and so programming is a limited but very profitable sideline. Then he goes to say that he was approached in 1980 by a South American company that shall remain nameless for legal purposes to develop an idea they had for producing an arcade game with a puzzle element that centered around a new approach to video game graphics.
Mike: Was that company Amazon?? Aahh? Jeff Bezos, you dragon scum.
Jason: Jeff Bezos made Polybius.
Mike: Hoarding your mountain of gold.
Jason: So this post is huge, like this is the last half of it.
Doug: Oh, God.
Jason: Yeah, I’m not reading all of that. There’s no fucking way.
Mike: For those of you that can’t see cuz you’re not in the room and you’re listening --
Jason: No, they are!
Mike: -- through your ears.
Jason: Would you look around before you fucking say shit?
Mike: Oh, hey! You got here on time! Hey, you over there --
Jason: C’mon, man.
Mike: -- driving your car right now. But, uh, he just showed us a big ol’ list of paper with multiple sentences highlighted.
Jason: And I’m not even gonna read those. So basically what he goes to say is he claims ownership of this company, he claims ownership of the game in cooperation with a few other designers. He goes and he basically verifies all the things that the myth verifies. Like, the Men in Black, the uh --
Mike: The MK Ultra.
Jason: Yeah, the MK Ultra. The CIA programs and that kind of stuff. So the funny part about him mentioning all these things is the strong ties that this has to things such as MK Ultra and if you think about what Polybius claims, they kinda claim very similar stuff.
Doug: Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s -- the two biggest theories around the game are, as we already mentioned, are the Men in Black and MK Ultra. For those of you who don’t know what the Men in Black are, which I would be very surprised if you didn’t --
Mike: It’s a lot different from the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones movie.
Jason: No, it’s exactly the same.
[laughter]
Jason: Can you stop lying to our fucking audience, Mike?
Doug: They don’t appreciate it.
Mike: They’re not always that nice and funny. A lot [voice cracks] of the time -- sorry, I’m going through puberty -- A lot of the times they’re a lot more sinister.
Jason: Yeah.
Mike: And usually aliens. Alien people.
Doug: Yeah, that’s -- you know, in a nutshell, they’re like a secret agency, I guess, that does kinda have their own agenda with things that, you know, us little people don’t ever get to know about. So in regards to Polybius, legend has it that these Men in Black would come into the arcades and, as Mike said, stick their whobajimoobers into the machines --
[laughter]
Doug: -- and take out some kind of data. Now we don’t know what this data is, we don’t know what they were exactly grabbing, but --
Mike: They’re finding the address to your dad’s house.
Doug: They probably have that. They probably know where I’m at right now.
Jason: They’re probably listening to this exact conversation.
Doug: So pretty much just as fast as the games were put into the arcades, the Men in Black took it out. I think it was, what, two or three months that they were there?
Jason: Yeah, not very long.
Mike: Not very good for profits. Can’t get that many quarters in two months.
Doug: They weren’t even taking money, as far as we know.
Mike: Damn.
Doug: They probably took the money but they don’t need it.
Jason: No, they don’t.
Doug: They use space cash.
Mike: It was the 80s, a quarter could -- [chuckles] Space cash.
Jason: Space cash.
Mike: They use it at a space bar.
[laughter]
Mike: Uhm, I mean, Starbucks. Bam! Nailed it.
Jason: God, you did it.
Doug: Gottem. Mike drop that one. But I mean, as far as the Men in Black are concerned, we have accounts of Men in Black showing up but are they the same Men in Black that we all know and love? Are they just some government officials in black suits that happen to have come in and did this?
Mike: Just a fancy business man who really wanted to get into the arcade before he had to go home to his wife and three kids.
Doug: Some guy just making it harder for children to play. But yeah, we don’t know. It could’ve been, you know -- they could’ve been conditioning people as a form of brainwashing for sleeping agents or similar techniques to what, you know, MK Ultra happens to be. Which, if you don’t know what MK Ultra is --
Jason: Please.
Doug: -- it was literally the CIA mind control program. That’s another one we could literally do a whole episode on.
Jason: Yeah.
Mike: Wasn’t the Unabomber part of MK Ultra? Like, wasn’t he experimented on? That’s why he went so crazy?
Jason: He claimed that.
Mike: Yeah.
Jason: I think they -- I don’t really know as much about the Unabomber as I’d like to.
Mike: Wasn’t he the guy that put like arson -- er, anthrax in envelopes and mailed them to people? Didn’t he do that?
Doug: I think that was a different person.
Mike: He took the band Anthrax and shoved them into an envelope --
Jason: [laughs] Yes.
Doug: You know, that’s not a bad fear, Mike.
Mike: I know.
Doug: We can roll with it, that’s fine.
Jason: Yeah, so the band Anthrax was the Unabomber.
Doug: I’m gonna write this down...
[laughter]
Doug: But yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, we could literally talk about MK Ultra forever and we would totally get off topic. Which we have done quite a few times already in this episode, but --
Jason: We can’t help it, Doug.
Doug: I know.
Mike: I have the attention span of a fly.
Jason: ….you what? What did you say?
Mike: I have the attention span of a fly.
Jason: Oh. Gotcha.
Mike: Can you not hear me?
Jason: See, I couldn’t even pay attention to you for the rest of your sentence.
Doug: Went in one ear and right out the other. So quickly. But yeah, these arcade cabinets -- I’m trying to get us back on track here.
[laughter]
Doug: These arcade cabinets are highly likely to have been used to flash unsuspecting kids’ minds with radio waves or electromagnetic waves that could’ve been a form of this testing.
Mike: Or 5G.
Doug: Yeah. Go burn your local 5G tower down, people.
Jason: Yes and then tell us what happens, please.
Mike: The 5G will make our kids gay.
Jason: It’ll make your frog’s kids gay.
Mike: Oh no! That’s worse!
[laughter]
Doug: But, yeah, essentially the last thing about MK Ultra -- because like I said, we’re gonna go way off topic here -- is it ran from 1951 to about 1973. This game came out about 1981. Up until 2018, new information has been continuously sourcing out from MK Ultra testing, so like really the possibilities of us knowing when MK Ultra stopped -- it’s kinda been questioned.
Mike: If it even did.
Doug: Yeah, if it has or has not. We don’t know, actually. So those are like the main two theories that kind of surround this machine that we can’t really confirm or deny, so. Pretty exciting stuff.
Mike: It is exciting.
Jason: It’s kinda -- that’s what I like about this though.
Mike: The excitement?
Jason: Yeah. The excitement, just the uncertainty about it all, you know? Like, there’s no, I don’t know -- it’s hard to find concrete evidence one way or the other.
Doug: You know, it’s so much information yet such little information.
Mike: Yeah, it’s very much like, for example, like where it came from There’s so much little stuff -- there’s nothing like, huge, you know what I mean? Like they don’t tell you the warehouse it was built in or anything?
[Jason opens a can]
Mike: Yeah, yup, that’s your part of --
Jason:
Mike: No, you have to sip it into the mic for maximum ARSM.
Jason: Oh, right. So you mean like this? [slurps]
Mike: Mmm. The folks at home will love that.
Jason: Fresh can of --
Mike: Pebis.
Jason: Pe -- what? No.
Mike: Crispy pebis.
Jason: Crispy Polybius.
Doug: Uhm.
Jason: Crispy-lybius.
Mike: But, for example, where Polybius came from -- the first mentions of Polybius, it’s kind of just a crap shoot? There’s no true one place where it came from. Some people claim that the legend started on Usenet in 1994, but if you go through Usenet, you can’t really find much of it on anything. The only real first post you find is on a place on Coinop.com -- sorry, .org. Sorry, I forgot it. But -- I know, embarrassing.
[Jason laughs]
Mike: I’m so sorry, everyone at home.
Doug: .gov
Mike: But that’s where you find the first actual post, is on Coinop.org. But people -- you know, the legend goes it was found on usenet in the 90s. Other people are like “Oh, yeah, people have just been talking about it forever” and that’s how the legend got started. It’s just word of mouth. You know, like that fucking -- that hot sauce that everybody likes. What’s it called?
Jason: Da Bomb?
Mike: No, the one with the chicken on the label? And it’s like super popular? It’s not hot sauce, it’s that other stuff. What’s it called… red sauce?
Jason: Sriracha?
Mike: Sriracha. It’s that really popular brand. Sriracha? No commercials. It’s all word of mouth. Just like Polybius. Polybius, Sriracha. Connection.
Jason: I’m sure there might be some in Japan or something.
Mike: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no.
Jason: I didn’t think about it like that. [laughs]
Mike: Yeah, yeah. The only other mention -- the mention on Coinop-- the only way that it’s mentioned is you see a copyright date for a name Polybius. The copyright date is 1981, which is when this whole legend started. But if you look it up, there’s no actual copyright in existence. So if it was copyrighted at one point, it’s not anymore. It’s kind of free game at the moment. So even it’s origins are muffled and there’s not really much to go off of, you know? It’s just one of those rabbit holes that don’t have an ending.
Jason: So there’s several --
Mike: The before internet times, there was no records of shit.
Jason: And then -- so actually, researching this topic kinda made me more aware to that. So I used to use Usenet, way waaayyy --
Mike: Way to date yourself.
Jason: I know, I know.
Mike: You’re gonna use AltaVista next. Use the Xanadu hyperlink project from the 60s.
Jason: So I did use AltaVista, but --
[laughter]
Jason: Thank you so much. It’s hard to think about a time where you can’t go to your computer or your phone and type in whatever the fuck you want and get nine hundred thousand search results for it.
Mike: Yeah, would’ve had to go to the library like some loser.
Jason: Yeah so this is back -- this is the start up of the internet, like it’s -- not start up, but it’s closer to the origination point of it so they haven’t really figured out how to sort stuff or how to archive stuff properly.
Mike: Well, the internet is a fad. It’s gonna go away.
Jason: Yeaah, that’s how they all thought. And now it literally runs our lives. So it’s kinda cool to dig back through these old, old, ooollddd internet archives and see what kind of organization systems they had cuz they were bad.
Mike: And to see what these websites looked like back then. Not to tangent off, but I’m imaging Usenet in 1994 wasn’t the prettiest looking website.
Jason: No.
Mike: Hell, if you want an example of an untouched website -- the Space Jam website is still up from 1996 and it has not been touched since. You can look it up.
Doug: Really?
Mike: It looks exactly the same as it did. If you want phone wallpapers, they have wallpapers on there like Bugs Bunny and all them and they’re, like, extremely high resolution for no fucking reason. [chuckles] And they’re really good -- they’re really cool looking wallpapers. And you can go on mobile too and it works on mobile, which is odd. But fun fact. Look that up, everybody.
Jason: Space Jam dot what? Dot com?
Mike: Yeah, just spacejam.com
Doug: No, dot gov, sorry.
Mike: I’m [chuckles] -- yeah. I’m worried that they might update it because of the new Space Jam movie.
Doug: Oh, those bitches.
Mike: I hope they don’t though.
Jason: They’d fucking better not.
Mike: They better not, otherwise I’m gonna go kiss LeBron James on the lips.
Jason: You have a lot of kissing to do.
Mike: I have a lot of kissing to do. I gotta kiss your dad.
Doug: Alright, do you need help? Is there something you’re not telling us?
Jason: Are you okay?
Doug: Everything good at home?
Mike: Yeah, everything’s great. I just love kissing.
[laughter]
Doug: Word, word.
Jason: “I just love kissing.”
Mike: Uhm, back on track --
Jason: Yeah, no, so actually speaking of Usenet, I just kinda wanted to give a little bit of background information about what it was and we’ll use a term that everybody here knows, I’m 100% positive, and that’s Reddit. Think Reddit. Usenet was the --
Mike: Eeehhhhh. Ehhh.
Jason: Alright, I’m deleting this whole recording. Thank you so much, everybody, for listening --
Mike: Goodbye!
Jason: It’s time to go.
Mike: -- to the final episode.
Jason: It was a great run. No, it’s -- Usenet was Reddit. It was just a place to post, you know, discussion topics, learn more about something you want to from people who are knowledgeable about it. Very, very low quality compared to Reddit.
Mike: It was the 90s.
Jason: But you could still get the information if you looked for it. And so I actually did a little digging through Ye Olde Usenet and the only mentions of Polybius that I could find --
Mike: Wait, Usenet is still up?
Jason: Yeah.
Mike: Oh, wow.
Jason: Well, it was acquired by Google Groups.
Doug: Yeah.
Jason: So you can get the entire Usenet archive if you go to the Google Groups and just search for whatever.
Mike: I bet you can look up the Way Back Machine shit too.
Jason: Yeah, you can also use the Internet archive for that. Uhm, but yeah, the only mentions to Polybius were to the Greek historian from Arcadia.
Mike: Nice.
Jason: Did you get that?
Mike: They must have done that on purpose. Arcade-ia.
Jason: Arcade-- yeah. So you get him and it tells you a little bit more about the Polybius square, which is a cipher tool that he created. Which is cool. It’s a little confusing to use. I tried looking at how to encode and decode stuff and I just -- this was at the tail end of my research and I’m just like “I can’t.” I’m so sorry.
Mike: I can’t learn math right now.
Jason: I can’t do this right now.
Mike: I didn’t get into the podcast game to do math.
Doug: There’s gotta be a website somewhere that’ll just do it for us, we’ll be fine.
Jason: Oh, absolutely. I have a whole databank of cipher websites where we don’t have to do the work but we still get the results. I’m very okay with that.
Mike: Someone get, uhm, what’s his name? Alan Turing?
Jason: Yeah, the Turing Test?
Doug: The Turing Machine?
Mike: Yeah, someone get him on this.
Doug: Did you know you can make a Turing Machine out of the correct deck format of a Magic: The Gathering deck?
Mike: Hell yeah, man.
Doug: Fucking dope, actually.
Mike: Thanks, Wizards of the Coast.
Doug: Look that up on YouTube one day.
Jason: Yeah, that sounds awesome.
Doug: There’s a good video about it.
Jason: Like I said, not a whole lot -- the only things on Usenet were these little blips about the Ancient Greek historian and one of his creations. And this is -- if you think -- when you think Reddit, what do you think of?
Mike: Uhhmmmm… r/spacedicks.
Jason: I mean, yes. That’s actually a decent answer.
Mike: What was the one we used to go on?
Doug: r/birdswitharms.
Jason: r/spaceclop.
Mike: That’s the one.
Jason: Oh, God. I need those hours back.
Mike: r/fiftyfifty.
Jason: r/fiftyfifty is a good one.
Doug: Oh, that one’s rough.
Mike: Purple cocoa.
Doug: r/birdswitharms.
Jason: r/birdswitharms is fantastic. But no, it’s literally everything from everywhere all compiled and organized and ready to be researched. Like, it’s this giant encyclopedia of everything. And that’s what Usenet was, which lets you compile and search for things in this kind of organized fashion. If you think that something has that if you searched a very, very popular key term, such as Polybius, something would come up that has nothing to do with the Arcadian historian or one of his inventions. I couldn’t find anything.
Doug: Yeah. Yeah, I mean --
Jason: Granted, so let’s -- I do kind of want to say that the not finding -- so, not finding anything to me anyway, doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be found.
Mike: I think that just means that you have to dig harder to find the truth.
Jason: Or whoever wants it to not be there is very good at making sure it isn’t. And that’s part of the whole --
Mike: The Men in Black.
Jason: -- problem. Yeah, like you can’t prove any of these claims but you can’t disprove them, so you’re kinda stuck in limbo.
Mike: Cue the X Files theme.
Doug: Yeah, right?
[sound clip from the X Files theme song plays in background]
Doug: So, it’s just funny just thinking about a lot of -- doing a lot of this research, there’s just so little information on all of these main key points and Sinneslöschen is probably the one with the least information on it.
Jason: There’s nothing.
Doug: You’ve got Polybius, which has nothing on it in the first place, and then you’ve got the people who made it that has even less information.
Jason: Yeah, really the only thing on Polybius is that the myth itself, Polybius, there’s almost nothing else on it, you know what I mean? It’s just -- that’s -- wouldn’t you want to know? So we all -- you found out about this and you shared it with us, right, Mike?
Mike: Mhm.
Jason: And we all -- I know at least I’m not gonna speak for Doug -- but I know for me, as soon as I heard about this, I was like “Holy shit, this is a really cool topic, I want to know more about it.” The worst fucking thing is that you see like, “Oh, hey, there’s an arcade game from the 80s that is brainwashing and mind-controlling these children? Sending some to the hospital? What the fuck?” and you go to research it and everything’s a dead end.
Mike: And there’s nothing.
Jason: There’s paths to follow but it’s all dead.
Doug: There’s plenty of websites that are literally the same retelling of the story over and over and I hit, like, twenty --
Mike: Just in a different person’s voice.
Doug: Which is basically what we’re doing here, but --
[laughter]
Mike: We’re contributing to the problem.
Doug: Yeah, seriously, we’re making it even more confusing for everyone, for sure. But what we do know about Sinneslöschen is very little. Very, very little.
Jason: So what do we know about that little word.
Mike: What’d you call it? Sin--
Jason: Sinneslöschen.
Doug: Sinneslöschen.
Mike: No, what did you call it before?
Jason: Uhm…
Mike: No you said lotion.
Jason: Sid-lotion.
Doug: Sid-lotion.
[laughter]
Doug: Well, I said it because I was just breaking out the word.
Mike: A Johnson & Johnson company.
Doug: So that’s one thing we do know. It’s like a broken German word.
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: Like it’s not technically correct, I guess?
Jason: Okay. What do you mean, ‘not technically correct’?
Doug: Like it’s not grammatically written -- like the word itself isn’t --
Jason: So that’s not a German word.
Doug: I don’t believe so, no.
Mike: It’s a made up Germ-- all words are made up.
Doug: Well --
Jason: Well --
Doug: In a sense.
Jason: It’s true.
Mike: Alright, I quit.
Jason: Again, we’re ending the episode for the second time.
Doug: But you have ‘Sinnes’ or sine or however you say it, which means ‘sense’. And then you have ‘löschen’ which means ‘extinguish’.
Mike: Which means ‘rub on dry skin’.
Doug: And I’m probably saying these very, very incorrectly which I apologize to everyone about.
Jason: Yeah, we’re not German.
Doug: But when you kinda mush the two words together, you’ve got ‘delete senses’ and it’s not quite correct. Either way you look at it, it’s just not a correct German formation of the word. The other thing we know is that a lot of people have come forward that have said they are this company. We have records anywhere online, there’s nowhere that lists what they’ve done or anywhere, but one thing we do know is that this text that you see on the classic image of Polybius’ start up screen is that their font is at the bottom. It says ‘1981 Sinneslöschen’ and if you deep dive into it, there’s a lot of little things you can nitpick out of it. The text is extremely similar to a lot of the text that came from Williams Games arcade cabinets.
Jason: Gotcha.
Doug: Even Atari ones like -- I think the ‘Insert Coin’ or like whatever it says at the bottom --
Jason: The credits.
Doug: -- is an exact match with most other games, but uh --
Mike: Yeah, there’s one -- it’s called Bubbles, I think?
Doug: Yeah, Bubbles.
Mike: The Williams Games Bubbles and it’s like almost an identical match to the font.
Doug: Mhm. I think it’s like three pixels off? And like the L or something like that?
Jason: So it’s the O that has the umlaut over it. It’s like a couple of pixels off.
Doug: Yup.
Jason: And that kind of leads you to believe that the umlaut was added and that changed the format.
Doug: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Mike: Or it could just be fucked over -- like the image that we all see itself could’ve just been fucked up over time of just like, shitty screen captures or -- you know what I mean? Resolution issues.
Jason: It could all just be a coincidence too. Like, this could be their actual logo. This could be a fucking company, like, we -- this is all speculation about all of this.
Doug: And it’s funny too, cuz we have -- when you Google the word, the first thing you see is the Polybius image, the one that is everywhere, the one that everyone is using as the basis of what we’re seeing and knowing about how the game looks. But I mean, as far back as you can trace it, it really doesn’t come up until about 2000.
Jason: Right.
Mike: So, on Coinop?
Doug: Yeah.
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: I know that Coinop technically said it was a published post from 1988 at first but that little bit of information was added on afterwards so we don’t know -- we have no way of knowing.
Jason: Just because something said that it’s made then -- I can put on Facebook that my page was created in, you know, the year 600.
Mike: That would make you really old.
Jason: It would. Or someone knew who I was in the future and just created it in the past.
Mike: Wow. What kind of time travelling shenanigans -- get Marty MyFly over here.
Jason: The horny kind.
Mike: The horny kind of Marty McFly.
Jason: [laughs] The horny kind of -- I don’t want that prude fuck. Give me…
Doug?: Biff?
Jason: [laughs] Yeah. Biff. Prude fuck.
Mike: And Marty ‘Horny’ McFly.
Jason: Did we just write a porn?
Mike: I mean… Yeah. There’s gotta be --
Doug: There’s a podcast for that already.
Mike: There’s gotta be Back to the Future porn called like “Back Door to the Future” or something.
Doug: I’m sure
Jason: You know what? I’m gonna have to look at that. I’ll wait.
Mike: Good call.
[laughter]
Doug: “I’ll just hold off on that.”
Mike: “I’ll save that for… later.”
[laughter]
Mike: Send me that link when you’re done.
Jason: Don’t worry, I got you.
Doug: What is it -- what’s that rule?
Jason: Rule 34.
Doug: Yeah, yeah.
Jason: If the thought exists, there is a porn about it. Rule 35 says “If there isn’t, you have to make it.”
Mike: So you just became a porn star.
Jason: Well, Mike, you might be wearing a very puffy white wig to, uh -- to help me with that.
Mike: Oooo. Erotic. I like that.
Doug: Errat-ic.
Jason: Eroctic Doc.
Doug: So, on that note, that’s all we know about the company.
Mike: Sinneslöschen.
Doug: That’s really all we know. We did touch on Steven Roach a little bit.
Jason: Actually, since you brought him up, there was one more thing I wanted to add about him.
Doug: Yeah, what’s up?
Jason: So he’s -- one of his nicknames -- there’s a couple of Steven Roach’s that exists, you can look them up, you can look into their backgrounds. One of them -- he bears some eerie resemblances to the whole -- I don’t even know what to call it -- the whole story behind Polybius about mind control and everything like that. His literal nickname was the Mentor of Mind Control.
Mike: Hmm.
Jason: So he’s ran a few organizations called the Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs in Schools or W.WASPS.
Mike: My family came from a bunch of wasps.
[silence]
Jason: ...what??
[laughter]
Mike: I was like, wasps. They’re -- it’s like a religious thing. It stands for something.
Jason: OH. The religious sect. Not --
Mike: Yeah. Yeah, I was -- I made a --
Jason: I thought you were literally saying --
Mike: “I’m a bug!”
Jason: -- you guys threw mud at the corner and like, nested.
[laughter]
Mike: “My family is a bunch of insects flying around.”
Doug: What is going on right now?
Jason: No. Okay. [laughs] So it’s WWASPS and it’s this -- it’s a complicated network of companies and non-profit organizations run mostly from a small community near St. George, Utah. They’ve also had at least eight behavior modification schools located in Mexico, Jamaica, Western Samoa, and the United States. There was one in the Czech Republic as well. Now, if you do a search of this guy, you can find his arrest records in all of these countries for child abuse and torture. Like, it was not -- it was bad. Every single school this guy taught at -- here are a few of the things that he put these kids through --
Doug: Go into real, real graphic detail right now.
Jason: Okay. No, I’m not. I don’t know if I can about a few of these, especially because we just ate and I don’t really wanna vomit all over, well, you guys -- you guys are fine, my table I don't want --
Mike: It’s half mine, too.
Jason: But he would use torture. He would use starvation, beatings. He would tie -- he would make them sleep with their arms chained above their head so like their ass was off the floor. They just had to hang there by their arms all night. They would be forced to eat their own vomit instead of actual food --
Mike: Speaking of.
Jason: -- they would be forced to -- yeah, it’s topical. They would lay in their own urine, their own blood and feces, and in a lot of cases, there was a ton of rape and molestation going on. And these are reform schools.
Mike: This guy sounds like a real jerk.
Jason: So he’s done this four times. Which means he’s gotten out of prison four times to go back to do this stuff. He was only arrested three times. The last time that he was almost caught was in the Czech Republic, running a behavioral modification school with the goal of trying to essentially make a sleeper agent -- mind control and brainwashing. And that was his specialty. Now he’s claiming to have also taken part in this game.
Mike: He’s claiming? Or people just assume it’s him because the name is similar.
Jason: It’s him and he threw out a couple other names that are a part of it. So a person named Steven Roach came forward saying it. If you search Steven Roach, you can find all of this information.
Mike: That’s what I was saying, like --
Jason: They don’t know if it’s him or not.
Mike: I found it odd that this guy who is a very shitty guy just has all these schools of -- he’s like the Professor X of having, like, mutant schools but instead of teaching you how to use your powers, he just tortures you.
Jason: He just rapes --
Mike: I find it very odd that he’d just get on a goddamn forum and be like “Yup, I made this also. Here’s other things I’m known for.”
Jason: No, I totally agree. Why the fuck would you say that? But it also begs the question of like, well if he’s on the run and he’s using a -- if he designs -- if he’s a programmer or designer, he knows his way around a --
Mike: A map, apparently. He’s been in like four fucking countries.
Jason: But how to hide his IP. He can use -- he doesn’t need to, you know, be worried about someone coming and finding him from where he’s posting. Hell, nobody could. No one can confirm that it is him. And if no one can confirm that it is him…?
Mike: Hmm.
Jason: That’s kind of the whole mystery. These are the kind of points that lend so much mystery to this whole topic. But I just wanted to give some background on this Steven Roach guy because I forgot he was -- he did some horrible, horrible, horrible shit. So if this guy talking is claiming to have invented this game that is no longer around, that might lend some credibility to its actual existence.
Doug: One thing about Steven Roach that I forgot to mention, too -- well, I didn’t forget to mention, but -- a lot of his stuff was fueling the fire for this story for a long time. Until somebody discovered that he was posting all the comments and replies from the same IP address for a bunch of different users --
Jason: Oh, shit, really?
Doug: -- after that. Yeah.
Mike: So he’s like talking to himself?
Doug: Yeah, pretty much.
Jason: Okay, if that’s the case then, it kinda sounds like somebody caught wind of what this guy has done in the past and is just trying to --
Mike: Have fun with it.
Jason: -- bumper sticker another horrible possibility of a creation onto his ass.
Doug: Yeah, I don’t know.
Mike: Well, I am going to say, speaking of children being tortured or having a bad time --
Jason: Oh, what does that remind you of, Mike?
Mike: It reminds me of going back to our myth of Polybius. One of the big parts of the urban legend are that kids were getting sick playing the game. They’re having hallucinations, they’re getting health issues. All that stems from -- at that same arcade in Portland, two kids did get sick from playing video games. Back in 1981, at that same arcade -- so, you know, perfect timing for everything that had come through -- one kid collapsed from a migraine playing Tempest which, you know, might explain the part about the myth about how Polybius runs and plays like Tempest does.
Jason: Right.
Mike: Another kid, he got stomach pains from playing Asteroids for 28 hours.
Doug: Holy shit.
Mike: He was trying to break a Guinness World Record. Which, honestly, if you’ve been playing Asteroids for 28 hours and the most you get is stomach pains -- I think you kind of lucked out.
Jason: Yeah, it could be worse.
Mike: Yeah, you didn’t go blind, cuz, I mean -- the amount of blue light 80s arcade games probably gave out, how are these people not blind?
Jason: Good question.
Mike: They could be now.
Doug: Remember Virtual Boy?
Mike: Just shove these lights in your eyes.
Jason: Oh, God.
Doug: Literally people, like -- I’m pretty sure there was a class action lawsuit against that because people actually got their eyes, like, super fucked up from it.
Mike: I wouldn’t be surprised, it was shooting red lasers in your face. It was the 80s, they didn’t know.
Jason: Well, the 80s, they shot a lot of things in their bodies that they didn’t know.
Doug: Oh, they knew.
Mike: Cocaine.
Jason: They didn’t care.
Mike: But that -- the big myth about kids getting sick has, you know, a little seed of truth to it. Everything in Polybius the myth has some seeds in truth, like the Men in Black coming in to inspect these games. Even that has some truth to it. Back in the 80s --
Jason: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah, back in the 80s, a lot of arcades -- they weren’t as, like, innocent --
Jason: It’s not like Chuck E Cheese.
Mike: They weren’t as innocent as Hollywood makes it seem, where it’s just a bunch of kids in the arcades, playing. A lot of people were using arcades for, like, gambling purposes and essentially like drug dens. People would go there to do drug dealing. People would go there to gamble. People would tamper with high scores because they would gamble on who could get the higher score. So a lot of these arcades had police, like FBI and CIA people, going to these arcades and testing a bunch of cabinets for tampering. So even the Men in Black, which might just be a local fucking cop coming in to check if these cabinets are being tampered with or if there’s any illegal gambling going on --
Jason: So what the fuck would -- what are they gambling on?
Mike: I was thinking that the other night too.
Doug: Who can Frogger better than the other?
Mike: Yeah, right?
Jason: Which seven year old can play this video game better. A different seven year old?
Mike: From what I was looking at, it wasn’t just that they were betting on the arcade games. They were just going to the arcades as the center for them to meet up to do the gambling.
Jason: Oh, cuz of all the dark, narrow corridors.
Mike: Basically, yeah.
Jason: Okay.
Doug: I’m just imaging a bunch of, like, big Italian --
Mike: A bunch of like big, burly dudes.
Doug: -- dudes just standing around like --
Mike: A pack of centipedes or something.
[laughter]
Mike: They’re all smoking cigars, like “Yeah, Timmy! Fucking get him, boy!”
Jason: Screaming at like a ten year old.
Mike: Throwing money.
Jason: The kid’s crying, just like “Oh, no.”
Mike: The kid that loses --
Doug: There’s that, like, weird spotlight on the kid, it’s really dark in the background.
Mike: The kid that loses, they go take to the back and shoot like Ol’ Yeller.
[shocked laughter]
Mike: But, again, all these things -- have a little, I guess, nut of truth in them, you know what I mean?
Jason: Yeah, little nuggets of truth.
Mike: Yeah, little nuggets of truth. The Men in Black is just the police coming in to inspect these cabinets to see if they’re being tampered with and seeing if there’s anybody -- any sketchy folks hanging around.
Jason: Right.
Mike: So it’s funny how these small -- all these things start happening at the same time, you know what I mean?
Jason: Yeah.
Mike: Kids getting sick, the gambling rings, all this -- Polybius starting at the exact same time, it all taking place in Portland, Oregon. I guess Portland was like a big --
Jason: Wasn’t there -- wasn’t one of the other games you had listed kind of also released in Portland? Or was it -- or am I wrong?
Mike: It wasn’t that they were released in Portland -- a lot of game designers would release their games in Portland first. Portland was like a hot spot for new releases. They would bring in --
Jason: Oh, okayy.
Mike: Yeah, they would bring in a bunch of games and they’d have them on unmarked cabinets so you couldn’t see the name of them and they would just test to see how many people liked playing them, get feedback on them. So it makes sense that polybius would be in kind of an unmarked cabinet going into here for a little bit to kind of be in the test zone. The hot zone.
Doug: Yeah, you gotta wonder, like, how many random games probably that you’ve never heard of went in and went out.
Mike: Mhm.
Jason: Well, actually -- so I found an article written by somebody named Cat DeSpira and this is a video game journalist and historian that grew up at one of these arcades, like the actual arcade. She remembers the kid that got the migraine so bad that he had to call the police.
Mike: Yeah, she was from the arcade that all this has started from.
Jason: Yeah, so I have this article by her and she’s saying how she remembers all of these different points that we’re making along the way and she could absolutely see how, if you connect those dots, you’re gonna come up with something that’s a little bit more sinister than what’s actually happening and she also sees that conclusion might actually be real.
Mike: Mhm.
Jason: Which is, again, back to the whole “What the fuck is going on with Polybius?”
Doug: Yeah, and I want to shout out to Ahoy who made the documentary --
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: Phenomenal, by the way.
Mike: At the end, I’m gonna go through a couple sources that I took a bunch of stuff from so if anybody wants to look at some more videos or anything, they can look at these. Cuz I have a couple different sources written down that I would like to give credit to.
Doug: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike: But one of the main games that I guess all this stems from is fucking Tempest. That’s what Polybius’ gameplay itself is based off of.
Doug: Yeah, there’s a handful of games that kinda give credit to what Polybius is and Tempest itself is pretty oddly shaped, if you want to call it that. It’s basically a square with a little ship that kind of floats around in a circle, fight enemies, and you’re just basically trying to survive as long as you can. The stages take different shapes. This game came out in 1981. Same year. By Atari. It’s one of the first games to use the color quadrascan vector display, which is the really colorful neon lines.
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: You’ll see that in, like, Tempest and Cube Quest and stuff like that. But, yeah. It was a smart game. So I don’t know -- we don’t really have any hard evidence of how Polybius looks although there’s lots of recreations which I actually have one on my computer, but it’s basically just shoot and move.
Mike: I feel like that’s every 80s game. If it’s not Frogger or PacMan, it’s just “Shoot. Move.” Shoot and move. Galaga. Space Invaders. Centipede. It’s just shoot and move.
Doug: One thing that I -- I think my favorite thing about Tempest is that there’s a government project called Codename -- er, Tempest Codename.
Jason: Okay?
Doug: And it has to do with spying on information through unintentional radio electronic signals, sounds, or vibrations.
Jason: Ooooo.
Doug: Which kind of just full circle comes right back to fucking Polybius being some MK Ultra shit.
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: I don’t know. It was weird. When I looked it up, I typed in Tempest and the first thing that comes up, before the video game, is the Wikipedia page for this government Codename Tempest and I was like, “Damn, like, are all 80s video games just fucking government bullshit now?”
Jason: The great social experiment.
Doug: Right?
Jason: Who fucking know.
Doug: One of the other kind of great inspirations for this was Cube Quest.
Jason: Yeeaaahhh, Cube Quest!
Doug: A Cube called Quest.
Jason: Did you guys ever play Cube Quest?
Mike: Nice. A Cube called Quest.
Doug: A Tribe called Cube.
Mike: No, I never heard about it until we actually started doing research for Polybius.
Jason: Yeah, so I --
Doug: Cube Quest is crazy looking.
Jason: It’s -- yes. So I actually remember one of my cousins had this game and I never played it, I just saw it sitting on the shelf. We always played some other games like Contra and stuff like that. But it was released in 1983 in arcades by a company called Simutrek, designed by Paul Allen Newell and Duncan Muirhead, if you ever heard of those designers.
Doug: Oh, yes, Muirhead.
Jason: So one of the cool -- one of the reasons --
Mike: The very one.
Jason: -- I really wanted to kinda research this is I found out that the CGI backgrounds in Cube Quest were also used in a -- it’s like a short, abstract art film called Beyond the Mind’s Eye. I actually had this VHS as a kid and I would watch it when I was like five. I would watch it like everyday after school. It was all just these super weird, abstract -- like a floating head belching metal flowers that turned into dancing midgets, or something like that. It’s all very strange but I loved it.
Doug: Ooohhh. Uhm…
Jason: A little bit trippy, huh?
[laughter]
Jason: It’s in that film, if you want to check that out. I doubt you’ll be able to find it anymore but, if you do, awesome. Actually, if you do find it, send it my way. I would love to A. Show you two and B. Kinda take a trip down memory lane there. But the basic goal of this game was to guide a spaceship through the cubic world to reach the Treasure of Mytha located at the opposite extreme of the player’s origin and each one of these cube edges led to like, fifty-some odd different corridors that were -- I don’t think I would be able to play this game for more than five minutes because these corridors were just flashing and neon colors and you had to try to like, avoid shit and shoot other shit and it was -- it was a lot. It was just a big tube shooter.
[Mike laughs]
Doug: A lot of these games remind me of Geometry Wars.
Jason: I think we broke Mike.
[Mike continues laughing]
Mike: Just the word ‘tube shooter’ [laughs harder]
[laughter]
Doug: Oh my God…
Mike: TUBE SHOOTER.
[continues laughing]
Doug: We need to copyright that.
Jason: Tube shooter. Shoot tuber.
[laughter slowly dies out]
Jason: So -- [chuckles] So the way this was described and the way this game was played, it sounds very, very, very similar to the gameplay of Polybius, which you see a circle and some kind of geometrical object, from what you can see, shooting at it until you get forced into one of these tubes where you shoot things.
[Mike starts laughing again]
Mike: Sorry.
Jason: But after looking into this, it made me think “Is this just kind of like a big --”
Mike: Shooter?
Jason: Well, Mandela effect.
Doug: Yeah!
Jason: You guys remember when Nelson Mandela died in prison?
Doug: I mean, we all do.
Mike: I remember the Berenstain Bears.
Jason: So, the reason it’s called the Mandela effect is that he didn’t die in prison. Although you can find thousands, if not tens of thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of people who will describe the exact same events like it happened, but when you boil it down, it didn’t fucking happen. Same with, like you said, the Berenstain Bears.
Mike: Or the Monopoly guy having a monocle.
Doug: I saw that the other day, actually!
Mike: Yup! He has no monocle.
Jason: No monocle.
Doug: I had to go and check my two Monopoly boxes at home.
Jason: Yeah, so, this could be maybe selective memory based on what game you were playing? The other thing it could lead you to is something called the Publius Enigma --
Mike: Alright.
Jason: -- and this kind of leads you back to Usenet. Publius Enigma was something put out by Pink Floyd as just this giant puzzle -- it’s still unsolved to this day -- and it was on Usenet back in the day and a lot of people think that the people that are remembering Polybius on Usenet are actually thinking of the Publius Enigma.
Mike: Ooohhh. That would make sense.
Jason: It’s very, very similar.
Mike: Was it like a marketing thing for Pink Floyd?
Doug: I don’t think they -- nobody solved it, right?
Jason: No one has come forward to claim ownership except for the band members of Pink Floyd saying that it must be some Epic Records marketing scheme, but -- and they gave times and they would line up with things that happened during Pink Floyd shows so I’m sure it is some kind of marketing stunt.
Doug: There’s a picture of one of their concerts that has the word --
Jason: “Publius Enigma” in one of their light shows.
Doug: Yeah.
Mike: Huh. That’s kind of fun.
Jason: It is, yeah.
Mike: Maybe we can do an episode on the Publius Enigma.
Jason: I would be more than happy to. But so a lot of people think that when people think of Polybius, they’re thinking of the Publius Enigma.
Mike: That would make sense.
Jason: It is so hard for me to go from saying Polybius to Publius. I feel like I’m just gonna say the same fucking thing twice.
Mike: Pu -- poo poo.
Jason: The Poo Poo Enigma.
[laughter]
Doug: That’s all I could think of the whole time you were saying both those words. I was just like “Poo poo”.
Jason: No, so that’s -- it could be a combination of a bunch of different video games. So just Tempest and Cube Quest. But there’s another really, really decently sized topic that kind of covers this exact same thing where a video game is using children to -- a government is using a video game to recruit people. And that game was The Last Starfighter.
Mike: And you’re off by a little bit. It wasn’t the government using games. It was an alien government.
Jason: I said a government.
Mike: Dang. You got me.
Jason: Lemme rewind that for ya. No, no, hold on, here we go. [imitates a tape rewinding] “-- in a government --”
Mike: An egg government?
[laughter]
Jason: …Dammit.
Mike: I like my governments sunny-side up. No, but yeah, The Last Starfighter is like -- with Polybius there was that part of the legend where the government using this game as kind of like a testing grounds to recruit and indoctrinate people into some sort of government agenda. The Last Starfighter is a movie where essentially there’s a teenager who’s playing a video game and this video game is being monitored by aliens to covertly recruit people into their war. I haven’t seen the movie, but it sounds kind of fun.
Jason: Sounds like Ender’s Game.
Mike: I haven’t seen that. Or read that.
Doug: Or read it.
Mike: But that would be -- that came out around the same time as the Polybius myth so, ya know. It’s all these things. It’s The Last Starfighter, it’s these kids trying to get Guinness World Records, it’s Cube Quest. All this stuff.
Jason: Plus it said it’s a video game revolution. This is one of the first times that we’ve seen video games being able to be mass produced and just sent out to the public without almost any test -- the public was the test ground. And that’s -- it’s so easy -- I mean, they used to be shipped into arcades in just solid black cabinets, no anything. There was no title, there was no nothing on them because they weren’t sure if they would make it. If they did, they would then develop the title and everything about it, which -- can you imagine if a game got released today that was like, the bare bones of what the game is? It’d be like “Is this it? Is this good? We haven’t named it, we don’t know what it’s about.”
Mike: “We got these guys fighting each other on the street. What -- did you like it? What should we name it?”
Doug: “Fight Streeter”.
Mike: Fight Streeter. Tube Shooter.
[laughter]
Jason: Tube Shooter: The Fight Game
Mike: Yeah, it’s just a bunch of these things add to the myth or, at least, were the inspiration for the myth. And Doug even has a lot of other examples of --
Doug: Polybius in the media.
Mike: Yeah, things that even Polybius itself has inspired.
Jason: Oh, yeah. Been in.
Doug: Well I think the whole legend has just kind of become this staple video game fun tale for people to talk about and reminisce about.
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: Especially if you were around in the 80s when arcades were popular.
Jason: Absolutely.
Doug: A lot of places -- So there’s a couple places you can see the Polybius game in just pop culture in general. I just thought they were cool. The Simpsons makes a reference to it, you actually see the arcade cabinet in a screenshot in The SImpsons. There’s a Batman comic where there’s a Polybius arcade game in the background. I’ve never watched the Goldbergs but apparently they reference the game in an episode. And also Nine Inch Nails has a music video with their interpretation of Polybius playing in the background, like that’s the whole music video, it's just the gameplay. Just really interesting, I don’t know. I thought it was cool.
Mike: Nine Inch Nails also had ARG, right?
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: Yup.
Jason: For the Downward Spiral.
Mike: Bunch of losers. Look at them, they’re just as nerdy as us, making their hardcore ass music.
Jason: Trent Reznor is a huge nerd.
Mike: Trent Reznor? Didn’t he do the music or something for that Facebook movie?
Jason: I think I remember -- for The Social Network?
Doug: Yeah.
Jason: Yeah. Was it that?
Mike: It was Trent Reznor, I’m pretty damn sure.
Jason: I’m almost positive you’re right.
Mike: Going from Nine Inch Nails to Mark Zuckerberg.
Jason: So I need to not just blindly agree with things because I just realized that in our Erratas episode, I wrongly claimed that Corbin, Kentucky is the birthplace of Colonel Sanders and then we just shat all over the people of Corbin, Kentucky --
[laughter]
Jason: Absolutely not the birthplace of Colonel Sanders.
[more laughter]
Mike: If any of you at home catch us saying some other wrong shit, please email us at DLUTIpod@gmail.com and just title it “You Dumb Fucks” and then put in the rest.
Doug: Yeah, let us know those things because --
Jason: Seriously.
Doug: -- we do so much research that sometimes shit just meshes together and --
Mike: Some things slip through the cracks, man. We make fun of Corbin, Kentucky. And -- what’d you call it? Fried Chick-Con.
Jason: Fried Chick-Con.
Mike: The Colonel Con.
Jason: All they do is bathe in grease and brush their teeth with mashed potatoes and gravy.
Doug: Oh, we’re… dicks.
Jason: Sorry, Corbin, Kentucky. That’s not you.
Mike: I mean, it might be.
Jason: Again, I’ve never been there.
Mike: They still have --
Jason: They may do that.
Mike: They still have a statue of him.
Doug: Where was he born?
Jason: Uhm, you know what… he was born in Henryville, Indiana. Wow.
Mike: He wasn’t even born in Kentucky. Wow. Indiana. No wonder he got out of there. So many potholes. Anyway. That’s a stab at the Indiana government.
Jason: Even the world’s first KFC is in south Salt Lake, Utah. So I’m not even remotely close to Corbin, Kentucky being the birthplace of KFC.
Mike: We might have to issue an apology to Corbin, Kentucky.
Jason: Like a public one?
Mike: Yeah. We’re sorry, Corbin, Kentucky.
Jason: We are. We’re sorry that we assumed that you had anything to do with one of America’s staple restaurants. Please remove your pin from the map, hang up your apron, and go back to your greasy baths.
[laughter]
Jason: Was that a good apology?
Doug: That was a classic YouTube apology right there.
Mike: Yeah. The only thing we could do left is monetize it.
Jason: Please donate to our wrongness. If you want to hear us be more wrong --
Mike: I wanna know what you guys honestly think of Polybius. Do you think it’s legend? Do you think it’s actually real? Cuz I have so many mixed feelings about it. I honestly don’t know what I believe myself. What do you think? Doug.
Doug: Okay. Alright. So, when I was doing research the other night -- I was doing it with Ally the other night and she dropped this, like, bomb of an idea on me and I wanna give her credit for it because it fucking blew my mind a little.
Mike: Thank you, Ally.
Jason: Thanks, Ally.
Doug: So we’re sitting there, we had just finished --
Mike: Actually, no, not thank you. Doing my job for me. You’re trying to take my job, Ally! You can’t have this mic, I paid for it!
Doug: And next episode, Mike is gone. So --
Mike: No! I already lost my AT&T job, I can’t lose this one too!
[laughter]
Doug: But, no, so we’re sitting there. We had just watched the documentary, we were going through just a bunch of random stuff that we could find on the internet. She was like, super deep diving into it with me, and she goes “So because it was a German game, think about this. Say the Germans put it in here, you know, post --” I can’t remember the exact dates for the Cold War.
Jason: Cold War. Well, that’s Russians.
Doug: I know, I know. But so, I don’t know. We were just, like, talking about all this random stuff. So German government put the game into circulation, right? And the Men in Black was actually checking these for German spying utilities or something along those lines.
Mike: [imitates German accent] So they’re looking for the Germans?
Doug: So AKA we were sending the Men in Black to make sure that the Germans weren’t putting anything into arcades to, you know, dick with our children.
Mike: Like spy on us, kind of?
Jason: This is an age of espionage.
Mike: Yeah, that’s kind of fun.
Jason: When you look at the world theater, there’s a lot of that shit going on.
Mike: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Doug: And that’s why it disappeared so quick. So like, maybe --
Jason: They found it.
Doug: -- there was stuff in them and so the Men in Black --
Mike: That’s a good theory.
Jason: Again, this goes to MK Ultra. When people were touting this stuff about how, like, “Oh there’s a government program” or “They’re testing mind control and brainwashing and sleeper soldiers” and all that. Everyone reacted to it just like we’re reacting to this video game, saying like “Oh, there’s no fucking way. There’s no fucking way. There’s no fucking way.”
Mike: It happened.
Jason: It did. It literally happened.
Mike: Operation Paperclip, too.
Jason: Yeah.
Mike: It happened!
Jason: It all happened.
Mike: That’s an interesting take on it. I didn’t think of that.
Doug: Right? When she said it, I was just like “Holy shit, that makes a lot of sense actually. Goddamn.”
Jason: Get her on the show! It would be an easy way to do it, especially with the, you know -- we’re going to the Golden Age of Video Gaming. It’d be so easy to hide anything you wanted in an arcade, really. They were already doing it with heroin and meth.
Mike: “We found this video camera hidden in the arcade machine” and it’s like a giant --
Jason: VHS.
Mike: -- like VHS tape.
[laughter]
Mike: And it’s just like a man hiding in the cabinet --
[more laughter]
Mike: -- cranking like an old 30s camera.
Jason: He waits until everyone goes home and he uses the quarters to go buy food. “I’m so fucking hungry.”
[laughter]
Doug: That’s why they never saw them leaving with coins, you know?
Mike: But he’s a German man --
Jason: Right.
Mike: [imitates German accent] “I’m so -- I’m so hungry. I haven’t had my strudel today.”
Doug: [imitates German accent] “I’ve had my knees to my chest all morning.”
[laughter]
Jason: [imitates German accent] “I can’t feel my ass.”
Mike: What are you, uh -- so what do you think, Doug? Do you think there’s truth in this? Do you think it’s real? Do you think it’s made up?
Doug: Well being the mega-nerd-gamer that I am, I really wanna believe this is true. Like, I really -- a big part of me wants this to be like a real thing, you know? I’m all about these myths -- I mean, we have a whole fucking podcast about this stuff. I want this to be true. But this one hits a little harder for me because the whole idea just is like -- I grew up playing video games.
Jason: Right.
Doug: The farthest back I can remember, I was probably playing Warcraft 1, you know, the first one on a computer.
Jason: Oh God, DOS.
Doug: Windows 95 or something like that.
Mike: You could be Joe Rogan paying -- what did he pay? Like a thousand dollars a month for like 3mb internet back in the 90s so he could play fucking, uh -- he was trying to play a game.
Jason: I’ve heard nothing about this.
Mike: StarCraft? Uh, no not StarCraft. The game that we played a lot. You have it on the Switch. You brought it over to my house.
Jason: Diablo.
Mike: Diablo! Like, wanna play Diablo -- like, the first one, and like 3mb internet was the fastest thing in the world back in the 90s so he paid like a thousand dollars a month for it to play Diablo or some shit.
Jason: Jesus. I didn’t know that.
Mike: Yeah.
Doug: I didn’t either.
Jason: I actually don’t know a whole lot about Joe Rogan.
Mike: Me neither other than that and he like DMT.
Doug: Just DMT, yeah.
Jason: He loves his DMT.
Doug: Not a sponsor.
Jason: No.
Mike: Joe Rogan, sponsor us.
Jason: Please send us money and DMT.
[laughter]
Mike: Give me drugs!
Doug: Any spare is fine. You can have already maybe smoked it, I don’t care.
Jason: So I totally agree with Doug here. I will always be the first to give credence to some kind of wild, out there fucking idea, especially like a mind control video game. And, like, I can totally see how they used a visual medium to just kind of fuck with your head because if I watch things way, way, way too long, I start to get headaches. And I can lend some credence to that and I want to believe there’s a video game out there that the government developed, put into an arcade to try to fuck with kids, like -- as horrible as it sounds, I want that to be true.
Mike: The government -- when I was looking into everything, and I forgot what game it was, but the government went to a game developer -- like a company, like a big company -- and wanted them to create a battle simulator and they did. And it’s like a tank shooter for the government. It’s like a VR tank shooter.
Jason: Oh!
Doug: So kind of like a flight simulator but --
Mike: Yeah, they made it in the 80s. I don’t remember what it was. But that shit happens, though!
Jason: I know what you’re talking about. Yeah.
Mike: That shit happens, the government does get involved with video games.
Jason: Yeah.
Doug: World of Tanks.
Jason: World of Tanks.
Mike: Yeah, what a game.
Jason: How about you, Mike? What are your thoughts on all of this?|
Mike: I’m so split on this one because, like you guys said, I want it to be real because like, how fucking fun and terrifying is it that the government is like, putting out these brainwashing video games. But how fun is that? You know what I mean?
Jason: Yeah, it’s intriguing.
Mike: There’s a couple things that don’t really add up. I mean, one -- first and foremost, it’s very coincidental that 1981, when Polybius apparently came out, all these things happened. The kids were getting sick playing other games, cops and FBI agents were going into arcades to test for tampering for gambling purposes and everything. There’s The Last Starfighter. There’s all these things where you could say someone like, saw all these things and took all this inspiration and made Polybius the myth out of all of it. It’s all there, you know what I mean?
Jason: Yup.
Mike: It makes sense. You can take all this and make Polybius myths out of it. Even like, for example, the Men in Black going to take data from the Polybius game.
Jason: Right.
Mike: What kind of data are they even taking, you know what I mean? What are they taking? High scores? It’s the 80s. What kind of data can you take?
Jason: “Oh, ASS did real well this week.”
[laughter]
Mike: “He’s number one, two, and three! And FART is in fourth! And COX spelled C-O-X.” But, you know what I mean? It was the 80s. It’s an arcade game. There’s no data to take there. It’s not like it’s reading a person’s face using face recognition and putting that into some database and getting their home address, you know? Not like today’s standard where that’s a possibility. But back in the 80s, that technology wasn’t there.
Jason: No.
Mike: So I want to say it’s not real because of the whole aspect of the technology’s just not there for these types of things to be real. There’s no way Men in Black can collect user data off an arcade game, it’s just not possible. I want to say it’s real. There’s a lot telling me ‘no’, but there’s a lot of heart telling me ‘yes’.
Doug: [singing] “And my mind’s telling me no.”
Mike: Yeah! That’s exactly what it is.
Jason: [singing] “My booodddyyy.”
Mike: I’m split right down the middle. I can’t give an answer if it’s real or not. I just don’t have one.
Doug: Truthfully, I can’t either.
Jason: Same. I’m on the same page and the fucked up part is literally every other person that has done a deep dive on this topic is also on the same page.
Mike: Speaking of that -- thank you. I kinda wanted to give a thank you to some of the sources I used.
Jason: Oo, yes please.
Mike: There’s Ahoy, who has that whole hour long --
Doug: Over an hour long! Super good.
Mike: -- YouTube video on it. A lot of this is YouTube stuff because it’s just easier looking at shit on YouTube. Scott the Woz has a fun video. It’s nothing huge but it’s entertaining and it gives a good description of what Polybius is. TheGameTheorists has one, which is really good. That one actually has a lot of good information in it.
Jason: Well, he uses math to prove or disprove stuff.
Mike: Mhm, yeah, so his is very good. It’s like eight years old so it’s kinda cringey, but it’s still fun.
Jason: But if you like super technical stuff as a means of proving or disproving game theories, as this definitely falls underneath, definitely check him out.
Mike: Yup. Wikipedia. I used a bit of Wikipedia on there and there are sources on Wikipedia. Retro Bitch.
[laughter]
Mike: But that’s just a couple of sources. Those are the main sources that I used -- I didn’t use Retro Bitch, but --
Jason: Nah, that was all me.
Mike: -- most of my sources were YouTube based. Angry Video Game Nerd has a good one.
Jason: Yeah he does a good one. He has a really fun video.
Mike: Yeah, it’s funny. It’s like a half hour long.
Jason: Yeah.
Mike: But a lot of it has a lot of credence to it, so I just wanted to shout out to our sources because they do most of the work for us.
Jason: They make it easy for us, for sure.
Mike: Yeah, so if you guys want to see more stuff on Polybius and get probably -- let’s be real, probably better information than what we’re giving out, go look at some of those guys. I highly recommend the Game Theorists episode because he goes into a lot of the MK Ultra stuff, the Men in Black stuff, and it’s really good. And the Angry Video Game Nerd just cuz that one’s funny.
Jason: That one’s funny. He makes creepypasta, essentially.
Mike: Yeah, he’s great.
Doug: If you guys want to play a recreation of Polybius, you can actually just go to Sinneslöschen.com and download the file.
Jason: It just has it there?
Doug: Yeah.
Mike: If you go to the Playstation PlayStore as well, there’s a bunch of Polybius games that you can buy too. They’re all just artist renditions of what they think the game might have been like and what it would look like if it was made in modern time.
Jason: That’s actually really cool that, like, the myth of a video game that may or may not exist spawned the existence of several video games under the same name.
Doug: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah.
Jason: That’s super fucking cool to me.
Doug: And they all have super, super hardcore Geometry Wars vibes.
Jason: Oh, God, yeah.
Mike: Oh, yeah.
Jason: Absolutely.
Doug: It’s pretty great.
Mike: I think that’s about it though, boys. What do you think?
Doug: I’d say that wraps it on this one.
Jason: Yeah, we’ve kinda exhausted all mediums on Polybius.
Mike: Awesome. Well, Jason, do you have anything to say to the audience then?
Jason: Yeah, you know what? I kinda want to change it up today and I actually have a prepared speech.
Mike: Awuh.
Jason: I know, yeah. Are you ready?
Mike: Yeah, go ahead, I’m listening.
Jason: Theodore John Kaczynski was born May 22nd, 1942 -- also known as the Unabomber. American domestic terrorist, anarchist, and former mathematics professor. He was a mathematics prodigy but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to live a more primitive life. Between 1978 and 1995 -- I’m just going to keep going with this unless you guys interrupt me.
Mike: No, I’m not going to stop you.
Doug: I’m actually like really --
[laughter]
Doug: -- you sucked me in for a second there.
Mike: I forgot that his name was Ted Kaczynski. I was like “Do you mean John Krasinski?”
Doug: As soon as he said it, I was like “And we’re going into the Unabomber, here we are.”
[laughter]
Mike: Oh, no, I want you to just read his -- I’m assuming you’re on his Wikipedia page?
Jason: Yeah!
Doug: Alright, alright --
Mike: No, I’ll stop you.
Doug: -- guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We really appreciate it.
Mike: [mumbles] I do want to take a minute real quick.
Doug: You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram -- what?
Mike: [in a low voice] I do want to take a minute real quick, before we sign off.
Jason: You’re getting all sexy with the --
Mike: I am getting all sexy.
Jason: -- sexy voice.
Mike: I want you all -- I’m assuming some of you are either driving to or from work right now. If you’re driving home from work: go home.
[laughter]
Jason: I think they got that one covered, Mike.
Mike: Go home.
Doug: Just go home.
Jason: What the fuck are you doing?
Mike: Hang on, I’m getting there.
Jason: Okay, okay.
Mike: Go home. Make yourself a nice dinner. Have a nice drink, you’ve earned it. You’ve been good. If you don’t drink, if you smoke, roll up, like, a baby’s leg or marijuana. You’ve been good. You’ve earned it. If you’re going to work: go home.
[laughter]
Mike: Call off. Listen to more of the podcast. Tell your boss to eat your teeth. Your teeth. Pull your teeth out and shove them down his throat -- or her throat. And then follow us on social media.
[laughter]
Doug: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram -- we have all of them. You’re going to be able to find us where all podcasts are available.
Mike: We’re under Don’t Look Under the Internet for all of them. The handle for most of them is DLUTIPod. D-L-U-T-I-Pod. You’ll see my stupid drunken posts on there, more than likely, sometimes.
Jason: They’re funny.
Mike: They’re okay. And yeah. That’s a good --
Jason: Thank you, guys, please, so much, for listening. Join us again two weeks from now. Going over another fantastic topic, I hope you guys enjoyed listening to us [laughs] amateur investigators drunkenly research some topics that are very weird and obscure and then talk about them. So, thank you so much. Please, please, please remember to stay paranoid.
Mike: Uhhh… eat your toothbrush.
Doug: And don’t forget to slap peens and bake beans.
Jason: There it is!
Mike: [in a low voice] I’m gonna go to your home, I’m gonna slap your beans.
Jason: [muffled slapping sounds] I’m doing that right now.
Mike: I’m then I’m gonna tell your father that I love him and that you love him.
[voices fade out as music fades in]
Mike: That you love him so much.
Jason: Is this while you’re slapping peens?
Mike: Yeah, I’m slapping your dad’s peen.
Jason: Like, you’re keeping eye contact right here.
[laughter]
Jason: End the show! End the show!
[outro music plays]