The Creepy Legend Of The Arcade Game Polybius

This grainy photo, is claimed to be the only one of the legendary cabinet.
The Internet is awash with myths and urban legends, whose source and origins have been long lost in cyberspace. One such urban legend among the retro gaming community is that of the mythical arcade machine Polybius. The story goes back to the 1980s, but the scant evidence of its origins place the story's first appearance online sometime in the late 90s. 

The story is that of a mysterious arcade cabinet that starting appearing in a video arcades in Portland, Oregon in 1981. Unusually no-one had heard of this game before it suddenly landed in the arcades, which was unusual at the time. Avid gamers would hotly anticipate new game releases, through gossip networks and trade magazines. Polyibus was an unknown game, and it was assumed had been placed in the arcades for game pre-release testing purposes. The game was a mixture of styles, from Tempest style shooter, to Pac-Man style mazes and puzzles that tested the skills of the players to the max. Gamers became addicted to playing it, forming lines out of the arcade doors waiting for a chance to play the game. Players started to develop strange symptoms that seemed related to playing, such as migraines, nausea , epilepsy, blackouts, amnesia, insomnia, nightmares and night terrors. In extreme cases causing the player to commit suicide. 

It wasn't unusual for people to come into arcades and download usage data from their machines. With Polybius, it was strange men-in-black types. The legend claims that they were government agents, collecting data on the psychoactive effects of the game on players. Apparently there were players who had played Polybius that stopped playing video games altogether. One it is claimed, went as far as becoming a activist campaigning against video games. 
Legend says that Polybius was created by developer Ed Rotberg for the German company  Sinneslöschen. A made-up word, that roughly mistranslates as trying to mean "sense delete" or "sensory deprivation" or "to have erased your mind". The game's name Polybius the same as the Greek historian known for his cryptographic work and saying that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with witnesses.

The first evidence of the game of legend was a post on coinop.org in 1998, that named the game and made assertion that have become part of the fabric of the legend. Another claim he makes is to have a ROM image of the game. Describing the look of the game as, "weird looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements". In 2006, someone called Steve Roach claimed in interview that he was involved with the creation of Polybius in 1980, while working for a South American company involved in innovative designs for computer graphics. None of this is verifiable and has added to the mythology.
The only screen shot of the game?!
More down-to-earth gamer conspiracy geeks simply say that Polybius was the Tempest prototype also known as Vortex, but was secretly released under the name Polybius.  Originally in the game the tubes rotated and the player's claw stayed still. This was changed in Tempest, after it caused motion sickness, so that the tubes staying stationary and the claw rotating. 

One final claim is that the whole thing originated as an April Fool's joke by a German user of Usenet called Christian Oliver Windler, with the  user name "cyberyogi" or "CYBERYOGI=CO= Windler".
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