Polybius

Legend has it that in 1981 an arcade cabinet called Polybius briefly took residence in Portland, Oregon. But Polybius was no ordinary video game. Many believe that it was a tool of the United States government to test one's mental and physical agility as a method of recruiting soldiers, just like The Last Starfighter. Others say that it caused seizures or brain aneurysms, and was possibly being tested by the CIA as a brainwashing tool. Some think it was just a prototype version of Tempest. Many more believe the whole thing was a hoax, while others say it never existed at all. Documentarians Todd Luoto, Jon Frechette and Dylan Reiff are seeking the truth behind the mythical arcade cabinet, wherever that might lead them, in their upcoming film The Polybius Conspiracy - now seeking funding on Kickstarter . It's not a simple matter of proving whether Polybius was real or not, but rather coming to some understanding on how all these wildly divergent rumours began in the first place. And oh boy, are there a lot of stories out there, many pertaining to real world events. You see, in the span of a week, three children really did fall ill upon playing video games at arcades in the Portland area. Michael Lopez got a migraine, the first he'd ever had, from playing Tempest. Brian Mauro, a 12-year-old trying to set the world record for playing Asteroids for the longest time, fell ill after a 28-hour stint. And only a week later 18-year-old competitive gamer Jeff Dailey died due to a heart attack after chasing the world record in Berserk. One year later 19-year-old Peter Burkowski followed suit for the same reason playing the same game. "There's a medical and logical explanation to it, but when four different kids get sick within a close time frame of each other, that's how legends can grow," co-director Todd Luoto tells me over Skype. "When you think about it in playground years, that's enough fodder to keep kids going and talking about that forever," producer Dylan Reiff adds in a conference call. "Even a week is a pretty short time between events to make correlations, especially with kid brains. Kid brains are just going to take that and go wild with it." That's just one tiny aspect of the urban legend. The whole Last Starfighter scenario in which Men in Black would use arcade games to recruit soldiers was based on the fact that FBI agents really did stake out arcades in Portland during the early 80s. Only it wasn't to recruit video game savant super soldiers, but rather due to a series of drug and gambling busts in the area. Some of the very arcades the sick kids frequented were raided by the feds. "Back in the early 80s, arcades weren't the safe haven that people think they were. Drugs were a big part of what went on. Gambling was a big thing as well," Luoto explains. "There were FBI that came up to the Portland area and placed hidden cameras and actually tracked people through their high score initials that they left. So there actually was an FBI raid that people remember. But then they remember that there actually were these Men in Black figures that would go there as well. So some say they weren't trying to brainwash kids, but they were trying to keep tabs on the arcade." "So you've got people seeing these kids getting sick, seeing these busts go down, and seeing this police presence. It's the perfect fertile ground for conspiracy theory," Reiff adds. There are more real world connections that lie beyond the Polybuis myth, notably the CIA's MKUltra program . It's now known that following World War 2, the US government recruited Nazi scientists via a plea bargain agreement in what came to be called Operation Paperclip. The former Nazis would be protected under the condition that they would develop technology for the US. Over the years this turned into MKUltra, a well documented, albeit illegal initiative experimenting on brainwashing and mind control. Both drugs and electronics were used in such experiments. "The kernel of t