In 1981, Portland arcades hosted the eerie Polybius—a glitchy, unmarked machine with white sides, a single joystick, and impossible tech mixing vector and raster graphics, despite no such hybrid existing then. Players fed endless quarters, suffered migraines from strobing effects, and woke with nightmares but no memory of gameplay, fueling urban legends like the FBI’s anti-drug warnings in games, including Time Crisis. Over 200 premium episodes await on Patreon for $5/month, where hosts like Jake (who insists he’s not crying) and Travis dive into bizarre gaming lore. [Automatically generated summary]
As always, we're your hosts, Jake Rakutansky, Jack LaRoche, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Portland, Oregon, 1981.
The year is 1981.
If you're lycanthropically inclined, maybe you're heading to the carpeted floor of a Malibu Grand Prix amusement center after spending an afternoon at the multiplex watching Wolfin, the Howling, or an American Werewolf in London.
The bright lights of Space Invaders and Defender are illuminating the faces of the teens bent over the cabinets.
There's still a line for the new Pac-Man machine, and you can hear the waka-waka-waka over Russia's moving pictures blaring from the loudspeakers.
The scent of smoke is strong in the air.
In fact, ashtrays are set up beside a lot of the video game cabinets and built into the pool tables.
It's the heyday of American arcades, and you heard that there's a new unmarked machine that everyone is just dying to play.
The cabinet is impossible to miss.
The line for it stretches out the front door.
You dutifully wait, sweaty fingers clutched around your precious quarters, with maybe a few house coins painted over with red nail polish.
When it's almost your turn, you set a quarter on top of the cabinet, marking your place in line.
The mystery box could be anything.
If it's late enough in the year, its slight build could remind you of Galaga, but the shallow sides are white instead of black.
The coin box isn't consistent with Namco machines.
There's just a single joystick and a button.
As the line dwindles, you notice that the kids ahead of you don't look so good when they're done playing.
Their eyes are glassy.
The neon lights blint off the sweat on their foreheads.
They look pale.
Whatever.
You step up to the screen and drop your quarter into the coin box.
The title screen is slick.
The large bubble letters are more detailed than anything you've seen before or would see again until 1983, when Mario Brothers uses a similar giant bubble-lettered font.
The word flashes on the screen, Polybius.
The copyright at the bottom lists the year 1981, as well as the company, Sinus Lotion.
You hit play, and dizzying vector graphics fill the screen, creating the illusion that you're flying through a tunnel.
The joystick moves the background, but not your ship.
The strobing effects cause pain to blossom behind your eyes.
Your temples throb, and an icy sensation spreads low in your gut.
But you keep on playing.
Quarter after quarter hits the coin box as your mouth goes dry and your vision starts to blur around the edges.
The game isn't even that good, but you still keep playing.
Just like the others, you can't stop.
You won't even remember the game in much detail later, but your migraine will remind you that you overdid it in the arcade.
The nightmares begin that night.
They don't stop.
Boy, you know, I'm not quite old enough to really experience the peak of the golden age of arcade games, but I was old enough to remember its decline.
I remember being very excited.
They were very common.
I'm like, in my town of Bonsel, California, population 2000, there was a small arcade right next to the movie theater.
So like, yeah, there was like, it was everywhere.
I remember, yeah, in that particular place, I played Street Fighter II Championship Edition with all the quarters I could get.
It was a good time.
I was about to say that is definitely it for me.
I'm old enough to remember pumping quarters in and playing like Street Fighter, watching the arrival of Area 51 and Time Crisis and these games where you could actually hold a gun.
I was like, that is so crazy.
And there was a sniper game too that I loved playing.
Really crappy sniper game, but you did get to hold the sniper rifle and look through a little silent scope.
Yes.
That's the one.
I played them all.
You know, this is what they took from us: that quarters don't have any appeal.
When I was a kid, having a quarter in my pocket felt amazing.
Having that little coin, just the right size, just the right weight.
It's like the perfect coin.
And for some of those who were lucky enough, on a cold summer afternoon, you'd walk into your local arcade and see a strange machine with a glass dome over it inside a holographic cowboy.
Oh, was I remember this one?
It was uncontrollable.
It was way too expensive for me and my brother to ever play, but we, but we watched it.
And who knows if you were actually doing anything, but but I remember seeing like a three, like a 3D hologram arcade machine and being like, this is the future of gaming.
Travis just reacted this really as well.
You know this game?
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, that was one of the games that the Bonzel Arcade happened to have.
And I remember, yeah, I remember it's also big.
Like, I was sucking in by the gimmick.
It's like a dollar a game or some crazy shit.
I was going to say, yeah, it's like four or five quarters officer.
And then also, also, you, yeah, right.
It was barely difficult.
It's very difficult to troll.
It reminded me of Dragon's Lair a bit, where it's like, I was going to ask, yeah.
Yeah, it was like, it was like Dragon's Lair style play, but the gimmick was that it was like it was in this little kind of like illusion of sort of 3D kind of thing.
It was kind of crappy, but good gimmick.
Younger listeners, you gotta, you gotta imagine when we saw these games like Dragon's Lair or stuff that had like full motion video integrated, like Mad Dog McCree or what's another one?
What's another like FMV arcade?
I mean, I guess Lethal Enforcers to a certain degree was kind of using like FMV graphics as opposed to Time Crisis, which was still, you know, polygons.
This was like crazy to see.
Like it looked, it felt like there was a Disney movie that you were controlling.
Well, with Dragon's Lair, it literally was because Don Bluth did all those animations.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There are certain techniques that he used that other animators just weren't using too.
And you can really see that coming through with Dragon's Lair.
It's on the same thing he was doing in Secrets of Nim, where he was actually shining light through the cells.
So it was real lighting you were seeing, which was just absolutely amazing.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Worth the extra quarters.
Do for a rewatch.
All listeners, if you have not seen Secrets of Nim, you got to watch it tonight.
Okay.
Well, our listeners.
All right.
Let's go.
All of the young listeners are like, what the hell are these?
They're all unking out so hard.
They're unknown.
Talking about no quarters.
But you know what?
One listener is going to sit down and find Secretive Nim on YouTube or possibly a streaming service.
They're going to watch it from front to back and they're going to be like, they're going to understand us better.
Actually, they're going to come away with a tiny little piece of lore that nobody else will have.
What was the name of the husband in it?
Jonathan.
Oh, Jonathan.
Oh, you guys are going to love it.
In fact, stop listening to the podcast.
Cancel your Patreon.
Don't you?
Shut up.
Jesus.
Right.
All right.
Cancel your Patreon right now and go spend that on Secretive Nim.
Jack, please crack down on this fool.
Yeah.
Believe it or not, there were more arcades in the United States in 1981 than Starbucks in 2015.
To the dismay of many parents, there were coin-operated machines found in places as diverse as subway stations, swimming pools, and local delis.
One newspaper reporter commented that the only place he had yet to see a cabinet was a funeral parlor.
It only seems natural, in retrospect, that urban legends would surround something as relatively new and widespread as video games.
I think it makes sense too because they used to have like that FBI like warning on arcade stuff.
There was like don't do drugs messages often.
I think they had a collab with Time Crisis has that, yeah.
Yeah, so like it did feel like high stakes and kind of like dangerous and like you had to have warning labels on it.
Well, you'll learn why soon.
But the legend of Polybius is simple and light on the details.
One month in 1981, several unmarked cabinets showed up in arcades in the greater Portland area.
The game was unusually sophisticated for the time, featuring both common raster scan and the newer vector scan graphics, which is a technological impossibility.
Nice.
So right off the bat, yeah, all right.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QA podcast.
For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com/slash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverse with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com/slash QAA.