Pilybius

Working on mini MAME arcade machine. It was designed in Solid Works 2015 then cut out of 1/4″ MDF on our Epilog laser cutter. Will be powered by a Raspberry Pi and a 9″ TFT screen. The software is MAME4ALL-Pi running the MAME 0.375b5 romsets. The joystick and buttons are connected directly to the GPIO pins and the 9” monitor is connected to the Video out port.

Pilybius is based off an arcade cabinet described in an urban legend about a game called Polybius, which is said to have induced various psychological effects on players. The story describes players suffering from amnesia, night terrors, and a tendency to stop playing all video games.

Bizarre rumors about this game are that it was supposedly developed by some kind of weird military tech offshoot group, used some kind of proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA. According to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in black coats would come to collect “records” from the machines. They’re not interested in quarters or anything, they just collected information about how the game was played.

Around a month after its supposed release in 1981, Polybius is said to have disappeared without a trace. There is no evidence that such a game has ever existed.