BP-2026.012.1
Polybius
- Claim
- 4 of 5
Animals and crops destroyed, or lasting harm to the body, livelihood or estate. - Evidence
- 1 of 5
Statements by those involved, and nothing further. - Provenance
- 0 of 3
No evidence the object ever existed.
These three figures are kept separate and are never combined into a single score. How grave the claim is, what it rests on, and whether the object can be traced are different questions. How the register reads them.
Asserted
Accounts attributed to a source. The register does not adopt them.
That it unsettles the minds of those who play it. A coin-operated game is said to have appeared briefly in a few arcades in 1981, causing hallucinations, amnesia, nightmares and at least one seizure among those who played it, and to have been built as a behavioural experiment. Men in dark suits are said to have visited the machines to collect readings before the cabinets were removed.
- C20
accident or injury
- C22
mental disturbance
- H5
made as an object of misfortune
reported by: since 1998
Recorded
Established by the register, or received with the object.
File
- Register number
- BP-2026.012.1
- Entry type
- Object entry
- Opened
- 2026-09-16
- Coded against
- Claim Index v0.8
Object
- Type
- arcade cabinet
- Materials
- not recorded
- Date
- said to be 1981
- Origin
- said to be Portland, Oregon
- Maker
- said to be a company called Sinneslöschen
- Whereabouts
- no evidence the object ever existed
Custody
No custody record has been entered.
On what grounds
An entry posted on an arcade-listing website in August 1998, seventeen years after the events it describes, and an addition made in 2006 by a user who cannot be traced. Reported since 1998. Evidence is capped at 1: no source exists beyond those statements, and there is no evidence the object ever existed.
Counter-indications
What weighs against the claim. These are never subtracted from a figure; the lowest applicable ceiling is applied instead.
- CI1
absent from the earliest sources
- CI21
the reporter cannot be traced
- CI12
a claim of fabrication has been made but is unresolved
- CI23
the reporter had a commercial interest in it
- CI26
no source beyond the submitter's statement
- CI15
no evidence the object ever existed
No cabinet, no circuit board and no software have ever been produced. There is no copyright registration and no record of the company named. An analysis of the order in which the accounts appeared concluded that the game was almost certainly invented to draw traffic to the site that first described it.
Register findings
- MT8
playable versions marketed by others
- MT28
has appeared in broadcast and viral posts
Nothing the story itself asserts — the panic removal of the machines, the men collecting readings — can be recorded here. Register findings require a documentary source, and none exists.