One of gaming’s most notorious urban legends could be heading to consoles for the end of 2016.
Years and years and years ago, a rumour sprung around arcades of a machine named Polybius. As the urban legend goes, the machine would appear in multiple arcades in Portland, Oregon in the 1980s.
The game was meant to be murderously addictive, resulting in long queues and fights over whose turn it was to pilot a rectangle through space (it was the 80s, this was meant to be cutting edge gameplay).
Described as a ‘polygonal flying shape game’, at the end of each day, men in suits would turn up and collect information print outs from the game.
Depending on who you talk to, Polybius was supposed to contain subliminal messages which would influence the action of anyone playing it. Those who claim to have played the game have reported headaches, amnesia and nightmares. Others have suggested that arcades have been visited by government officials in black suits, claiming it was part of some sort of CIA project to control members of the populace.
Then… IT DISAPPEARED. Passed into legend but making appearances everywhere from The Simpsons to Keyser Soze’s personal arcade.
Now for the rational, Wikipedia and Snopes reading members among us, this thing called Polybius never existed.
But for legendary British indie games Jeff Minter, not only did Polybius exist, but he’s going to update it for modern day consoles.
This week saw the release of the very first trailer for Polybius for the Playstation VR. Mixing what we know about the original game with some slick new gameplay, Minter has promised Playstation Blog a gaming experience like no other.
‘I’ve been dabbling in ludic psychedelia for a while now, and maybe the time and the medium was right now for me to attempt a game to at least in part replicate the effects, if not the exact gameplay, of that old legend. Leaving out all the bad stuff, of course,’ he says.
‘We began building a framework within which to create such a thing. To accurately convey the sensation of speed-rush that so strongly permeated the original game it was necessary to build an engine that could deliver everything we needed at 120 FPS without possibility of frame drops, and at a very high internal resolution.’
While no release date for Polybius has been set yet, expect it to land sometime in 2017.
Ready your VR systems. Gaming is about to get weird.
