elioncho

The Polybius was an arcade game released in 1981 by a company called Sinnesloschen (german for sense-delete). The company initially installed a couple of machines in Portland, Oregon for testing purposes. The game had vectorial graphics and sounds far more advance than anything ever seen, but its story was very primitive and similar to Condor Wars – control a spaceship and shoot enemies.

Rumors began to spread that people who played it suffered from health problems, including amnesia, insomnia, headaches and nightmares. Gamers claimed the game had subliminal messages which appeared for fractions of a second:

OBEY, COOPERATE, NO IDEAS, NO IMAGINATION, CONSUME, REWARD INDIFFERENCE, SUBMIT, OBEY AUTHORITY

Voices were heard during the game and ghostly pixelated faces appeared. Some arcade owners said guys in suits came from time to time prompting questions about the players reactions and checking to see which were the high scorers. Soon after its initial release, a 13 year old kid died from epilepsy which ultimately was the reason the machines were taken off the market. Sinnesloschen disappeared from the face of the world too.

The only known picture of a Polybius

Parody in The Simpsons

A government project during the cold war years? A failed new approach on computer graphics that prompted epileptic fits? An all around urban legend? Have your say!

• Special thanks to Pablo who told us about the Polybius on our guestbook.

Today we want to talk about David Singer, the man who dared not to sell the domain we thrived to own: www.buttonsmashers.com. We made our own investigations and found out that he has got the domain under his name for the last seven years. Seven years and all you get when you browse it is a “Page Not Found”.

We wrote him an e-mail:

Dear David,

I am interested in the domain “www.buttonsmashers.com” listed under your name. Are you selling it? If so, which is the price you’re asking for. Thanks,

Elioncho

And all that we got back was a miserable:

Thanks for the inquiry, but the domain is not for sale.

David

So we wrote him back:

Dear David,

I know you’ve been unconvinced, and I’m prepared to compensate you. How much will it be 1 million US dollars? Very well, make it 2 million US dollars.

Thanks,

Elioncho

Apparently there are a handful of things that might be going on in his life:

1) He has been working secretely on his website for 7 years, thinking about releasing it very soon (HIGHLY unlikely).

2) He doesnt know that HTML exists, hence he’s been developing his own hypertext language (for example SHTML) for the past 7 years, together with contacting Microsoft and the Mozilla people so that their browsers can support it.

3) Hes trying to learn HTML but keeps falling asleep on his book every hour -> this seems to have been happening since 2001.

Kind Regards,

TioGus and Elioncho