[INTENSE DRAMATIC MUSIC, TO ENCITE FEAR AND WONDER]
We all know the urban legend of Polybius Arcade Machine,
supposedly an arcade game from the early 80s, which produced addictive
and psychoactive effects in those who played it.
"Hello!"
some kids collapsed whilst others were
visited by mysterious men in black after playing.
Of course, it's apparent that most of this was probably made up.
The first mention of it seemed to be on coinop.org during the year 2000,
talking of a 1981 arcade machine created by a company known as soon as Sinnesloschen.
A brief synopsis of rumors regarding
the machine seemed to cause a wave which rippled through the Internet,
leading to many investigations, videos, upcoming ASHENS films,
spinoff games and indeed apparent versions of the arcade machine.
Numskull then, in line with their other quarter scale.
Arcade cabinets have decided to run
a Kickstarter campaign to create this infamous machine.
I never Numskull people pretty well, so
they've sent me two prototype machines to have a look at.
It's not every day you stumble across not one, but two Polybius Arcade cabinets.
Sure, they might not be full size, but they look pretty good to me.
Now, these machines are based on the model created by Rogue Synapse.
They are the same size as all the other
quarter arcade machines, and they're designed to fit snugly in your
quarter size arcade, but they're slightly different.
They do have screens, they have joysticks.
We have buttons, but they don't play a game as such.
And of course, you would expect that,
Numskull, are trying to create something realistic here, something true to life.
And if you had a game on this Polybius machine,
who says, which game it's going to be?
Is it going to be the Jeff Minter one?
Is it going to be the other one
which claims to be the proper game on the Internet?
It's best to leave it to the imagination, I think anyway.
The screen will have the Polybius title screen.
It will have an array of effects
and sounds which play, which I think would be pretty cool.
[strange noises play]
And you get the Polybius marquee at the top, which is rather dashing,
we even get the little government messages stuff down here, which is quite nice.
And of course you get the coin slots and all that stuff, which makes it nice.
You know, it's made to the same high standards as normal Numskull stuff.
I quite like it.
Now, of course, this should have a use
because you'd expect it to have a use and it does. These are only prototype machines,
but they will have, all of them have a USB hub on the back.
This one's got one, two, three, four, four.
This one has 10 USB ports.
So I'm not sure if they're two or three, but,
You know, it seems irrelevant because
their main purpose is to power the rest of your Numskull quarter arcade cabinets,
you can have this one in the middle and then plug the USB cords in,
light up your entire arcade rather than taking up crap loads of power supplies.
I like it, but one of my main interests here is can it be hacked?
What can we do to it? Because you might want to customise yours.
You might want to put Jeff Minter's game inside it to make it an experience
which you think is more akin to what Polybius should be.
So let's take a look. The two prototype cabinets I have are very different.
One has the USB hub on the back
and the other is like a normal quarter arcade cabinet,
but running the Polybius firmware, mainly
I want to see how much space is in these things.
The USB version has a crap ton of space in there, enough for ramming a Raspberry Pi
in there or whatever you like, as does the standard version.
Of course, the final product will be
an amalgamation of these two, but there's lots of scope here.
The shipped screens are pretty decent, five inch panels and hardware wise,
but it's basically the same as the previous cabinets.
I'm not going to rip this thing apart now, but I may do in the future.
For now, I think it's a good addition to have with a USB hub and it's really
aimed at collectors of previous quarter sized arcade cabs.
But if you a Polybius machine just sitting in the corner
sitting in the corner whirring away, then I think it's good for that as well.
So this Kickstarter campaign has
two or three days left by the time you watch this video.
So if you do want to bag yourself one
of these, I suggest you click the link below and go and take a look.
It's about forty six thousand out of fifty thousand at the moment.
So it should quite easily sail through.
But if you collect these quarter arcade cabinets, you'd be mental to miss out
on one of these amazing additions to any quarter sized arcade.
I think. Got your own Polybius cabinet!
Come on.
Polybius.