gaming-history
There is an old urban legend about an arcade game Polybius.
An arcade machine that would have been made to be a government experiment, appeared just for a few days in a few arcades, and then some men in black took it away, never to be seen again.
So is there a nugget of truth to this myth? Did the game ever exist? Or was it all created from nothing just to be a creepypasta?
While doing research on why the color-coded system came to existence, I remembered that each color is perceived to have a few meanings.
Looking at this list, there could easily be some links to why they picked certain colors. For example, in Star Wars the Old Republic, the ordering of items is White (standard), Green (premium), Blue (prototype), Orange (custom), Purple (artifact), Deep Purple (legendary), Light Yellow (legacy), and Yellow (mission).
The Purple and Deep Purple items are very rare and powerful, which could easily be traced back to the meanings that purple has, sophistication and power.
Besides just this, these more rare and vibrant colors pop out more, and are more likely to draw a players attention. Mix this with making them rare, and these exotic and new colors will easily grab a players eye while they are playing as they are rare and new.
Going from the history of gaming and seeing where it was used, an early contendor is Diablo 1, which came out in 1997. However, the best contender I could find for setting the trend in motion early was Diablo 2, which came out in 2000. Here they used a myriad of colors to clarify between different types of items.
They used White for Normal items, Blue for Magic items, Yellow for Rare items, Green for Set items, and Gold for Unique items.
Which is easier to see in a gloomy crypt, a dark gray glow or a bright yellow one?
After Diablo 2, World of Warcraft (released in 2004) was the next major game that I could find that started using color coding for it's loot system, and it was very easy to see it was based off of the Diablo 2 coloring system, which is the same for every game that uses the coloring system. Gray for junk, white for common, green for uncommon, blue for rare, purple for epic, orange for legendary, gold for artifact, and cyan for heirloom (with the latter two only being added in later additions to the game).
While Diablo 2 started the trend, I think it would be safe to say World of Warcraft really set it into stone.
Note: Both of these games were made by Blizzard Entertainment.
Outside of gaming however, color coding based on value or rarity probably dates back a long time. Just one that is coming from the top of my head is the color of coins. Gold coins are made of a valuable metal, meaning a gold coin would be worth more than a silver coin. While this is not directly making lists based off of value, the value of the coins made their own color list, associating gold with value and silver with less value.
I refer to both the Solidus(gold coin) and the Follis(silver coin).
Much like the coins, indigo was another instance of color being related to value. The dye itself was rare in Europe at one point, so the mere use of the color dictated value. It might just be a color, but because it was different and rare, it had value.
There are multiple reasons to why I believe colors are used to denote rarity in games.
Simply put, the color rarity system was re-adapted for games by Blizzard Entertainment with Diablo and World of Warcraft. As a basic concept however, it has been around for a while. It is all balanced deep in the human mind, and how we perceive colors and how scarcity works.
Why didn't arcade games keep scaling? Because the problems of making a game stand out scaled in a different direction than the benefits arcade cabinets provide.
Decades ago, as mentioned in the question, a game could stand out by simply having 3D graphics, or doing other things that required hardware that could not practically be included in consumer home gaming devices. As technology improved, that became less and less the case, and now there is essentially nothing you can make a video game do that commercial hardware can't handle. Nicer hardware might get you more polygons or better lighting effects or even better physics simulations, but you can't get the same qualitative difference as 3D graphics in a world of otherwise 2D games.
Once we reached that point, the main challenges of developing impressive new games shifted to things like innovating on mechanics, making game worlds bigger and deeper, improving 3D model fidelity, and others. These things do not necessarily demand more of the hardware, but they require much more development resources.
Considering those shifts, it is often not worthwhile to make an arcade machine, in terms of both user experience and profit.
Let's say you wanted to try the "expensive hardware" strategy of building an arcade cabinet with today's technology. You get the best graphics money can buy: a 4K monitor and 4 RTX 2080 TI connected with SLI. You get the most powerful processor on the market: an Intel Core i9-10980XE. You get all the memory you can cram into a PC motherboard: about 64GB. And you fill it out with more storage than you could possibly fill with one game. This adds up to several thousand dollars worth of hardware, and you can do real-time ray tracing in 4K, which is pretty cool.
Now you need to make a game that actually uses that hardware. You're going to need designers, modelers, artists, animators, programmers, and others to spend a lot of time making a game with the fidelity to take advantage of that hardware. And in the end, this is all still commercial gaming hardware, so you can provide a lower resolution graphics option and the game will run on people's computers at home. And once you sell the game to people directly, most people probably would not consider it worthwhile to travel somewhere to pay more money to play the same game with marginally better graphics than what they can get in the comfort of their own home. Plus, if people buy your game to play at home, you don't have to handle selling hardware.
I recently went to a Dave & Busters, which is probably one of the best places to see modern arcade games. Almost every game there distinguished itself not by being more visually impressive, but by having an input device that you would rarely see on consumer gaming setups, like a steering wheel and pedals, or a gun, or a dance pad, or a single big button. For the most part, they were designed to be easy to understand, and quick enough to finish that other people could get a turn.
Best Answer
The game never existed. Both Wikipedia and Snopes state this definitively.
One theory for the creation of this urban legend is that is was started by Kurt Koller in an effort to get more visitors to his site dedicated to arcade gaming.