DiscoverScroll article

Polybius is an urban legend about a mysterious arcade video game.

According to the legend, the game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon in 1981. Children who played the arcade game were said to suffer from amnesia, seizures, night terrors, and hallucinations. Despite these adverse effects, the arcade cabinet was described as so addictive that players returned to Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished. The lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men in black who were said to record data on the players before removing all the arcade machines. There is no evidence for any Polybius machines in the 1980s. The earliest online reference to Polybius is a coinop.org page, dated to 1998. There is no record of the supposed publisher, Sinneslöschen, and no surviving arcade cabinet has surfaced. People claiming to have seen a Polybius arcade machine may be conflating it with memories of unusual actual titles from the period, such as Cube Quest and Tempest. Journalists and scholars have linked the urban legend to cultural anxieties from the period and real but unrelated events. In 1981, two Portland residents became ill while playing games at the same arcade. Ten days later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided multiple Portland arcades for illegally converting arcade games into gambling machines. Parents publicly expressed concerns that the new video game arcades could be dangerous. There were reported cases of epileptic seizures, and one teenager died while playing Berzerk, which led to rumors of a cursed arcade game. Urban legends spread of arcade cabinets built to hypnotize players. These rumors influenced science fiction, including Robert Maxxe's novel Arcade. The urban legend has had a lasting cultural impact. Two video games titled Polybius were released in 2007 and 2017, claiming a connection to the purported arcade game. In fiction, the game and legend have been used to evoke 1980s nostalgia, supernatural themes, and conspiracy theories.

Polybius shares its name with the classical Greek historian Polybius, who was born in Arcadia.

Author Brian Dunning believes the Polybius legend grew out of a mixture of 1980s influences. Although contemporary magazines and newspapers do not mention Polybius, similar legends and rumors circulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of arcade machines designed to hypnotize, brainwash, or recruit players.

Players claiming to remember playing or seeing Polybius in the 1980s may be recalling one of several unusual games from the period. Several games may have influenced the legend and have been proposed as the "real Polybius".

For Paper Girls (2022), CBR reported that the Polybius cameo gave the series 1980s science fiction credentials and differentiated it from Stranger Things (2016). Two major video games were inspired by Polybius and bear its name. In 2007, freeware developers and arcade constructors Rogue Synapse published a free downloadable game titled Polybius for Windows at sinnesloschen.com. They present it as an "attempt to recreate the Polybius game as it might have existed in 1981". Developer Jeff Minter initially claimed to have played the original Polybius arcade machine in Basingstoke, England, but later admitted that this claim was itself a contribution to the hoax. Minter's game does not attempt to reproduce Polybius' alleged gameplay, but it is instead closer to his work on Tempest successors Tempest 2000 and TxK. Still, Polybius has enjoyed cult-like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era." Ripley's Believe It or Not! called Polybius "the most dangerous video game to never exist". Lovecraft's Necronomicon is for books, Polybius is for videogames." Portland Monthly calls it "one of Portland's craziest urban legends" and mentions that people at the time speculated that it might be part of the CIA's MKUltra mind control program of the 1950s–1970s. List of urban legends – List with all urban legends currently on Wikipedia

Quick Facts

• According to the legend, the game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon in 1981.
• There is no evidence for any Polybius machines in the 1980s.
• The lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men in black who were said to record data on the players before removing all the arcade machines.
• The earliest online reference to Polybius is a coinop.org page, dated to 1998.
• Despite these adverse effects, the arcade cabinet was described as so addictive that players returned to Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Polybius (urban legend)". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.