Polybius: The Most Dangerous Game
Did the infamous 1980s arcade game actually exist?
Imagine a simple game that envelops your eyes with vibrant shapes and colors and fills your ears with a catchy tune. You feel compelled to try your hand at the game, see if you can become a winner. Your heart races as you advance from level to level. A smile crosses your lips. This is fun. Hey, maybe you not only will win, but you'll also set the high score.
You can’t rip yourself away until you realize minutes have turned into hours while your hands grow numb from playing. When you finally force yourself to quit and leave the arcade, strange things began to unfold around you.
Sleep eludes you that night. Colors within your room swirl together. Walls melt and eerie noises rip through an otherwise unnerving silence. Soon, horrible and indescribable images stalk you and bombard your senses. Each one paralyzes you with fear and turns you into a babbling mess when morning returns.
This hypothetical scenario forms the crux of an urban legend surrounding Polybius, an arcade game doubling as a clandestine mass psychology experiment done by the US Government.
Origins of Polybius
According to the legend, Polybius was a new arcade game that debuted in 1981 in Portland, Oregon. The game showed up at malls and other places in multiple Portland suburbs. It proved an instant hit. Long lines formed around the arcade machines and fights often broke out between gamers over who would play next. People who played Polybius regularly started reporting dangerous side effects. These included amnesia, insomnia, night terrors and hallucinations.
Then, one month after its 1981 release, Polybius disappeared without a trace never to be seen again.
Eyewitnesses claimed the arcade machines were visited by government agents during the month they were available to the public. These agents collected data from each machine that allegedly measured responses to various psychoactive effects resulting from playing Polybius.
No contemporary accounts of Polybius from the early 1980s exist nor is there any compelling evidence this game ever existed. First widespread reports of this mind-altering video game did not show up within the gaming community until the early 2000s.
Mind controlling media
Polybius fits snugly with a host of other urban legends and conspiracy theories related to mind control. These stories always feature the CIA, or military intelligence, doing clandestine psychological experiments that have unforeseen dangerous side effects on the subjects and are subsequently shut down.
These types of urban legends stem partially from a latent fear of being controlled by popular media relentlessly bombarding us. You can’t visit most websites these days without tons of pop-up ads greeting you. Snoopy algorithms shadow your movements and try to influence everything you see and hear based on a handful of past choices. Topics of discussion with a spouse or friend turn into suggested searches and ads on your phone.
Video games serving as a conduit for other shadowy purposes crops up in the science fiction and horror realms. A classic example of this trope is The Last Starfighter, one of the few sci-fi movies my dad likes to watch. The Last Starfighter follows Alex Rogan, a teenager recruited from a trailer park to fight in an interstellar war after he earns the highest score on a new arcade game. Rogan learns the game actually simulated a real conflict and was designed as a training vehicle to identify new starfighters to join the battle against the Ko-Dan Armada.
Check out the Strange New Worlds archives for previous Folklore Friday features. If you have a specific urban legend, myth, or piece of folklore you want me to write about in the future, feel free to let me know in the comments.
I learned about Polybius through Angry Video Game Nerd. He had an interesting video about the weird history of this legend.
Some conspiracy theories have a grain of truth to them, and here's where this one is:
The hypothetical scenario you describe is more or less what I experienced after several hours at the arcade. I'd have phantom game-playing while trying to sleep! Of course, this happened because of such a ridiculous surplus of screen time, not because something something X-files Joe Rogan.