Polybius

July 20th, 2008 by WHO WAS PHONE?

In Portland, Oregon in 1981, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs, something of a rarity at the time. This game was called “Polybius”. The game proved to be incredibly popular, to the point of addiction, and queues formed around the machines, quickly followed by clusters of visits from men in black. Rather than the usual marketing data collected by company visitors to arcade machines, they collected some unknown data, allegedly testing responses to the psychoactive machines. The players themselves suffered from a series of unpleasant side-effects — amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and suicide appearing as having been caused by the game in various versions of the legend. Some players stopped playing video games, while it is reported that one became an anti-gaming activist.

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Posted in Strange & Unknown


17 Responses

  1. pringles

    took me a few seconds but i got it, lol.

  2. Eilamme

    There’s finally one from my state and it’s about video games?

  3. Royal-Sovereign

    I totally wrote a short-story about this.

    Published it on Lulu.

  4. Anonymous

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_(game)

    I had no idea it was this popular (the legend, that is)!

    And once again, Creepypasta.com proves informative.

  5. Royal-Sovereign

    Yeah, I got my inspiration from that wiki article, actually…fascinating shit.

  6. Maran Doll

    Oh shit. This one’s from my city.

    But it’s BORING. How sad.

  7. ???

    I want to play it D:

  8. Hrissar

    @ royal-sovereign

    i’d buy the book where is it?

  9. Anonymous

    I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE

  10. LMLYUT

    This is one of those stories that is just crazy enough to be true. Bravo to whoever wrote this one.

  11. lostmyselfalongtheway

    Was the activist Jack Thompson by any chance?

  12. -

    Isn’t this SCP-034 dialed down a bit?

  13. EnjoyTheRide

    I remember seeing something about this. Maybe it was on G4 TV when they were promoting the king of kong.

    The smae exact things were said to have happened but I don’t know if it was true or if the urban legend became stated as fact.

  14. Icecry0

    I heard of Polybius, never played it though obviously xD.

    I’ve only heard of the legend.

  15. Anonymous

    This this story is like “The Killing Joke” for Jack Thompson

  16. OmnomAvenger

    I live in the right city, I downloaded the game that was created in the image of what people think Polybius would be like, and am in the process of building a arcade front for it.

    Ah, the life of a geek with nothing better to do.

  17. MVO

    Polybius is interwebanese for World of Warcraft.

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