Polybius
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.
took me a few seconds but i got it, lol.
There’s finally one from my state and it’s about video games?
I totally wrote a short-story about this.
Published it on Lulu.
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.
Yeah, I got my inspiration from that wiki article, actually…fascinating shit.
Oh shit. This one’s from my city.
But it’s BORING. How sad.
I want to play it D:
@ royal-sovereign
i’d buy the book where is it?
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE
This is one of those stories that is just crazy enough to be true. Bravo to whoever wrote this one.
Was the activist Jack Thompson by any chance?
Isn’t this SCP-034 dialed down a bit?
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.
I heard of Polybius, never played it though obviously xD.
I’ve only heard of the legend.
This this story is like “The Killing Joke” for Jack Thompson
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.
Polybius is interwebanese for World of Warcraft.
okay, i have to say this. WHO WAS GAME?
OMFG a remake download
….
WHO WAS MAN?
#2 - I know how you feel. I was like, “Yay! Portland!” and it turned out to be lame.
@-@
Search Polybius on Youtube. I think it was a real game. Freaky.
@brix: a miserable pile of secrets.
No… NOT THE GAMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually, Jack Thoupson grew up in Cleaveland, Ohio and then went to Florida to practice law. There’s never been any big occurance in his life when he went to Oregon. Sorry, but after a bit of research, the pasta failed to make me shit a brick. Better luck next time.
Didn’t really like thz 1, personally, i prefer pacman… omna omna omna omna