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.
Posted in Strange & Unknown
July 21st, 2008 at 3:30 pm
took me a few seconds but i got it, lol.
July 21st, 2008 at 3:57 pm
There’s finally one from my state and it’s about video games?
July 21st, 2008 at 8:12 pm
I totally wrote a short-story about this.
Published it on Lulu.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:44 pm
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.
July 22nd, 2008 at 12:35 am
Yeah, I got my inspiration from that wiki article, actually…fascinating shit.
July 22nd, 2008 at 2:04 am
Oh shit. This one’s from my city.
But it’s BORING. How sad.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:09 am
I want to play it D:
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:57 am
@ royal-sovereign
i’d buy the book where is it?
July 24th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE
July 27th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
This is one of those stories that is just crazy enough to be true. Bravo to whoever wrote this one.
July 27th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Was the activist Jack Thompson by any chance?
July 31st, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Isn’t this SCP-034 dialed down a bit?
August 9th, 2008 at 6:04 am
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.
August 10th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I heard of Polybius, never played it though obviously xD.
I’ve only heard of the legend.
August 11th, 2008 at 10:09 am
This this story is like “The Killing Joke” for Jack Thompson
August 21st, 2008 at 2:17 pm
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.
August 31st, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Polybius is interwebanese for World of Warcraft.