Like the Evil Stick, Polybius blurs the line between an internet story and an actual physical object.
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The legendary
Polybius arcade cabinet.
Source: Wikipedia |
According to the legend, the mysterious arcade cabinet, called "Polybius," appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon in 1981. Released during the golden age of arcade video games,[16] it was housed in a simple black cabinet.[17] The gameplay was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, geometric, and dangerous because it was highly addictive.[18] People who claim to remember playing the game recall different and contradictory gameplay experiences.[19]
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.
It is claimed that the machines were visited by men in black, who collected some form of unknown data but left the coins inside.[8][22]
It was said that the game could turn itself on autonomously.[23] Polybius was suspected to be not a product but an experiment to test responses to the game's psychoactive stimuli.[24][1] Some accounts connected Polybius to the CIA's real-world mind control program, MKUltra.[25]
At the legend's end, some of the players went insane, some took their own lives, and the arcade machines vanished without a trace.[8]
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 that the game ever existed.[2] It is considered to be an urban legend or a deliberate hoax.[3][4] Fact-checking website Snopes calls the game a modern-day version of 1980s rumors about "men in black" recording the high-score initials from arcade machines.[5] No newspapers or gaming magazines from the 1980s mention Polybius,[2] and no ROM image of the arcade machine's software has ever surfaced.[6] Aside from mockup cabinets and games inspired by the myth, no Polybius cabinets have ever been found.[7]
