‘Polybius’: How the Terrifying ’80s Video Game Urban Legend Became a Pop Myth

It is, perhaps, the quintessential urban legend of video games, in stiff competition with the Sasquatch from ‘GTA: San Andreas’ or the codes to undress Lara Croft. An arcade game from 1981 that controlled the minds of unlucky players who came near it and that it was half psychological experiment half neuro-weapon paid for by the CIA. But… what was the truth in all this? Damn: was there something right?

The more or less accepted version of the myth says the following: ‘Polybius’ is an arcade with abstract graphics but certain airs of shooter mechanics that appeared in the theaters of Portland, Oregon, in 1981 and as part of this government experiment. The games would produce psychoactive effects in the players, who would also experience a certain addiction to the game and an inexplicable phobia for the medium as the weeks went by. Periodically, the machines would be visited by men in black who would collect data from them, until at a given moment, after having fulfilled their function, they would disappear from the rooms.

The “this happened to a friend of a cousin of mine” was completed with the inevitable tragic ending. It was said that some of the kids who had tried ‘Polybius’ had committed suicide or disappeared mysteriously. But the truth is that everything remains in the mist of urban legend: there is no evidence that ‘Polybius’ really existed, much less that it generated such effects.

Debunking the myth

The web ‘Skeptoid’, specialized in analyzing pseudosciences, urban legends and other forms of more or less harmful collective thought ‘ analyzed the phenomenon, trying to find out if Polybius existed or not. To begin with, he looked for traces of the arcade in Portland in the 1980s, but recognized the difficulty of locating it, given how complicated the word is: Polybius is also the name of a Greek historian born in 200 BC who invented a coding system for the language that allowed long messages to be sent while saving space, and that affirmed that without tangible evidence of what happened, a reliable historical chronicle cannot be made. Is there a relationship in the origin of the myth?

‘Skeptoid’ also analyzes the press of the time, specialized magazines such as Electronic Games between 1981 and 1984without finding even a reference to Polybius. The first mention that the web finds of the arcade game is much later, in 2003 in the magazine ‘GamePro’ and already talking about it as an urban legend from the early days of video games.

But it does locate some references in the press of the time about kids who suffered from disorders after playing arcade games. For example, in 1981, a 12-year-old boy played ‘Asteroids’ for over 28 hours and hurt his stomach from all the Coca-Cola he drank to stay awake. Tragic (or tragicomic, if you will), but very little mysterious. As are the cases of epilepsy in front of the screen, which unleashed a moderate wave of paranoia in the eighties, but perfectly justifiable rationally.

There is also an explanation for “the men in black”, because It’s true that federal agents wandered into Portland arcades in the 1980s.. Apparently, many room owners had modified the machines so that they paid players money based on the points they earned, functioning as gambling devices. FBI agents took photos of the names that appeared on the record tables looking for witnesses, and examined the machines for these modifications. There were also raids for pickpockets and juvenile drug dealers, a common occurrence in the darker rooms.

Finally, the ‘Skeptoid’ article summarizes military intervention in video games, possible inspirations for the urban legend. For example, ‘Battlezone’ was modified to emulate the controls of a Bradley tank and sold to the military. The military also modified levels from ‘Doom II’ in 1996 (in time for the GamePro news) to serve as military training. And of course, there is the movie, hugely successful at the time, ‘Starfighter: The Adventure Begins’, in which a very skilled young man with video games is recruited by the government to engage in a star battle.

We end with one last piece of information: In 1985, the German publisher VEB Polytechnik released the clone game compilation ‘Poly Play’., where a ‘Pac-Man’ from Hacendado was included. The arcade games were based on illegally copied Russian CPUs and were distributed throughout Eastern Europe. After a few years (after the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially), the legitimate owners of the plagiarized trademarks began to take these issues more seriously and the machines were withdrawn. The phonetic similarity of this “mysterious” game and its disappearance from the rooms for no apparent reason could also have made the legend grow.

The ‘Polybius’ that did exist

The fact is that, despite the fact that it is more or less clear that Polybius did not exist, there are those who say they have played it or even worked on it. This is the case of a certain Steven Roach, who in 2006 declared that he had been involved in its programming, and that the withdrawal from the rooms was due to the epileptic seizure of a kid that sparked panic. It was his description of the game mechanics and the graphics aspect of it that prompted a couple of current versions of it. What he described is similar to an unknown shooter from 1983 called ‘CubeQuest’.

From that description came a game freeware from 2007 for PC programmed by Rogue Synapse, which is a 2D shooter that some compare to the game ‘Star Castle’. In 2017, the indefatigable Jeff Minter produced a game for the PS4 virtual reality headset also titled ‘Polybius’: Minter acknowledges that he was inspired by the urban legend but does not attempt to replicate the assumption gameplay of the game.

Of course, such a juicy story had to end up permeating pop culture, and it has been referenced in multiple ways. Perhaps the most popular is its appearance in an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ from Season 18, ‘Please, Homer, don’t hit a nail’, where the arcade is distinguished along with one that Bart plays, and which exhibits the sign ‘Property of the United States Government’. It also recently appeared in the background in the fifth episode of ‘Loki’, ‘Journey into Mystery’.

These are just a few examples: ‘Polybius’ (or rather, the Jeff Minter version) also appears in the video for Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Less Than’, it was the inspiration for Ernest Cline’s novel ‘Armada’ and the object study in a series of documentaries entitled ‘The Polybius Conspiracy’. It is also the core of the excellent novel-essay ‘Polybius’, by Francisco Jota-Pérez.

Quite a journey for a game that never existed. Or yes, because there are those who swear and perjure that they saw it, played it and even suffered a cardiac crisis because of it. In this case, as is always the case with the great legends of popular culture, it matters little whether ‘Polybius’ was real or not: its impact on the common dreams of fans has been as tangible as any great success of the golden age of recreational ones.