8 Crazy Video Game Urban Legends You Need To Hear
2. Polybius Was A Government Experiment
In the early '80s, an arcade cabinet called Polybius is said to have shown up in limited numbers around Portland, Oregon. By all accounts, there was nothing unusual about its space shooter gameplay, but the same cannot be said about its effect on players.
Anyone who fed pocket change into this machine is rumoured to have suffered some kind of adverse reaction, from vivid nightmares to migraines and seizures brought on by its violently powerful strobe effects, either during their session or afterwards.
Meanwhile, there were also reports of men dressed in black visiting arcade parlours in Portland to download data from Polybius machines. Members of the tin hat brigade will have you believe they were government agents conducting research into the effects of psychoactive machines on arcade-dwelling youths.
Although the Polybius conspiracy theory would probably make a good movie, the urban legend about men in black attending coin-op parlours to gather personal data harks back to the dawn of video games.
In any case, it's difficult to look into the Polybius case since all of the arcade machines have seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth, which is either ominous or very convenient, depending on your point of view.