Date: 1981
Location: Portland, Oregon
The Conspirators: Unknown government agencies
The Victims: Portland arcade customers
This legend claims that government agents conspired to construct an arcade game to collect information about players for some unknown purpose, a game which had the collateral effect of sickening the players. It is said to have been installed in a few video arcades in Portland, Oregon, in 1981, whereupon several players fell ill or committed suicide. Government agents would collect player data from the machines, then one day—as mysteriously as they appeared—the games were all taken away.
Although some parts of the legend are based on real events, the Polybius game itself is completely fictitious and never existed.
Tales of how Polybius worked and what it did are a bit scattered, but most follow the same general theme.
Sometime in 1981, people claim a few Polybius consoles appeared in arcades in suburbs of Portland, Oregon. The games were wildly addictive—teens would line up to play them. But then some players began having serious side effects after playing, ranging from insomnia to hallucinations. There are even stories of suicides and permanent insanity resulting.
To add to the intrigue, mysterious government agents, sometimes described as Men in Black, would apparently come to the arcades and download data from the Polybius games, but seemed uninterested in collecting any money from them. This happened for about a month, and then suddenly, all the games disappeared, removed from the arcades by government agents.
Nobody has ever unearthed an actual Polybius console game, although quite a few people have built replicas, and there is now even a standard logo that’s always used and descriptions of how the game was played. Some enterprising coders have actually written 1980s-style gaming code to make their Polybius consoles functional, though they just made up a game themselves.
Due to its dark and compelling history, the game has become a fixture in arcade culture. It was famously seen in a 2006 episode of The Simpsons where Bart went into an arcade. It has had various other appearances in media since: comics, TV, and even as a meta reference in other video games.
There don’t appear to be any references to the Polybius legend until decades later. In fact, there is a handy time machine that allows us to go back and verify with certainty that there was never any such arcade game anywhere in the early 1980s. Electronic Games was an industry magazine that covered every minute detail of gaming and arcades. If it happened in arcade culture, it was covered in this magazine. All its issues from 1981 through 1984 are available and electronically searchable, and there is neither any mention of Polybius nor any of the events associated with the urban legend. For all practical purposes, case closed.
Nevertheless, we can go back and find specific events that likely inspired the legend. Newspapers reported that two arcade players had gotten sick after playing at the same arcade in Portland on November 29, 1981. One was twelve-year-old Brian Mauro, who was at the tail end of an attempt to beat the Asteroids record, with local TV crews on hand. After playing for twenty-eight hours straight, Mauro became ill with stomach cramps, attributed to anxiety from all the attention coupled with the prodigious volume of Coca-Cola he’d been consuming.
In a separate event, police were called to a scene where teen Michael Lopez was found collapsed on a stranger’s lawn. He had been playing Tempest at the same time and the same place as Mauro, but had developed a severe migraine and left. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it all the way home before falling. Two players, arguably both taken out of action by arcade games in Portland in 1981. That’s kind of suspicious, right?
But there was more to come. Unrelated to the two boys, authorities had been scoping out Portland area arcades for some time for illegal gambling activity. Some older arcade games could be rigged with hardware counters to total up game scores, and some arcades would make cash payouts to players who reached certain high scores, as a way to attract more players. The legality was disputed; arcades said these were games of skill, but the Feds said it was illegal gambling. And so, ten days after Mauro and Lopez went down, multiple law enforcement agencies made raids at several Portland arcades, seizing cash and rigged games. And thus was another element of the urban legend satisfied: government agents removing video games.
There is even a close match for a true historical event referencing the name of the game. It was called Poly Play (close to Polybius). Poly Play was a crappy East German console game that was a rip-off of eight popular Western games, and sold to Eastern Bloc arcades in 1985. But they broke a lot, and with the dissolution of the Iron Curtain, were suddenly subject to copyright claims. So the factory, VEB Polytechnik, recalled them all and destroyed them.
Digging through all possible archives and resources, the earliest reference to the Polybius video game that anyone’s found so far is an entry on www.coinop.org, which is sort of a Wikipedia of video games. An anonymous author posted the basics of the Polybius legend. The post is dated August 3, 1998, but some researchers believe that date is fake and the post was not actually created until February 6, 2000. It included the game’s publisher, Sinneslöschen. There was no actual software publisher of that name, and it’s not even quite proper German. Loosely translated, it means something like “lose your senses” and is a word you might come up with if you didn’t know any German but had access to a German–English dictionary. If this is indeed the earliest published mention of the game, then it’s likely that this anonymous poster was the originator of the urban legend.
Sometime after that, Coinop.org owner Kurt Koller advised GamePro about the post. GamePro magazine ran an article in 2003 called “Secrets and Lies,” and the urban legend took hold.
Suppose the author of the Coinop.org entry saw The Last Starfighter or read Arcade, and/or had heard about the Portland arcade raids, and/or the teens being sickened. The story practically writes itself. And that’s probably how this urban legend was born.