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Polybius (urban legend)

An alleged start screen, attached to an article on coinop.org.[1]

Polybius is a fictitious 1981 arcade game from an urban legend.[2] The legend describes the game as part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment based in Portland, Oregon. Gameplay supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. Supposedly, all of these Polybius arcade machines then disappeared from the arcade market.

This urban legend has persisted in video game journalism and through continued interest, and it has inspired video games with the same name and even a movie.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference coinop.org was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Dunning, Brian (May 14, 2013). "Skeptoid #362: Polybius: Video Game of Death". Skeptoid. Archived from the original on September 7, 2020. Retrieved October 13, 2014.