![]() ![]() Throughout the early 1980s, at least nine cases were reported of epileptic seizures being triggered by video games in the United States. Stories spread like wildfire in the local middle schools: video games were freaking kids out, possibly even trying to take over their minds.Īnyone looking for corroborating evidence would have found even more frightening facts. Two players knocked out in the same arcade on the same day. ![]() Lopez was reported to the police when he collapsed in pain on someone's lawn. Researcher Cat DeSpira, writing in a 2012 edition of online vintage gaming publication Retrocade, discovered that a Michael Lopez developed a migraine headache while playing Tempest on the same day and in the same arcade where Brian Mauro was going for his record. He finally bowed out with stomach discomfort, attributed to anxiety and all the Coke he drank. The Eugene Register newspaper reported on Novemthat 12-year-old Brian Mauro played Asteroids for more than 28 hours, trying to break the record, as local television crews watched. We do know that at least two people fell sick from playing arcade games in Portland, Oregon in 1981. It turns out that the story of Polybius may indeed have an eerily similar basis in fact. However, saying that is one thing, and concluding that it's therefore just an Internet hoax is another. This essentially nails the lid on the coffin on the suggestion that Polybius ever actually existed. In fact, I could find no print references to the game at all prior to 2003, when the urban legend was described in GamePro magazine. All the issues of Electronic Games magazine from 1981 through 1984 are available online, and contain not a single mention of the game. He lists most of what seems to be known about the urban legend, including a few photos of unknown origin, and a joke YouTube video he made where they find a Polybius game in a garage, turn it on, and - well, you can guess the rest.īut the bottom line is that there is nobody in the vintage arcade community who openly claims to have, or to have ever seen, an actual Polybius. However, Robb's listing there is really just a placeholder for his website, Jolt Country with the Polybius Home Page. Many owners of rare and classic arcade games are members of the Vintage Arcade Preservation Society, which lists exactly one person as the owner of an original Polybius: Robb Sherwin, who lives in Colorado, and owns a dozen or so classic video games. If these game consoles were ever actually in Oregon, they must have gone somewhere. Is it this reference that prompted the originator of Polybius lore to choose the Greek name as an homage? Who knows. But rearrange the letters within the grid, and you have a simple ciphering system. His idea was that this would make it easier to send messages by flag or drum or fire, having only five characters to worry about instead of a whole alphabet. In a Polybius square, the letters of the alphabet are arranged in a grid, numbered five across and five high (the Greek alphabet had only 24 letters, so it fit). He's best known for two things: a 40-volume book about the history of Rome called The Histories, and perhaps more intriguingly, for a little ciphering scheme called a Polybius square. Polybius was a Greek historian born about 200 years BCE. But it's difficult to track down the name Polybius, because it's not a unique word. One of the first things I'd normally do with a case like this is to search news archives, first to see if there were actually any reports of sickened gamers in Portland (or anywhere else) about that time, and second to see when and where the name first starts to appear in publications (assuming it's a myth and we want to see when the myth started). Could this urban legend have grown from a seed of fact? The story of Polybius has all the markings of a made-up urban legend, but as dedicated gamers are a social bunch, the tale has persisted to the point that many people today are not so sure. Soon the games were removed, never to be seen again. Later, some who played are said to have committed suicide or mysteriously disappeared. #Polybius rom for e downloadThe most ominous part of the story is that men in black suits would come to the arcades and download the data. It was called Polybius, and the legend says that players reported nausea, headaches, nightmares, and an aversion to video games. Popular tales on today's Internet hold that there was a mysterious video game, introduced into only one or two video arcades in the Portland, Oregon area. Today we're going to delve into the urban legend files, and dig back to the year 1981. ![]()
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