This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), first released in North America in 1985. It had already been available on the Japanese market for two years, where it was known simply as the ‘Famicom’ (Family Computer), but it wasn’t until the North American release that it picked up the NES moniker and its now iconic front-loading design.
Video games have come a long way since then. Today, they rightfully sit alongside music, television, and movies as the dominant forms of popular entertainment. This is despite the intense moral scrutiny video games have been subjected to since their inception.
Critics have frequently warned of the corrupting potential of video games, especially on young minds. Prince Harry once called for the game Fortnite to be banned, arguing it was ‘created to addict’. In the 1990s, under President Clinton, the US Congress accused games like Mortal Kombat of teaching children to ‘enjoy cruelty’.
This pattern of concern isn’t new, of course, and is probably just the latest iteration in a long history of moral panics, where each generation struggles to understand the hobbies and interests of the next.
In the 1950s, it was comic books. In the 60s, rock ’n’ roll. The 70s brought fears of Dungeons & Dragons summoning Satan in the suburbs. In the 80s it was ‘video nasties,’ like The Evil Dead or Zombie Flesh-Eaters. Perhaps most surprising: in the 90s there were fears that books were ruining young minds… by which I mean the 1790s, when one memoir warned, ‘the free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted their morals’. That’s what parents now beg their children to read instead of spending another three hours on Minecraft.
In the days before home consoles and PC gaming, kids would go to play at the arcade. This shaped not just gaming culture but also gaming mechanics themselves. High-score tables were designed to drive competition between strangers. A limited number of ‘lives’ reflected the economic model – typically 25¢ per go, with three chances to progress before you had to pay again. Some games allowed you to ‘continue’ if you paid again immediately; others would boot you out, to keep the queue moving and the quarters flowing.
But while parents today might worry about kids wetting themselves while playing Fortnite, older and more sinister stories tell of children in the 1980s collapsing in arcades after playing a mysterious game called Polybius.
The story of Polybius
According to legend, Polybius surfaced briefly in Portland, Oregon in 1981. It was supposedly developed by a shadowy game studio called Sinneslöschen (loosely, ‘sense delete’ in German), and appeared in just a handful of arcades. Players reported a powerful compulsion to keep playing. Some are said to have suffered seizures, night terrors, or amnesia. One 12-year-old was said to have collapsed on his way home from the arcade; another reportedly died of a heart attack.
The legend also includes reports of sinister ‘men in black’ visiting the machines, tinkering with the internals, and then vanishing. A few weeks later, the cabinets themselves disappeared without a trace. It’s all very X-Files, very MKUltra.
What I find most interesting about Polybius is that almost every part of the story has elements of truth. Portland really was used as a test market by some games developers. Arcade cabinets with unfinished or unlabelled games were sometimes placed discreetly to monitor player response. Some were deliberately kept obscure, either for market testing or copyright reasons.
There’s also a famous incident where a boy in Portland fell ill after an extended arcade session – but the game wasn’t Polybius, it was Asteroids. 12-year-old Brian Mauro had reportedly played for 28 hours and 14 minutes in an effort to beat the high score. He eventually gave up after developing stomach cramps, which he attributed to ‘too many cokes’. (In some modern tellings of this story, Mauro collapsed at the controls, but this doesn’t seem to be supported by reporting from the time.)
Reports of players having seizures has a foundation in fact too. Photosensitive epilepsy can trigger a seizure in roughly one in 4,000 people. A 1981 case study in the Lancet described a 17-year-old who experienced a seizure while playing the game Astro Fighter, which featured a 15Hz multicolour strobe. He had no prior history of epilepsy.
And the mysterious men in black? It’s possible some were simply technicians servicing or repairing machines, but it’s also possible that government agents really were visiting the machines for a very different reason. In December 1981, The Oregonian ran a story titled ‘Video games gambling count admitted’, detailing how federal agents had seized $200,000 worth of arcade machines that had been rigged to function as gambling devices. Anyone watching a cabinet being confiscated by stern-looking men in suits might understandably have imagined a more thrilling backstory.
Moreover, I’m not convinced that a game like Polybius even could exist. We know visual images can induce migraines and seizures in susceptible individuals, but Polybius did far more than that. A game that hypnotises and mind controls players? Which induces amnesia, or night terrors? Gamers often experience a state of ‘flow’ – deep immersion and focus – but this is a far cry from the hypnotic mind control attributed to Polybius. I don’t know if we could make a game like that today, much less in 1981.
In fact, the earliest recorded references to Polybius are remarkably recent. Back in 2017, the gaming YouTube channel Ahoy published a deep dive into the history and origins of Polybius. They reported that the earliest description of Polybius surfaced in early 2000 on the arcade fan website CoinOp.org. There is no verifiable reference to the game prior to this; not in gaming magazines, the trade press, not even on Usenet. While the article on CoinOp dates itself to 1998, this is not supported by online archaeology tools like The Wayback Machine.
After initially featuring in CoinOp, the story gained further momentum when it appeared in a 2003 article from GamePro magazine titled ‘Secrets and Lies: Greatest Gaming Urban Legends.’ The writer of that article told Ahoy that it was Kurt Koller, the owner of CoinOp, who brought him the Polybius story. There is a good chance that the entire Polybius narrative was stitched together as a hoax, a stunt or even internet performance art, to promote CoinOp.
The ‘real’ Polybius
Once the story had gained traction, modern recreations began to appear. If you search for Polybius today, you’ll find photos of the arcade cabinets – but they’re all modern builds. Screenshots from the game exist, but only from the title screen, never of gameplay. There are games you can download that claim to be recreations or surviving copies of the original, but none exhibit any of the supposed effects.
One such version is credited to an engineer named ‘Ygor Euspanes’ – an anagram of ‘Rogue Synapse’, an indie game developer known for building real-life versions of fictional games. Their catalogue includes Graboids (from the film ‘Tremors’), The Bishop of Battle (from the 1983 horror anthology ‘Nightmares’), and Space Paranoids (from ‘Tron’).
That’s the thing: the ingredients for Polybius were already in the cultural blender. The Last Starfighter (also later a Rogue Synapse game) imagined aliens using arcade games to test human reflexes. The novel Arcade by Robert Maxxe describes a game called Spacescape that rewires players’ minds. Tron depicts a man being transported into a computer world and forced to play deadly video games. These are all stories about games doing more than simply entertaining. They’re games that control, transform, or recruit.
Polybius was on the tip of our collective tongues and just needed someone to say it out loud.
What’s mildly tragic is that this nebulous and chaotic imagery – sinister men in black, corrupted children, and dubious morality – was ultimately crystallised into legend… because someone wanted to promote their website. Someone wanted to sell something.
Which, of all the possible explanations, is perhaps the most boring of them all.
