During the 1980s, youthful gamers flocked to arcades with quarters in hand to play legendary games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. In Portland, Oregon, amongst these colorful cabinets laid Polybius. This video game was apparently so dangerous it made players sick, and government agents used it to control minds. The game’s biggest mystery, however, is whether it ever existed in the first place.

According to ripleys, Polybiusis was allegedly an arcade game that was one of many in Portland arcades in 1981. Boxed up in just a black cabinet, it attracted players through its colourful gameplay of geometric patterns and shapes dancing across the screen. Now the story goes that once a gamer pressed the start button on it, he/she would quickly become addicted and fall into a trance. The trance not only had them disassociated at that moment, but it would also cause memory loss, seizures, blackouts and hallucinations.

You might be wondering where the name comes from and what contributed to the conspiracy that followed it. Well, the game shares a name with a Greek philosopher. Born in Megalopolis, Arcadia, in 208 B.C., Polybius the philosopher is known for creating the Polybius Square. This device functioned as an encryption table that converted Greek letters into numbers to share secret messages. Polybius also translates to “many lives” in Greek.

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It is believed that when players fell under the spell of Polybius, the gameplay seemed to deliver subliminal messages to them. Combined with reports of government workers in black suits removing not quarters but data from the arcade machines, people were fully convinced that something more than just gaming was happening. Eventually, these same workers removed the game from arcades one month later, with Polybius disappearing, never to be seen in any arcade centre ever again. 

This video game was apparently so dangerous it made players sick, and government agents used it to control minds. The game’s biggest mystery, however, is whether it ever existed in the first place. The story doesn't end there and if you want to read more on it, you can do so by clicking here.