Polybius (urban legend)

Polybius is an urban legend about a lost video game. According to the legend, a new game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon, in 1981. The gameplay was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, and dangerous. Children who played the arcade game were said to suffer from amnesia, seizures, night terrors, and hallucinations. Despite these adverse effects, the arcade cabinet was described as so addictive that players returned to Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished. The lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men in black who were said to record data on the players before removing all the arcade machines.

There is no evidence that Polybius ever existed. The earliest known print reference to the game is the September 2003 issue of GamePro. The earliest online reference to Polybius is the coinop.org entry, dated to 1998. There is no evidence that the supposed publisher, Sinneslöschen, existed. Snopes has called it a modern-day version of the early '80s urban legends about "men in black" recording the high-score initials saved in arcade machines.

This urban legend has persisted in video game journalism and has inspired video games with the same name.