Of course, all of this is complete hogwash. (Also, sinneslöschen means “sensory deprivation” in German.)
Others claim that Polybius drove people completely insane and that government goons snuck into arcades at night to collect data and tweak the settings on each machine. Those who got hooked, the story goes, developed negative health problems ranging from insomnia to amnesia to extreme anxiety. The game’s flashing lights and subliminal messages could supposedly hypnotize and even brainwash gamers. Polybius was so addictive because it was allegedly part of a government plot to test the psychoactive effects of video games on the public. Fistfights even broke out in some arcades when people wouldn’t stop hogging the machines. It was supposedly very addictive, and within a few days, gamers began showing up in droves to play it. But if the story is to be believed, Polybius was a mysterious game produced by a company called Sinneslöschen that began popping up in suburban Portland arcades in 1981. Like any urban legend, this one was spread by word of mouth and it’s difficult to pinpoint where or when it got started. And then there was Polybius, an arcade game that supposedly hypnotized gamers and broke their brains. When video games became mainstream in the 1980s, they sparked lots of mass hysteria, with parents claiming that games did everything from make their kids violent to make them into lazy slobs with carpal tunnel syndrome. One of video gaming’s craziest and earliest urban legends.
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