Polybius

Have you ever heard the urban legend of Polybius? Here is a perfectly adequate summary from Wikipedia:

Polybius is an urban legend about a mysterious arcade video game. According to the legend, the 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.

Polybius is probably my favourite spooky urban legend-- despite the fact that it's a manufactured urban legend. That is, it seems to have been started by an online article in 1998. (Although, tantalizingly, it does draw on various rumours about video arcades back in the eighties.)

Here are some the reasons I find the story so spooky:

1) The strangeness of the name Polybius. It's not the sort of name you'd associate with a nineties video arcade game. (Admittedly, I don't know much about nineties video games.) It's the name of an ancient Roman historian. I seem to recall that the choice of name might have been a nod to something Polybius wrote about mass hysteria, though I can't remember where I read that. I find this oddly sinister.

2) The fact that the game's "cabinet" was said to be a plain black cabinet, and that the game itself was "abstract and geometric". I also find this oddly sinister.

3) The understatement of the story. Although the above summary mentions players of the game dying and going mad, most of the accounts I read-- or perhaps this is just the version I preferred to remember-- didn't go so far. Instead they mentioned that the game was addictive, and that it gave people nightmares, hallucinations, and insomnia. This is somehow much creepier, in my view.

4) The fact that the scary element in this story is the opposite of everything that is traditionally scary. Video arcades are public, busy, modern, and high-tech (for the time). Spooky legends tend more towards deserted, abandoned, dark places. Why this should make the story scarier, and not just more original-- I'm not quite so sure of that.

5) The lack of any final climax, pay-off, or "reveal".

So, do you find the story scary?

I think I'll have much more to say on the subject of why I find particular stories scary, and why I seek out particular stories. It's one of those topics where I want to write about it to form my own thoughts, as well as to communicate them.