The video game that plays you, I'm Jason Horton.

I'm Rebecca Leap.

And this is Ghost Town.

You're usually the one that corners the market on a video game, conspiracy,

retro technology, but I found this very interesting case, I guess, about the

Polybius, I hope I'm saying that right.

It's a video game that may or may not have been that killed people.

And it's very rare that we see urban legend proven true-ish, but this has all of that too.

So we're going to be talking about the Polybius conspiracy today.

Polybius starts as a kind of vintage video game or urban legend in the 2000s, actually.

The urban legend goes, Polybius was a mystery arcade game that apparently appeared in

several Portland suburbs around 1981.

The machine's cabinet, body, I guess, was painted entirely black and it was rumored that the

stern-looking men would sometimes visit the arcade where Polybius was placed to collect

information from the machine, possibly testing the player's response to its psychoactive effect

before disappearing with said information.

The game had a strange effect on its players also.

It's described as being literally addictive, with lines forming around the machines and

fights erupting over who would play it next.

That doesn't seem that abnormal, but players also supposedly suffered from horrible side effects,

including amnesia, insomnia, night terrors, and hallucinations.

The company that created the Polybius game in most accounts of the story is called,

...