![]() ![]() This legend fit perfectly into the burgeoning new culture of The 90s internet chat rooms which was where the Polybius urban legend first launched in the late 90s on Usenet, an online message board. Once you identify the sources of the original story you can then easily deduce that repeated retellings of these events over the decades had transformed these simple facts into a fanciful urban legend. So, a series of real and perfectly average events happened in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington that fit the Polybius legend’s storyline exactly sans the creative storytelling regarding “mind control”. Police and FBI raids and surveillance did occur at several arcades and bars in The Pacific Northwest between 19.Two children were inadvertently injured in a Portland area arcade in 1981.Arcade game(s) in plain black cabinets were an average occurrence for “test games” in 1981 and was not an unusual sighting at all.Truth be told, if someone had known where to look, like a local like me would have and did, they’d have found that three major talking points in the original urban legend are actually true: At the time all that made up the Polybius legend on the internet in 2011 was a handful of overly reiterated posts with zero investigative work attached. But when I put boots on the ground in the Spring of 2011 and began tracing the story back to its alleged beginnings in 1981, and then forward in time and back again, I realized much to my astonishment that no one had. ![]() Ironically, I titled my first article on Polybius “Reinvestigating Polybius” because I’d assumed others had investigated it long before me. The Polybius Myth and urban legend seems to be tailor-made for Portland, by someone who was from Portland. Polybius, a mysterious mind-controlling arcade game, fits into the funky dystopian and paranoid pathos of Portland whose arcades of The 80s once were the focus of police who did everything they could to shut them down. I suppose our legends are comfort from the dark and the unknown, and like the previous generations before us, folklore binds us together and others to us. There are wide open and exceedingly lush green spaces with romantic yet brooding isolation here. We still have deep wilderness here, too, unknown areas where few men have stepped or even dared to. ![]() We can go for months without seeing much sunlight here during our endlessly rainy winters, so it’s cool that others admire our darkness. So, we’re used to mythology working its way into the fabric of our region’s cultural identity, and we love that it does. In fact, parts of Twilight were filmed less than a few miles from my home. This is the place where extraterrestrials are believed to shine lights over campgrounds in the forests of Skamania County (I’ve actually seen this phenomena), and where vampires and werewolves are rumored to maintain ancient battles lines in the rainforests of Washington State as referenced in the film, “ Twilight” (2008). Cooper, of lost Spanish gold and pirate treasure buried on Oregon’s beaches hence the reference to it in the film, “Goonies” (1985), filmed in Astoria, Oregon. In fact, the entire area from Northern California to Vancouver Island in British Columbia is steeped in tales of ghosts, and UFO sightings of wraith-women who haunt meadows and lakes and, of course, The Bandage Man, the dog-eating restless spirit who terrorizes a strip of road along the Oregon coast. The Pacific Northwest is a land of myths and legends. It’s a hoax.īut it never bothered me that the whole legend/conspiracy theory of Polybius was only a myth. And since the legend claims that Polybius had first appeared in a neighborhood that I spent a lot of time in from 1981-2004, surely, I and others had heard about it, right? Nope. Since I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and had never heard of this legend before, and neither had anyone else I knew for that matter, I was intrigued. The game was supposedly contained in a plain, unmarked, black upright arcade cabinet ( just like in Robert Maxxe’s 1984 novel “Arcade”) and the name “Polybius” appeared only on the game’s attract mode. Just briefly for those who aren’t aware of The Polybius Legend: According to a 1990s post from online message board Usenet, Polybius was an arcade game that produced psychoactive effects on players as well as caused a host of physical and psychological ailments. Quote from “Arcade” by Robert Maxxe sits in my home arcade on Satan’s Hollow (Bally Midway 1982) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |