Now, I'm sure everyone knows what Polybius is by now. Enough time has passed since the initial stories have made their rounds. A plethora of parodies, songs, and artwork have been created in its honor. However, if you're totally unfamiliar with the urban legend, the blurb of text below covers the basics.

Polybius is an urban legend concerning a fictitious 1981 arcade game. The legend describes the game as part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment based in Portland, Oregon. Gameplay supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. Allegedly, all of these Polybius arcade machines disappeared from the arcade market. Thanks, Wikipedia.

I know Polybius is crazy popular these days amongst the weirder side of the Youth™, but I promise it wasn't nearly as annoying when I was a kid. XD There was a genuine mystique about the whole thing, whether or not the arcade machine ever existed, or if the part about it being a government conspiracy was legit. I first heard about it the way many people my age did, through the internet's campfire stories: creepypasta. There are dozens of creepypastas based off of Polybius, and now I can't remember which one caught my curiosity, but the strangeness of it stuck with me throughout my teenage years.

Forgive me! I realize I may sound like a loser, with the previous paragraph rambling about kids these days ruining a perfectly good horror story, and turning it into weirdcore glitchcore garbage. What can I say? There's a lot of things about the modern web that tick me off, and people slapping ~aesthetic~ titles onto everything under the sun is definitely one of them. Don't get me wrong, I dig a little Lemon Demon here n' there, but Neil didn't create Polybius, and it's my website so I get to be a lil mean. :P