Polybius is an urban legend concerning a fictitious 1981 arcade game. ... The legend describes the game as part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology
Vintage video gamers have been talking about this strange arcade game since the early 1980s. Called Polybius, this game supposedly has strange, and sometimes lethal, effects on its players. It can prompt feelings of amnesia, disorientation, and even suicide. Moreover, men would occasionally visit arcades to gather data from the game before vanishing. Was this game some type of awful CIA experiment? Sadly, since arcades are a thing of the past, we'll never know.