Polybius - A Review

Few urban legends have reached the notoriety of Polybius, the mythical arcade game that was stated to have popped up briefly in 1981, somewhere in Portland, Oregon, as a psychoactive government mind-control experiment via MKUltra.

The rumor first gained traction online in the early 2000’s, based upon a supposed article from the 90’s in which unwitting players reported occurrences of madness, murder, and worse after playing the game.

I remember discovering the “conspiracy” around 2005, which is when the first online mentions began circulating in the “Creepy Pasta" circuit. Of course, twenty years later, and most of the background surrounding Polybius has been debunked, with no solid evidence of the game having ever existed at all.

It should be noted too, that Polybius was actually a Greek historian (200 – 118 BC), who lived in the city of Arcadia, so surely there is some tongue-in-cheek at play here with an arcade game that made some players lose their minds.

However, the idea behind the game remains relevant, especially as we enter the age of virtual reality, corporate interests, unrelenting commercialism and predictive programming. Welcome to the Machine, as Pink Floyd so beautifully stated.

In his debut novel, aptly titled POLYBIUS (Simon & Schuster – 2025), Collin Armstrong attempts to take readers deeper into the machinations of the secret government plot behind the game, and why the project was ultimately abandoned. The book describes itself as Stranger Things meets The Walking Dead.

Let me state that I recently finished the audiobook version of Polybius, which surely had some effect on today’s review. It was a quick listen, at 10 hours and 10 minutes, though due to the slow narration, I had to speed it up to hold my interest. The narration was adequate, but didn’t do the book any favors.

The plot itself was solid enough, though a little too PG-13 for my tastes, as a couple of “plucky teenagers” attempt to solve the mysterious events taking place in their small town of Tasker Bay, California. For a debut novel, there are a lot of good elements here, and I think Collin Armstrong could make a name for himself as an author, should he continue to pursue a career.

In a strange case of synchronicity, the new film PROJECT MKHEXE also dropped on Screambox the same week that the audiobook for Polybius was released, and the movie even makes a brief “blink and you’ll miss it” reference to the game.

Project MKHEXE is a psychedelic (and very nicely edited) ride through the paranoia inducing urban legend that, likewise, sprouted up out of the heinous experiments of MKUltra, and even manages to conjure some of the Cthulhu mythos into the narrative. If you were a fan of Banshee Chapter (2013), then I think you’ll highly enjoy Project MKHEXE.

The most horrific part of all of this pop-culture media? It’s based on facts, even if heavily embellished. The government has admitted to conducting some truly terrible experiments on thousands of unwitting citizens from 1953 – 1973, which undoubtedly destroyed lives and families (and who knows the long term implications on the gene pool).

During the two decades of MKUltra, there were at least 130 different research programs which took place in prisons, hospitals and universities all across the United States. This is just what has been declassified and admitted to. It would be naïve to assume that there weren’t, and isn’t still, top-secret mass experimentation on innocent civilians taking place daily.

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Michael A. Dyer is the host of the HORROR TO CULTURE podcast, vidcast, and website.