Rumour writhes and mutates like a living being, but all rumours have a root. Sometimes a fiction wholesale, sometimes a distortion of what happened and sometimes just something that was inexplicable from start to end.
An interesting read. As always the letter agencies do a good job in stirring up mystery with their skulduggery.
It's always interesting that even should something not exist the search frequently brings forth all kinds of strange creepy crawlies.
Honestly, when I started this article I knew none of this information and was shocked by the end of my research. I had heard rumors that there were some vague events that inspired Polybius but, in most circles, it seems to be written off as, "Oh yeah there was a kid who had a migraine playing Tempest" and that's that. Amazing that an entire article, damn near scholarly in nature, exists outlining every detail, and it just gets overlooked and never discussed. Like I said in the article, Dunning doesn't even link to DeSpira's article (even though he mentions it). How this isn't more well known in beyond me.
One could launch in theories of conspiracy and supression, but sometimes all it takes is a bit of dirt to cover gold.
Of course someone like DeSpira getting ahead tends to mute matters, it happens organically sometimes and deliberately sometimes. Quite possibly organic in this case.
Still it's one of the joys of that kind of thing, sometimes you find someone has explored they way unheard.
I love stories like this. Sometimes I think about the stuff we used to hear...they're obviously false, but maybe there's something there. Were there really people giving LSD to children? I know(or guess?) that this is a more common one but the little town I'm from had a pharmaceutical company that worked with some likewise stuff(among others it was one of the main suppliers of morfium for the Warsaw pact).
Also good touch on the migraine part. From the outside it can really look like something nefarious. I don't know if it was that, but I remember being blinded by pain(if it makes sense) and trying to hurt myself in some way so it might take away part of it.
(And yes...3 hours...just with D.C. and Appalachia...that's more than half of the country over here.)
It's funny you mention dosing children with LSD because it reminds me of a very similar "conspiracy theory" in America called MK Ultra, which overlaps some with Polybius as it was a purported series of mind control and behavior modification studies done by a certin alphabet agency, and some variations of Polybius claim that the game was part of it. The thing is MK Ultra is often conflated with bizarre, outlandish stories, but, again, there is truth to it. It did happen - there is concrete evidence that it did - and some of it did include dosing unwitting, unwilling subjects with psychedelic drugs, but the true extent of it is unknown since most of the files were either redacted or destroyed before it was ever brought to light. I bring it up because, ridiculous as it sounds to imagine spooks dosing random people's drinks with mind-altering substances, it really did happen. Interesting to hear that something similar did (or might have?) happen behind the iron curtain as well.
The soviets had a lot of suspicious stuff but they also tried to keep their stuff hidden. And there was also the internal intelligence...they always tried to blackmail the citizens and how convenient it would be if the kid was found with some stuff. There are some stories about how they tried to recruit informants that way so there might be a connection.
Interestingly, the agent lists weren't made public here...although it still comes up sometimes. One can see the reports written about them but nothing else. I bet we could find some interesting names and tactics there too.
I know this is not much, but it was enough for the people to shut up...who knows who's listening. That might have actually fed into the paranoia.
Now thinking back...there was a soviet radio/radar station not far from us too. The russians left a shitton of stuff here when they went home but they picked that place clean. The secrecy about that didn't help much.
(Also I'm interested in all the radio amateur stuff and sometimes just put one of the known numbers stations in the background. I need that creepy life dread before sleep when the sound cuts and you hear some russian code. Like the UVB-76. Love this cryptology stuff.)
Unfortunately, similar stories of cops just "conveniently" finding illicit substances on young people (or elderly people, even) are not uncommon. I don't think it's for the same reasons a communist secret police agent might try such a tactic, but small town police departments... shady things can happen.
From everything I've ever heard from people who lived through the communist years of Eastrn Europe, the sense of paranoia seems to be the defining feature. I won't say they lived bad lives, per say - or at least, they didn't know any different - but all of them speak of being keenly aware of what they said and to who, since anyone could be an informant, anyone could turn informant, and it was better to just keep your mouth shut and your head down. I asked my Russian professor if there were bars in the Soviet Union and she said there was, but anything that wasn't beer was too expensive for most people to drink regularly, the beer itself wasn't great, and the bars were known for being hotspots for informants to hang out and listen in on conversations, so a lot of people avoided them. I don't know how much that was her personal experience versus the overall reality for the tens of millions of people that lived in the Soviet Union - I can't imagine there weren't more than a few legitimate barflies - but it doesn't sound unrealistic.
For sundry reasons, there are places in America where it's like this now - with the digital panopticon we've built with social media and cameras in everyone's pocket, you can get yourself in serious trouble if the wrong person catches you at the wrong time.
Also, I don't know how you do that - numbers stations are so unnerving. I remember stumbling upon that rabbithole on a certain tibetan shadow puppet forum's paranormal board and being so intensely creeped out that I couldn't sleep, even though there was realistically nothing that was going to happen. I just don't like thinking about those things being out there. Or what they could possibly be used for.
It depended on the regime. The Stasi was notoriously harsh in East Germany, the Securitate in Romania too. Hungary was actually a pretty lite..."the happiest barrack" they say. But it was because of the Revolution of 56. Before that the AVH was really repressive (you might have visited the House of Terror when you were in Budapest) but the reward for the rebellion was that you don't want to push the hungarians to the edge.
The really concerning part is, that all that 'cancel culture' and regulated speech really resembles the system back then. You never really knew, when you spoke against the system. One day that country is our brother, in the next they are imperialist pigs. My father found himself in the hot water once because he was doing the school newspaper and wrote some really mild stuff(he was like 15 at the time). So you learn to shut up. The problem is, and I inherited this from my mother...if I lived then, they would surely have taken me away at one point.
Somebody wrote here that the Eastern Europeans always try to warn the others and always get ignored. Even if I didn't live then, I'm gonna say that the processes going on are starting to really resemble this stuff(just take a look at the UK and Germany).
But yeah...there was happiness there. The classes were cast in stone and the main order of the day was keeping the harmony. The government bullshitted but in a way the people didn't had to care about most issues. But it was unsustainable. And this thinking (waiting for daddy government to protect us from the outside) is still poisoning the thoughts of many. But I could write a book about these(maybe I will).
Maybe because I'm stuck at home, I need that unnerving(don't like to be scared but still looking for those occasions) feeling to get me out of mundaneity. And in my head I could act like some genius decoder...listening in to the enemy. What order did they give right now? Or was it just a standby? At least some of these are used as a deadman's switch. Like how the UK nuclear strike submarines use the BBC4. If they can't connect to it for 3 days(can't remember the exact time), they should assume that the UK don't exist anymore and they can open the brief for orders. Love these stuff. For the UVB-76 we can assume that there are actual orders going out...the messages became more frequent after the invasion.
I didn't see the House of Terror, but I was told plenty about the Revolution of '56 and the knock-on effects. Very interesting how Hungary seemed to be handled with kids gloves (relatively) afterwards. Others like the Czech StB and, as you mentioned, the Stasi... well, let's just say when an online gaming company (I can't recall which one) brought on personnel to spearhead an "anti-hate speech" initiative, I wasn't all that surprised when two of the senior members they tapped were literal former Stasi operatives. Interesting to see them plying their honest trade in the 2020's; especially in the world of video games, in all places. It's also funny you mention that about Eastern Europeans - the most fervent not just anti-communists, but anti-socialists I know were either from Eastern Bloc countries and lived to see it, or children of Eastern Bloc immigrants. The Russians I knew in college were more lax about it, but they were also young and, being my age, never lived through the Soviet Union.
One of the biggest misconceptions in the West about that time and place though is that everyone was unrelentingly miserable all the time. My Russian professor would always say, when asked about growing up in the 1970's Soviet Union, so long as you minded your P's and Q's (as we say in America), you could live a "normal life". Obviously, it was a far cry from the normal life of an American around the same time, but she said that, unless you made problems on purpose or happened to make a particularly egregious miscalculation, the odds something catastrophic would happen were relatively low. Not impossible, mind you - just low. Still doesn't sound like a society I would want to live in (though, as you point out about the UK and Germany, maybe we won't have a choice).
"One of the biggest misconceptions in the West about that time and place though is that everyone was unrelentingly miserable all the time."
Yeah, I'm sure the usual Religion of Progress attitude towards plus the Cold War makes for a very un-nuanced brew. Not that I'm denying the very real misery there, of course. Especially up to Stalin's death.
As someone who identifies as an (economic) far-ish leftist but not communist, I always feel a bit conflicted about the whole "everyday life in the Soviet Union" topic. It was obviously an authoritarian dictatorship, and like you, I don't think I'd have wanted to live in it either. On the other hand, I can't help feel there's something appealing about this alternative vision of industrialism where it's not all about pure profit all the time. Stuff like guaranteed apartments, even jobs and so on. Lots of inefficiency and dysfunction, but at least they didn't have to put up with the crass neoliberalism we do.
Maybe part of it is just that it was before its time. I don't know if you're familiar with JMG's scheme of "abundance industrialism" vs "scarcity industrialism"? The latter being the era where we still have many of the trappings of industrialism, but declining wealth per year on average rather than increasing, so the era that arguably started around 2010-20. The SU was clearly pretty bad at distributing the wild extravagance we had at the height of the industrial boom in the mid-20th century, but maybe its brand of rationed, austere but at best dignified (in the sense of meeting basic needs and equality) industrialism would be better suited for the era we're entering now?
Of course, that's another problem with the SU: the industrialism. In the end it was just as committed to eternal growth as the West. Maybe even more so. They're both different models for distributing and managing petroleum-based industrial abundance in the end. So I don't want to romanticize it, but it's also hard not to wonder sometimes what a SU with freedom of speech and press might have been like.
And yes, I also got a very clear sense during the Covid mania of what it must have been like to live in one of those societies. I want to emphasize that I'm not saying we came anywhere near the authoritarianism of, say, the SU or East Germany even at the height of the hysteria in 2021. Nowhere close. But I feel the seeds of those processes were clearly visible, with people being eager to virtually tattle on the their neighbors, the state suddenly cracking down hard on "disinformation", the naked propaganda, and so on. A very mild version, but a version nonetheless. Wait...isn't that the description of a vaccine? ;)
I can recall an early 90s SNES fighting game that my brother and I would play for hours before getting severe anxiety, headaches, and inexplicable bouts of undirected rage—once to the point of him choking me. It was mostly in Japanese with only a nonsense English title screen. Very heavy on flashing blues and reds. Our mom forbade us from renting it a third time. We got it from a dingy video store that was a small front room with a larger cordoned off area in the back for porn. I don’t know why kids were let in there. We could get a game, bag of popcorn, and a tamarind slushy for $3.25. It was next to a Bollywood cinema not far from I-10 and Hwy 6.
When it comes to people getting way too into video games I remember this one kid at birthday party getting so mad over Super Smash Bros Melee that he threw his controller against the wall so hard it got stuck in the drywall. Needless to say, he was not invited back to my friend's birthday party the next year. Also, I know Highway 10 is long as Hell but... do you mean Houston?
In Houston, of course one can live there whole life and not visit vast stretches of it. Upon further reflection, I believe it was near Bellaire and Hwy 6.
Polybius might be a campfire tale, but migraines induced by flashing lights = completely real. Poor kid. My first one was induced by staying up late on New Year's Eve and playing with sparklers and fireworks. I know it's not *actually* a conspiracy, but sometimes the proliferation of flashy-light decor and entertainment feels like one.
I had my first at 26 (I think) when I was at work and thought I was about to have a stroke. Thankfully my co-worker had similar visual aura migraines, so she knew what was happening, but for a good fifteen minutes I was convinced I was about to die. If you haven't read my article "Lavender Town Syndrome", I politely suggest you give it a look - it's about another story of flashy lights in entertainment going horribly wrong. And ending with much worse than one kid having a violent migraine. Try several thousand people.
Thanks for this interesting and well-researched deep dive into this particular urban legend! I had no idea about all the events that happened to build the legend (i.e. kids being sick, arcade machines being used to surveil criminals, etc.) Sometimes truth IS stranger than fiction!
To be honest with you, neither did I. This was a learning experience for me. I'd heard one time - just one - about a vague story in which someone had a migraine induced by Tempest, but if you had told me that there was actual heavy FBI involvement with the Portland arcade scene and another kid who had a gastric exorcism from drinking too much coke and binge gaming at an arcade... I'm not sure I would have believed it.
As soon as I saw that picture of James Rolfe standing next to that Polybius replica, I knew we were in for a good time.
And a good time, indeed, was had. I never heard much about this urban legend. Heck, I'd never heard of it at all until about a decade ago, and James' AVGN video on it was the single biggest point of exposure I'd been given for it. Your essay here goes to show that, as is often the case, the truth seems to be even stranger than the fiction it spawned. Suffice it to say I wasn't expecting to be handed the revelation of an arcade run by the feds as a sting operation on a silver platter this morning. Just another example of why your essays are fun to read.
Thank you for the kind words, as always - it's appreciated more than you know. Believe me, I was also not expecting to discover that the feds had staged an entire arcade for the sole purpose of a sting operation, nor that arcades in the PNW were apparently such hotbeds of degeneracy. I have to wonder if this was a widespread phenomenon or localized to that region.
I'm sure it was pretty widespread. Having lived in a relatively small town when I was in middle school, some form of that degeneracy is always going on where the teens/preteens tend to hang out. Someone's always finding a way to sell them the booze, the weed, and the pills. Someone's always pulling them into bets on this or that. Not all, of course, but enough. We didn't have an arcade where that all happened, but go behind the right shop, turn down the right side street, or pop into the right clearing in the woods and you'd find all the same stuff.
If it could all still happen in a mountain tourist town of 2000 people, most of whom were retirees, then it definitely happened in a good chunk of arcades across the country. Probably more for the ones in major cities.
Rumour writhes and mutates like a living being, but all rumours have a root. Sometimes a fiction wholesale, sometimes a distortion of what happened and sometimes just something that was inexplicable from start to end.
An interesting read. As always the letter agencies do a good job in stirring up mystery with their skulduggery.
It's always interesting that even should something not exist the search frequently brings forth all kinds of strange creepy crawlies.
Honestly, when I started this article I knew none of this information and was shocked by the end of my research. I had heard rumors that there were some vague events that inspired Polybius but, in most circles, it seems to be written off as, "Oh yeah there was a kid who had a migraine playing Tempest" and that's that. Amazing that an entire article, damn near scholarly in nature, exists outlining every detail, and it just gets overlooked and never discussed. Like I said in the article, Dunning doesn't even link to DeSpira's article (even though he mentions it). How this isn't more well known in beyond me.
One could launch in theories of conspiracy and supression, but sometimes all it takes is a bit of dirt to cover gold.
Of course someone like DeSpira getting ahead tends to mute matters, it happens organically sometimes and deliberately sometimes. Quite possibly organic in this case.
Still it's one of the joys of that kind of thing, sometimes you find someone has explored they way unheard.
I love stories like this. Sometimes I think about the stuff we used to hear...they're obviously false, but maybe there's something there. Were there really people giving LSD to children? I know(or guess?) that this is a more common one but the little town I'm from had a pharmaceutical company that worked with some likewise stuff(among others it was one of the main suppliers of morfium for the Warsaw pact).
Also good touch on the migraine part. From the outside it can really look like something nefarious. I don't know if it was that, but I remember being blinded by pain(if it makes sense) and trying to hurt myself in some way so it might take away part of it.
(And yes...3 hours...just with D.C. and Appalachia...that's more than half of the country over here.)
It's funny you mention dosing children with LSD because it reminds me of a very similar "conspiracy theory" in America called MK Ultra, which overlaps some with Polybius as it was a purported series of mind control and behavior modification studies done by a certin alphabet agency, and some variations of Polybius claim that the game was part of it. The thing is MK Ultra is often conflated with bizarre, outlandish stories, but, again, there is truth to it. It did happen - there is concrete evidence that it did - and some of it did include dosing unwitting, unwilling subjects with psychedelic drugs, but the true extent of it is unknown since most of the files were either redacted or destroyed before it was ever brought to light. I bring it up because, ridiculous as it sounds to imagine spooks dosing random people's drinks with mind-altering substances, it really did happen. Interesting to hear that something similar did (or might have?) happen behind the iron curtain as well.
The soviets had a lot of suspicious stuff but they also tried to keep their stuff hidden. And there was also the internal intelligence...they always tried to blackmail the citizens and how convenient it would be if the kid was found with some stuff. There are some stories about how they tried to recruit informants that way so there might be a connection.
Interestingly, the agent lists weren't made public here...although it still comes up sometimes. One can see the reports written about them but nothing else. I bet we could find some interesting names and tactics there too.
I know this is not much, but it was enough for the people to shut up...who knows who's listening. That might have actually fed into the paranoia.
Now thinking back...there was a soviet radio/radar station not far from us too. The russians left a shitton of stuff here when they went home but they picked that place clean. The secrecy about that didn't help much.
(Also I'm interested in all the radio amateur stuff and sometimes just put one of the known numbers stations in the background. I need that creepy life dread before sleep when the sound cuts and you hear some russian code. Like the UVB-76. Love this cryptology stuff.)
Unfortunately, similar stories of cops just "conveniently" finding illicit substances on young people (or elderly people, even) are not uncommon. I don't think it's for the same reasons a communist secret police agent might try such a tactic, but small town police departments... shady things can happen.
From everything I've ever heard from people who lived through the communist years of Eastrn Europe, the sense of paranoia seems to be the defining feature. I won't say they lived bad lives, per say - or at least, they didn't know any different - but all of them speak of being keenly aware of what they said and to who, since anyone could be an informant, anyone could turn informant, and it was better to just keep your mouth shut and your head down. I asked my Russian professor if there were bars in the Soviet Union and she said there was, but anything that wasn't beer was too expensive for most people to drink regularly, the beer itself wasn't great, and the bars were known for being hotspots for informants to hang out and listen in on conversations, so a lot of people avoided them. I don't know how much that was her personal experience versus the overall reality for the tens of millions of people that lived in the Soviet Union - I can't imagine there weren't more than a few legitimate barflies - but it doesn't sound unrealistic.
For sundry reasons, there are places in America where it's like this now - with the digital panopticon we've built with social media and cameras in everyone's pocket, you can get yourself in serious trouble if the wrong person catches you at the wrong time.
Also, I don't know how you do that - numbers stations are so unnerving. I remember stumbling upon that rabbithole on a certain tibetan shadow puppet forum's paranormal board and being so intensely creeped out that I couldn't sleep, even though there was realistically nothing that was going to happen. I just don't like thinking about those things being out there. Or what they could possibly be used for.
It depended on the regime. The Stasi was notoriously harsh in East Germany, the Securitate in Romania too. Hungary was actually a pretty lite..."the happiest barrack" they say. But it was because of the Revolution of 56. Before that the AVH was really repressive (you might have visited the House of Terror when you were in Budapest) but the reward for the rebellion was that you don't want to push the hungarians to the edge.
The really concerning part is, that all that 'cancel culture' and regulated speech really resembles the system back then. You never really knew, when you spoke against the system. One day that country is our brother, in the next they are imperialist pigs. My father found himself in the hot water once because he was doing the school newspaper and wrote some really mild stuff(he was like 15 at the time). So you learn to shut up. The problem is, and I inherited this from my mother...if I lived then, they would surely have taken me away at one point.
Somebody wrote here that the Eastern Europeans always try to warn the others and always get ignored. Even if I didn't live then, I'm gonna say that the processes going on are starting to really resemble this stuff(just take a look at the UK and Germany).
But yeah...there was happiness there. The classes were cast in stone and the main order of the day was keeping the harmony. The government bullshitted but in a way the people didn't had to care about most issues. But it was unsustainable. And this thinking (waiting for daddy government to protect us from the outside) is still poisoning the thoughts of many. But I could write a book about these(maybe I will).
Maybe because I'm stuck at home, I need that unnerving(don't like to be scared but still looking for those occasions) feeling to get me out of mundaneity. And in my head I could act like some genius decoder...listening in to the enemy. What order did they give right now? Or was it just a standby? At least some of these are used as a deadman's switch. Like how the UK nuclear strike submarines use the BBC4. If they can't connect to it for 3 days(can't remember the exact time), they should assume that the UK don't exist anymore and they can open the brief for orders. Love these stuff. For the UVB-76 we can assume that there are actual orders going out...the messages became more frequent after the invasion.
I didn't see the House of Terror, but I was told plenty about the Revolution of '56 and the knock-on effects. Very interesting how Hungary seemed to be handled with kids gloves (relatively) afterwards. Others like the Czech StB and, as you mentioned, the Stasi... well, let's just say when an online gaming company (I can't recall which one) brought on personnel to spearhead an "anti-hate speech" initiative, I wasn't all that surprised when two of the senior members they tapped were literal former Stasi operatives. Interesting to see them plying their honest trade in the 2020's; especially in the world of video games, in all places. It's also funny you mention that about Eastern Europeans - the most fervent not just anti-communists, but anti-socialists I know were either from Eastern Bloc countries and lived to see it, or children of Eastern Bloc immigrants. The Russians I knew in college were more lax about it, but they were also young and, being my age, never lived through the Soviet Union.
One of the biggest misconceptions in the West about that time and place though is that everyone was unrelentingly miserable all the time. My Russian professor would always say, when asked about growing up in the 1970's Soviet Union, so long as you minded your P's and Q's (as we say in America), you could live a "normal life". Obviously, it was a far cry from the normal life of an American around the same time, but she said that, unless you made problems on purpose or happened to make a particularly egregious miscalculation, the odds something catastrophic would happen were relatively low. Not impossible, mind you - just low. Still doesn't sound like a society I would want to live in (though, as you point out about the UK and Germany, maybe we won't have a choice).
"One of the biggest misconceptions in the West about that time and place though is that everyone was unrelentingly miserable all the time."
Yeah, I'm sure the usual Religion of Progress attitude towards plus the Cold War makes for a very un-nuanced brew. Not that I'm denying the very real misery there, of course. Especially up to Stalin's death.
As someone who identifies as an (economic) far-ish leftist but not communist, I always feel a bit conflicted about the whole "everyday life in the Soviet Union" topic. It was obviously an authoritarian dictatorship, and like you, I don't think I'd have wanted to live in it either. On the other hand, I can't help feel there's something appealing about this alternative vision of industrialism where it's not all about pure profit all the time. Stuff like guaranteed apartments, even jobs and so on. Lots of inefficiency and dysfunction, but at least they didn't have to put up with the crass neoliberalism we do.
Maybe part of it is just that it was before its time. I don't know if you're familiar with JMG's scheme of "abundance industrialism" vs "scarcity industrialism"? The latter being the era where we still have many of the trappings of industrialism, but declining wealth per year on average rather than increasing, so the era that arguably started around 2010-20. The SU was clearly pretty bad at distributing the wild extravagance we had at the height of the industrial boom in the mid-20th century, but maybe its brand of rationed, austere but at best dignified (in the sense of meeting basic needs and equality) industrialism would be better suited for the era we're entering now?
Of course, that's another problem with the SU: the industrialism. In the end it was just as committed to eternal growth as the West. Maybe even more so. They're both different models for distributing and managing petroleum-based industrial abundance in the end. So I don't want to romanticize it, but it's also hard not to wonder sometimes what a SU with freedom of speech and press might have been like.
And yes, I also got a very clear sense during the Covid mania of what it must have been like to live in one of those societies. I want to emphasize that I'm not saying we came anywhere near the authoritarianism of, say, the SU or East Germany even at the height of the hysteria in 2021. Nowhere close. But I feel the seeds of those processes were clearly visible, with people being eager to virtually tattle on the their neighbors, the state suddenly cracking down hard on "disinformation", the naked propaganda, and so on. A very mild version, but a version nonetheless. Wait...isn't that the description of a vaccine? ;)
That is the funnest story i've read in quite some time. Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it :)
Wow. This was a crazy deep dive. Gives one much to think about. Thank you very much.
And thank you as always for reading, Jenn, it's always appreciated :)
I can recall an early 90s SNES fighting game that my brother and I would play for hours before getting severe anxiety, headaches, and inexplicable bouts of undirected rage—once to the point of him choking me. It was mostly in Japanese with only a nonsense English title screen. Very heavy on flashing blues and reds. Our mom forbade us from renting it a third time. We got it from a dingy video store that was a small front room with a larger cordoned off area in the back for porn. I don’t know why kids were let in there. We could get a game, bag of popcorn, and a tamarind slushy for $3.25. It was next to a Bollywood cinema not far from I-10 and Hwy 6.
When it comes to people getting way too into video games I remember this one kid at birthday party getting so mad over Super Smash Bros Melee that he threw his controller against the wall so hard it got stuck in the drywall. Needless to say, he was not invited back to my friend's birthday party the next year. Also, I know Highway 10 is long as Hell but... do you mean Houston?
In Houston, of course one can live there whole life and not visit vast stretches of it. Upon further reflection, I believe it was near Bellaire and Hwy 6.
Polybius might be a campfire tale, but migraines induced by flashing lights = completely real. Poor kid. My first one was induced by staying up late on New Year's Eve and playing with sparklers and fireworks. I know it's not *actually* a conspiracy, but sometimes the proliferation of flashy-light decor and entertainment feels like one.
I had my first at 26 (I think) when I was at work and thought I was about to have a stroke. Thankfully my co-worker had similar visual aura migraines, so she knew what was happening, but for a good fifteen minutes I was convinced I was about to die. If you haven't read my article "Lavender Town Syndrome", I politely suggest you give it a look - it's about another story of flashy lights in entertainment going horribly wrong. And ending with much worse than one kid having a violent migraine. Try several thousand people.
I have read it!
This is, tbh, the main reason I don’t watch TV.
Well done.
This reminds me that I need to complete my article about a real (and very popular) arcade game that is *actually* "haunted.
Dare I even ask what it is? Or should I just wait for that article? Either way... you have my curiosity.
It's the "Mikey dies from Pop Rocks" myth of the video game world.
Mikey did die from pop rocks that really happened at my friend's cousin's (twice-removed) college roommate's school. I have it on good authority.
Thanks for this interesting and well-researched deep dive into this particular urban legend! I had no idea about all the events that happened to build the legend (i.e. kids being sick, arcade machines being used to surveil criminals, etc.) Sometimes truth IS stranger than fiction!
To be honest with you, neither did I. This was a learning experience for me. I'd heard one time - just one - about a vague story in which someone had a migraine induced by Tempest, but if you had told me that there was actual heavy FBI involvement with the Portland arcade scene and another kid who had a gastric exorcism from drinking too much coke and binge gaming at an arcade... I'm not sure I would have believed it.
As soon as I saw that picture of James Rolfe standing next to that Polybius replica, I knew we were in for a good time.
And a good time, indeed, was had. I never heard much about this urban legend. Heck, I'd never heard of it at all until about a decade ago, and James' AVGN video on it was the single biggest point of exposure I'd been given for it. Your essay here goes to show that, as is often the case, the truth seems to be even stranger than the fiction it spawned. Suffice it to say I wasn't expecting to be handed the revelation of an arcade run by the feds as a sting operation on a silver platter this morning. Just another example of why your essays are fun to read.
Thank you for the kind words, as always - it's appreciated more than you know. Believe me, I was also not expecting to discover that the feds had staged an entire arcade for the sole purpose of a sting operation, nor that arcades in the PNW were apparently such hotbeds of degeneracy. I have to wonder if this was a widespread phenomenon or localized to that region.
I'm sure it was pretty widespread. Having lived in a relatively small town when I was in middle school, some form of that degeneracy is always going on where the teens/preteens tend to hang out. Someone's always finding a way to sell them the booze, the weed, and the pills. Someone's always pulling them into bets on this or that. Not all, of course, but enough. We didn't have an arcade where that all happened, but go behind the right shop, turn down the right side street, or pop into the right clearing in the woods and you'd find all the same stuff.
If it could all still happen in a mountain tourist town of 2000 people, most of whom were retirees, then it definitely happened in a good chunk of arcades across the country. Probably more for the ones in major cities.