As a kid who grew up in the suburbs in the ’70s and ’80s, I heard many of the urban legends that were passed around like stolen issues of Playboy: Cropsey, Bloody Mary, the one about how someone flushed a baby alligator down the toilet and now it lives in the sewers below Manhattan.
But somehow missed the one about the weird arcade game that drove people crazy.
It’s that urban legend at the center of Collin Armstrong’s new coming-of-age horror novel Polybius (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), in which the titular arcade game really ruins some gamers’ days.
In the following email interview, Armstrong talks about his personal connection to the urban legend, and how it came to be the basis of this scary story.