FEATURE
Video Game Myths: Fact or Fiction?
What do E.T., Donkey Kong and Saddam Hussein have in common? They're all part of gaming's greatest urban legends.
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Million of Atari games are buried in the New Mexico desert.
Anyone who experienced the mind-cramping pain of attempting to play E.T. for the Atari 2600 knows that one of two things should happen to any copy of that game: it should be burned or buried. As it turns out, Atari opted for the latter...in a big way.
In early 1983, things could not have been going worse for Atari. The one-time king of the home video game consoles had suddenly found itself in enormous debt after a series of unfortunate events: competing systems from Coleco and Mattel were stealing market share, the new Atari 5200 was panned for being unwieldy, and low sales of its troubled Pac-Man port and its legendarily bad tie-in to Steven Spielberg's smash hit E.T. gave the software giant a black eye. As consumer interest waned, retailers returned boatloads of unused stock to an Atari warehouse in El Paso.
And by boatloads, we mean millions of games. So what does an ailing company do with roughly 10 million cartridges it can't sell to a disinterested customer base? How about poke around New Mexico for a suitable dumping ground and bury the problem altogether?
That's precisely what happened. According to the Alamogordo Daily News and confirmed by the New York Times, a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico provided the answer to Atari's cartridge conundrum. To be safe, they steamrolled the mound of product flat and, for good measure, covered the resulting game pancake in concrete.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
In the early 80's, the military released a subversive arcade game that caused its players to suffer terrible nightmares, nausea and amnesia.
It's perhaps the most alluring of all video game urban legends: unsuspecting kids play a cutting-edge game only to discover that it's actually messing with their minds, rearranging bits and pieces in some hush-hush government-funded experiment. Well, sorry, conspiracy theorists - this myth has more holes in it than that UFO they shot down at Area 51 back in the '50s.
Purportedly released to a select few arcades in Portland, Oregon in 1981, Polybius was unlike any game kids had seen before. Masquerading as a vector-based shooter akin to Tempest, Polybius was far more dastardly. Reports cropped up that undercover government officials - we assume they were wearing black suits and went by the names "J" and "K" - were routinely collecting some form of data from the machines. Meanwhile, those who spent hours playing Polybius were mysteriously afflicted with odd sleep patterns, frightening visions and, handily enough, amnesia.
Sounds sexy, right? Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the game ever existed, no less turned its users into babbling lunatics. No machines have ever been found and no ROMS have ever been produced. At best, Polybius could have been an unsuccessful game prototype, an urban legend that grew out of the early days of gaming in which some users would suffer vertigo or even seizures due to sensitivity to certain light patterns.
Still, Polybius has enjoyed cult-like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era. It was even immortalized by The Simpsons, who included it in an arcade shot during the episode 'Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em." Not bad for a good hoax.
Fact or Fiction? (Science) Fiction!
A man died by playing video games nonstop.
Technically speaking, video game addiction is not an official mental disorder, having been denied inclusion in the DSM by the American Psychiatric Association pending more study. But tell that to the families of gamers who, believe it or not, gave their real-world lives just to spend more time in a virtual one.
There have been numerous accounts of compulsive gaming having tragic consequences, predominantly in Asian countries where cybercafes are open 24 hours a day. In August of 2005, a 28 year-old South Korean man died of heart failure at a cybercafe during a 50-hour gaming binge. Reportedly, the only time the individual left the machine was to visit the restroom, eat, or take a short nap. Known only by his family name of Lee, the troubled gamer had recently quit his job in order to spend more time playing.
That's hardly a new story. Three years prior in October of 2002, a 24 year-old South Korean man passed away from exhaustion following a stunning 86-hour marathon. It doesn't have to take that long for exhaustion to become fatal: only ten days later, a 27 year-old Taiwanese gamer died at another cybercafe after a mere 32-hour session. And as recently as September of 2007, a 30 year-old man fainted at a cybercafe in southern China after playing games for three straight days. Clearly, these cafes could use some sort of systematic power outage plan to help keep the patrons alive.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
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Posted: 25 Jan 2008