4 Cursed Video Games You Should Never Play Alone.

Introduction- Ever since the boom of video games back in the 80s, there have always been urban legends surrounding games that are cursed – ones that can inflict serious damage to players in real life. Whether or not these whispers of curses are true, one thing is for sure – there’s a whole history of games that have been called cursed by players for years, and today, we’re going to dive in and explore those titles with our list of the top 10 cursed video games you should never play alone. Some of these games on this list are next to impossible to find or track down. Others have long disappeared from existence to the point where there’s speculation as to whether they were even real at all. And some are games that we’ve all played at one point in our lives. So with that in mind, let’s get to it!

Polybius Polybius is perhaps the most notorious of tabooed games – this is because there’s a lot of speculation as to whether or not it ever actually existed. Despite this, it’s found its way into all aspects of pop culture – hell, the Simpsons even references it. So what is Polybius, for those of you unaware? As the story goes, back in 1981, during the boom of arcade culture, Polybius was a machine that appeared at an arcade in Portland, Oregon. It was said to produce psychoactive and addictive effects in players who played it. According to the legends, ‘men in black’ would visit the machine periodically, data mining it to study the effects it had on players – it was believed to be a government-run psychology experiment. So did it ever actually exist? Using the Freedom of Information Act, an investigation was conducted about the machine’s existence, which came back as negative – there is no proof it ever really did exist. But it still has inspired a ton of copycat versions of the game, including a recent 2017 version for the PS4 developed by Llamasoft.

Stay Alive Stay alive is a game that has its roots in a 2006 slasher film. The movie follows a group of friends who play the game, Stay Alive, and end up getting killed in real life, dying in the same way their characters did. At the time of the film’s release, there were rumors that the game was actually being developed – a game that was supposed to be as difficult as Dark Souls, in which if your HP drops below zero, your avatar disappears forever. And apparently, playing this game is supposed to cause you to go mad, suffer from horrible nightmares, and even commit suicide in an effort to get peace. No Stay Alive companion game was ever released publically upon the film’s distribution.

Berzerk is one of the few titles on our list that actually has resulted in confirmed deaths. For context, it’s an arcade game, a multi-directional shooter that was released in 1980 and has you taking out rooms full of armed robots. If you get shot by a robot, touch a wall in the game, touch a robot or get hit by the game’s main antagonist, a smiley face named Evil Otto, you’d die. Back in 1981, a 19-year-old named Jeff Dailey had managed to get a high school of 16, 660 in the game, and as he typed in his initials, he died of a heart attack. A year later, an 18-year-old named Peter Burkowski died in the exact same way. Urban legends surrounding the title suggest that Evil Otto is the one responsible for the deaths, but really, it could just be the fact that they both suffered from heart conditions combined with the exhaustion that comes from playing hours and hours of the game to get a high score? Regardless, many believe the title is cursed, even to the extent that people refuse to play the newer iterations of the game available today.

Petscop Petscop is an ongoing let’s play series that focuses on a fictional obscure PS1 game – in the fictional game, the player, who in the series on YouTube is a guy named Paul, is supposed to collect pets from their cages. But after inputting a cheat code into the game, things get quite dark. It gets weirder. Those who watched the series spawned a fan theory about it, and it’s connection to a child abuse case of a 10-year-old named Candace Newmaker that died from a 70-minute rebirthing session as part of attachment therapy. Rebirthing sessions is a controversial treatment in the US in which adults wrap a child in a blanket and sit on them as a means to reconnect them with their parents, re-experiencing birth.