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Finding The Right Way To Turn The First Creepypasta Into A Horror Comic

Published Sun, 26 Mar 2017 18:00:03 -0500

By Ben Grisanti

The game appeared in arcades in the early 1980s. It was titled "Polybius," and gamers were lining up to play it. But the game was buggy and would shut down seemingly at random. Fights started breaking among the people waiting to play it. In fact, the people who played the game started acting strange in general. Some people had seizures, others complained of headaches, and others experienced night terrors, or insomnia. All the while, strange agents from some unknown organization were seen servicing the game. And then people started dying…

The urban legend of the killer video game, Polybius, is arguably the first creepy pasta, and I'm sure some people reading this will take umbrage with that statement. (It was creepypasta before the term was coined.) Supposedly, Polybius sprang to life on a usenet message board in the 90s. There's might be some truth to it, but the game has become akin to a cryptid: a mythical part of the American landscape, neither confirmed nor unconfirmed, but probably more fun unconfirmed. This is a conspiracy theory that taps into a cultural fear of new technology that we revisit again and again, and when I first heard it, I was pretty creeped out.

I also heard of it at a time where I was studying cultural theory in college. The Polybius legend sounded to me like a good example of how video games are occasionally demonized in American culture, but of course this story is most popular with people who are game aficionados, so I guess it's a complicated relationship. Like any good urban legend or conspiracy theory, the story changes depending on who is telling it. For me, it sounded like great way to talk about the death of arcade culture.

First and foremost, it was important that I didn't claim too much ownership over the source material. Part of the fun of this kind of storytelling is that it's a shared space. It wouldn't be right of me to claim to have written the definitive Polybius story, or over explain everything in a way that killed the essential mystery. That would spoil the fun, and I don't want to ruin anything for anybody. I decided very early on that I would focus on the characters. This would be a coming of age tale. I would set it in a small town where there wasn't much going on or much else to do, and the game would be a harbinger of the difficult road to adulthood. A symbol of awakening to a world that is dangerous and terrifying. I decided to focus primarily on one aspect of the story: the dreams. I devised a way to visually represent how the game is reprogramming the players to be violent, and then everything popped. It was one of those magical writing moments where the rest of the story fell into place and I knew I had something really cool on my hands. Polybius Dreams was born.

When I brought artist Keith Grachow on, we thought about changing the name of the game to something else, but it would just obviously still be about Polybius, so may as well use that name, right? Still, I wanted the pin-ups and t-shirt designs associated with the Kickstarter campaign to be more about the bigger story, as a way of celebrating it. I hope we're not the last Polybius themed story. We're certainly not the first killer video game story, but I think what makes what we're doing unique is that we never talk too much about the game itself, where it comes from and why, but there are some clues. Drama is king here, and I think dramatic, emotional realism in horror comics is somewhat lacking. We're walking a line between unique and unusual, and the instantly recognizable Americana of the 1980s. Additionally, this is a tragedy. All too often I feel like death is trivialized in horror stories, but I want my deaths to have an impact. I want my readers to empathize with the characters, and in the end they will have to come to their own conclusion as to what it all means.

All this is, I think, the best means to adapt a story that already lives in the public mind. Leave enough mystery so others can play in the same sandbox, make it about the characters, and do something different with it, while still making it recognizable. I'm really excited with what we've accomplished so far, but we still have a long way to go before this project is a reality. Please visit our Kickstarter, and if you can, help bring this story to life by pledging or sharing us on social media. Let us show you what we can do with this excellent source material.