The following contains spoilers for The Hardy Boys Season 2, now available on Hulu.
Season 2 of the teen sleuth mystery series The Hardy Boys dives deep into '80s culture. Characters tackle the tricky parts of recording and editing video on VHS while rocking peak period fashion. Part of this aesthetic is the appearance of arcade cabinets, whose golden age came in the late '70s and early '80s. Robowar, the arcade cabinet embedded in The Hardy Boys, does more than set the scene and quickly becomes an important part of the season's narrative. However, the game itself may be a reference to the mysterious video game urban legend Polybius.
Robowar looks like a simple shooter game where players pilot a robot and try to collect gems while destroying enemy robots. Early in the first episode, however, Frank has a vision centered on the arcade game. In the vision, his mom tells him that it's not a game of force but rather a puzzle. The arcade game later proves to be very real, and Wilt's Deli has a Robowar cabinet tucked among its seats and shelves. Phil shares with the Hardy gang that Robowar is responsible for the deaths of three kids, who had heart attacks after achieving a high score. The characters all fight for a chance to show off their robot-shooting skills.
The deadly arcade game seems to be a nod to Polybius. The legend of Polybius outlines an arcade cabinet that appeared in Oregon in 1981, which was supposedly a psychological experiment designed by the U.S. government. The game's intense graphics would induce physical effects in players, causing everything from seizures and amnesia to death. Polybius was also supposed to be incredibly addictive, with lines of eager players forming to play a game that could cause them harm. The legend states that while players literally lined up for the dangerous experience, government agents would watch and record data.
There's no evidence that Polybius ever existed, though in the decades since the legend spread, companies have exploited its popularity and made multiple versions of the game real. The urban legend also inspired other media, including an episode of RocketJump's series Dimension 404, and even made an appearance in the recent Loki series.
The arcade cabinet in Season 2 of The Hardy Boys is not explicitly Polybius. The names don't match, and none of the many characters who play Robowar suffer any of the dramatic effects suggested by the legend. However, the game does prove deadly when it's used to house a bomb in the middle of the season. The explosion effectively ends Robowar's influence on the show but makes real the threats of death promised in the legend that Phil recounts.
Robowar is also linked to increased government observation of the town of Bridgeport. While agents aren't tracking the game itself, there's an influx of people there to uncover the truth behind the Eye and the mystical fallout from the first season. Just as Polybius was supposedly always accompanied by government spies eager to track the game's effects, so it seems that Robowar presages their interference in The Hardy Boys.
Embedding a Polybius reference into The Hardy Boys helps cement the '80s aesthetic while making subtle nods to even greater mysteries in the show. Though it's never made explicit, the deadly arcade game at the heart of The Hardy Boys Season 2 feels like a clear reference to the insidious urban legend. This association feels even more important since Robowar doesn't seem to be a real game, though there was a '90s player-vs-player game and a late '80s pinball game of the same name. Since The Hardy Boys pays so much attention to this fictional, deadly arcade game, it's hard not to draw the Polybius comparison.
To see how Robowar draws on the legend of Polybius, The Hardy Boys Season 2 is now available to stream on Hulu.
