Chances are you haven't heard of it, so I'll give you the wikipedia article and any further research you want to do is up to you.
According to the story, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs of Portland, Oregon in 1981, something of a rarity at the time. The game proved to be incredibly popular, to the point of addiction, and lines formed around the machines, often resulting in fighting over who played next. This was followed by clusters of visits from men in black. Rather than the usual marketing data collected by company visitors to arcade machines, they collected some unknown data, allegedly testing responses to the psychoactive machines. The players themselves suffered from a series of unpleasant side effects, including amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and even suicide in some versions of the legend. Some players stopped playing video games, while reportedly one became an antigaming activist.
My personal opinion is that it was an experimental game in which the developers were testing a new style of graphics and a couple of epileptic kids couldn't handle it, so everyone freaked out and that's why the game completely disappeared. That being said, it's a fun and interesting topic for me (and possibly a really good movie premise) and I enjoyed the few days of freaking out and research that occurred upon first hearing the legend.
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