Skeptics and researchers have differing ideas on how and why the story of "Polybius" came about. American producer and author Brian Dunning believes "Polybius" to be an urban legend that grew out of a mixture of influences in the 1980s. He notes that two players fell ill in Portland on the same day in 1981, one collapsing with a migraine headache after playing "Tempest", and another suffering from stomach pain after playing "Asteroids" for 28 hours in a filmed attempt to break a world record at the same arcade. Dunning records that the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided several video arcades in the area just ten days later, where the owners were suspected of using the machines for gambling, and the lead-up to the raid involved FBI agents monitoring arcade cabinets for signs of tampering and recording high scores. Dunning suggests that these two events were combined in an urban legend about government-monitored arcade machines making players ill. He believes that such a myth must have been established by 1984, and that it influenced the plot of the film "The Last Starfighter", in which a teenager is recruited by aliens who monitored him playing a covertly-developed arcade game. Dunning considers "Sinneslöschen" to be the kind of name that a non-German speaker would generate if they tried to create a compound word using an English-to-German dictionary.