In Soviet Russia Arcade Plays You
Friday 8 June 2007 @ 7:54 am | By Ivan 'Nahu' LozanoIf you're new here and you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, and browse around for more fun stuff. Thanks for visiting!
Oh it seems the old soviet motherland wasnt all about communist glory and shunning everything the western devils did. Oh no, they were living the life, they even had arcades! As this Wired article points out, soviet video games were developed by the military for “entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities.” So, yeah, in the end even the arcades were a means turn their youth into super soviet soldiers (which is probably the name of one of the arcades!)
And while some were original models most of them were reversed engineered from the very first Japanese models. One difference with their western coutnerparts, though, was that highscores were non-existant. Why? Well as Alexander Stakhanov, one of the founders of the first Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, said “That kind of competition wasn’t encouraged,if you got enough points you won a free game, but there was no ‘high score’ culture as in the West.”
And that, kids, is why they lost the cold war.
P.S. Sorry for the very very lame joke on the title.
[Wired]
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Wow, it’s good to know that the “in Soviet Russia” thing is more widespread than my group of friends! Thankfully it has yet to be combined with any “your mom” or “that’s what she said” jokes… but now that I’ve said it, it’s inevitable… ;)
Though most of soviet arcade games were incomparable with their foreign counterparts in matters of gameplay at the moment of the 80s, still left very warm impressions in my childhood. Unfortunately, soviet arcades died with Soviet Union and vanished in early 90s mostly because of overall situation in arcade games market in the world. Dendy, Russian clone of Famicom\NES, and x86-based PCs flooded young Russian market of electronic entertainment, so nobody interested in arcades. In present days nobody in Russia even knows that arcades ever existed, arcade game culture was totally missed by russian gamers. Now the words “??????? ???????” (=arcade machine) in russian language means _gambling_ machine, there’re no separate word for arcade. People don’t even know the difference. That’s quite upsetting fact for me, arcade fan.
You may see one soviet arcade game - Konek-Gorbunok (based on fairy tale “The Humpbacked Horse” by P.P.Yershov) in MAME. Here’re few other games on TIA-MC1 arcade board: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIA-MC-1
Soviet Arcade Games Museum: http://www.15kop.ru/index_en.htm