Missile Mastar Comes Alive... In Soviet Russia!
OK, so it's not actually Super Soviet Missile Mastar, but Wired has an awesome article/gallery up called 'Soviet-Era Arcade Games Crawl Out of Their Cold War Graves', in which they reveal: "From the late '70s to the early '90s, Soviet military factories produced some 70 different video game models. Based largely (and crudely) on early Japanese designs, the games were distributed -- in the words of one military manual -- for the purposes of "entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities.""
And so? "Production of the games ceased with the collapse of communism, and as Nintendo consoles and PCs flooded the former Soviet states, the old arcade games were either destroyed or disappeared into warehouses and basements. It was mostly out of nostalgia that four friends at Moscow State Technical University began scouring the country to rescue these old games. So far they have located 32 of them and are doing their best to bring them back to life. "
Of course, it's the gallery of the extensive, largely previously unseen collection which is the hyper-awesome part of the article - there are games like Konek-Gorbunok, apparently "...the Soviet Zelda, full of castles, princesses and deep dark forests" - and my God, some of the arcade machines look so amazingly retro, I just may explode.









Comments
What's more, those games were -not shockingly- low on violence and on promoting antagonistic behaviour even in games (no high scores, that is). Fantastic find!
Posted by: gnome | June 9, 2007 5:36 AM
Unrelated, but does anyone remember the game Raid over Moscow? It was one of those great old potpourri games where you had to fly a ship, bomb all of Russia, launch missles at a castle and do battle with some weird robot thing, all in the name of stopping Communist nukes.
Sigh, it was a simpler time then..
Posted by: Jared | June 10, 2007 12:59 AM
Apparently, simplicity is way overrated...
Posted by: gnome | June 10, 2007 4:56 AM