You Can Now Play Video Games Developed Behind the Iron Curtain (vice.com) 15
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Cold War couldn't stop gaming from thriving in the Eastern Bloc. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a generation of young people living behind the Iron Curtain designed and released their own video games and arcade cabinets. Now, you can play English translations of some of these lost classics of early gaming. One is a text adventure where a Soviet military officer hunts and kills Rambo. The translated games all come from Slovakia and are a collaboration between the Slovak Game Developers Association and the Slovak Design Museum.
According to Stanislav Hrda, one of the programmers who created the games on offer, making video games was something only kids did. "The games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration," he said in the post explaining the project. "Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers." The computing power was limited and the teenagers' technological knowhow almost non-existent so many of these early games were text adventures. "These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in," Hrda said. "Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one's fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books."
Hrda loved American action movies and programmed the video game Satochin, a text adventure where a Soviet officer hunts John Rambo. "The game was very hard to win," Hrda told Ars Technica. "Whenever you made a small mistake, you would die. So before you win, you are killed ten times by Rambo." [...] The project has localized ten games for Western audiences, including Satochin, with plans to tackle more over the next few years. "The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games," the site said. English versions are available here and can be played in the Fuse emulator. The Slovak versions can be played online through the project's website.
According to Stanislav Hrda, one of the programmers who created the games on offer, making video games was something only kids did. "The games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration," he said in the post explaining the project. "Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers." The computing power was limited and the teenagers' technological knowhow almost non-existent so many of these early games were text adventures. "These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in," Hrda said. "Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one's fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books."
Hrda loved American action movies and programmed the video game Satochin, a text adventure where a Soviet officer hunts John Rambo. "The game was very hard to win," Hrda told Ars Technica. "Whenever you made a small mistake, you would die. So before you win, you are killed ten times by Rambo." [...] The project has localized ten games for Western audiences, including Satochin, with plans to tackle more over the next few years. "The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games," the site said. English versions are available here and can be played in the Fuse emulator. The Slovak versions can be played online through the project's website.
In Soviet Russia (Score:4, Funny)
Re: In Soviet Russia (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You sir
are
a
genius!!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Ironically that's what games from the West do, play you with micro-transactions and pay-to-win.
What makes these older games great is that there's none of that crap, no day 1 patches, no abusive play mechanics. Just fun games.
Play the FPS (Score:2)
Reminds me of this little gem... (Score:4, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Probably not much from a gameplay standpoint, but as a political commentary it's just spot on.
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How about Tetris? (Score:2)
It doesn't need promotion or reminding I guess.
Re:How about Tetris? (Score:4, Interesting)
Tetris is an odd game that escaped the iron curtain early in its life, and it was one that was the officially licensed by the state.
But that was one of maybe a handful of things that escaped - the others were not released worldwide. Now they were.
The history of Tetris making it to the west is one of many twists and turns and other scary things. And that was because people were wanting it - tales of people having to do all sorts of spy-movie things just to get at the game, and the Russians scrambling to figure things out.
It's also what created ELORG which anyone who played early Tetris remembers from the copyright screen, they were eventually formed to handle the licensing until the cold war ended and Russia gave the rights to Pajitnov.
But Tetris was one of the few that got out. There were plenty more that didn't. So it's a wonderful look into what was happening at the same time. Heck, we may have had computers, but being the Iron Curtain the students learned with programmable calculators. Luckily many of those are now easily available on the open market. so you can have fun with HP loving friends with your calculator where everything is in Cyrillic (they used RPN as well).
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I DL'd the English Zip File. :-(
NO Tetris
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Uh, Tetris? (Score:2)
Like... Tetris?
*Video* game? (Score:3)