The Lost Arcade Games of the Soviet Union

[mmmPeanutButter]

Wired Link

[leapinlew]

In Soviet Russia - game plays you

[CheffoJeffo]

Interesting ... thanks for the link!

[BobA]

Those games look Russian somehow.   I expected the rifle to look more like an AK 47 but I guess those were back in the old days and that would not have been looked on kindly by the Kremlin.

[GAtekwriter]

Thanks for sharing this... I like looking at old tech, even if it's arcade games.  The fact that these are old USSR-era is even better.  Doesn't that racing game (side by side) look like a pirated Atari classic?  It makes me wonder if some of the technology that went into arcade games was ever included in so much of the 70's and 80's espionage work.  I wouldn't be surprised...

Jim

[ChadTower]

In Soviet Russia - game plays you

 

[mmmPeanutButter]

There was a corresponding article too, which I had missed the first time.

One common feature among them all is a lack of a high-score list.

"That kind of competition wasn't encouraged," explains Alexander Stakhanov, one of the museum's founders and engineers. "If you got enough points you won a free game, but there was no 'high score' culture as in the West."

[ahofle]

In Soviet Russia - game plays you

 

  

[SavannahLion]

Some of those cabs would make interesting additions to a collection.

Fun to play? Probably not, just interesting as conversation pieces.

[leapinlew]

Fun to play? Probably not, just interesting as conversation pieces.

My experience thus far is any cab in the house is a conversation piece. Multiple russian cabs would be more of an oddity.

[SavannahLion]

To fix Soviet circuit boards, curators at the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines often combine parts from three of the same machines to get one to function. When those go, the game will be gone forever.

Sounds like something MAME needs to get their hands on. It would actually give the developers something new to create instead of tweaking the same IC for the 15th time. Maybe branch it off call it something like MAMЭ.

[ChadTower]

Why would the Soviets be using different PCB components?  What are they made from, beets?

[AcidArmitage]

they have built in geiger counters 

[ChadTower]

I wonder how hard it is to find an old Soviet board where the meat isn't spoiled.