14 ms·

1988: P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A.

207 points by aaronareed 5y ago

js8 5y ago
"Mrazik" was another text game in this genre - you were some kind of agent infiltrating a Soviet military base.
anotha1 5y ago
This isn't loading for me(mobile or wifi), which I find weird since it's hosted on substack. Edit: seems like all substack pages are down for me (except home). Not a good look for a service that hosts something so simple to get right. And too bad for this guy who is missing out on the HN subscriber wave.
- peraspera 5y ago
  Indeed. https://substack.statuspage.io/ https://substack.statuspage.io/
- ddingus 5y ago
  I must have got in early. Great read! Capable people enduring in and working against hard times and painful leadership.
- neonate 5y ago
  It's working for me now but https://archive.is/XnAFC https://archive.is/XnAFC also has it.
tyingq 5y ago
"Rylek dryly remembers a then-typical experience with magazine program listings" Ahh, yep. I remember the fun of typing lots of BASIC DATA line entries from a magazine into my C64, and getting something very unexpected, and no obvious way to find/fix the typo. Getting a VicModem was a godsend, so I could just download things and go.
- cronix 5y ago
  Same here. Compute!'s Gazette. There's an archive if you ever get the hankering for nostalgia lol. https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette I don't know how many times I spent many hours over several days typing pages of code from the magazines into the C64, have it be buggy, spend hours trying to fix the bugs only to have them release the code for their bug fixes the next issue, which took a month. It was very slow learning.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  I remember buck in the time in Yugoslavia one of the federal radio stations broadcasted Spectrum computer games over the air (FM). You could record the game to the tape and actually play it later. Copying games was as simple as copying a music tape, you only needed a tape recorder with two heads, those were very popular at the time for the same reason.
- jhgb 5y ago
  You used VicModem from behind the Iron Curtain?
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    Yugoslavia wasn't exactly part of the USSR block after 1956 and it actually was part of the group of independent nations.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      I didn't notice anything about Yugoslavia in the article...? I thought the comment referred to Czechoslovakia.
      - gostsamo 5y ago
        My bad, HN doesn't make obvious to screen readers who is answering to whom and I thought that you mean the comment with the Yugo radio programs.
peraspera 5y ago
Since Substack is currently down, the following Ars Technica article on the same subject (AFAIK) is a good alternative: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/how-indiana-jones-fought-the-communists-and-led-an-era-of-activist-video-games/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/how-indiana-jones-fou...
laviroman 5y ago
For non CZ/SK people reading this. This story is an extremely niche example of "anti" communist games. For example, transgoogle this article https://gaudeo.sk/jaro-filip-online/ https://gaudeo.sk/jaro-filip-online/ and watch the video posted there, which is from 1986 and it was airtimed in the state television as an 8-episode-long series. Jaro Filip, the guy from the '86 video is openly saying that he is playing Alien 8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv6yLoibUS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv6yLoibUS0 and he is joking about it quite casually. By the way, Fuxoft - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWfQH6o8T9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWfQH6o8T9I nowadays a crypto-millionaire (part of Golden Triangle, together with the guy mentioned in the OA, https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle ) did some nice text adventures like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1P56S5vdW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1P56S5vdW0. By the way, the first official games/programs distributor for CZ/SK and even UK/US titles was probably Ultrasoft. These games in the article were not official games, well, there wasn't a market for this thing in the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasoft Maybe you will know titles like Quadrax, Jet-Story or Tetris 2.
- stephenhuey 5y ago
  Pretty fascinating niche. On one of my trips over there a Czech cousin told me how they had to be careful even dubbing Michael Jackson tapes in the 80s since American media was not allowed at all. These games seem a lot riskier. Edit: Thanks to the comments on this it seems things weren't so dire in the 80s. My cousin was a kid then--perhaps he was recounting more 70s era stories from his older sister or something! In any case, it's fun hearing about all of your memories since my first visit over there was in 1990. :)
  - Tade0 5y ago
    It wasn't banned per se - it was just that with a non-exchangable currency getting hold of a copy of anything was difficult. Some western productions would make it through the iron curtain, but they needed to be checked and usually censored beforehand. Politically correct (in the original meaning of the expression) poster art was a genre in and of itself: https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/collecting/star-wars-posters-soviet-europe/ https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/collecting/star-wars-poste...
protomyth 5y ago
That was the amazing thing about being a kid in the late 70's and early 80's. Cheap computers existed that had the tools to allow you to pass programs to others like a mix tape. Now with iDevices, you need permission from a corporation to pass programs to others. I would guess this might be problematic with protest games.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  just use an android? Super easy to install.apk
- tdrgabi 5y ago
  You can make a small website. Even airdrop some html file with js included if you want it interactive and don't want to host it.
- navanchauhan 5y ago
  Wouldn’t you say it is easier now? Just create a web based adventure game (you can export HTML/CSS with Twine for text based adventure games), encode the URL as a QR code and simply swap those with people?
  - protomyth 5y ago
    Easier to get an maintain a website versus handing someone a cassette with a program on it? No, I think the program was easier.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Fair point. It seems that the web doesn't forbid you to do your own stuff on the side, it's just that the mainstream has become a commercial enterprise with its (large) share of constraint. Probably nothing new under the sun.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    You'd still need to host it, which involves money, a way to pay for it (credit card), which includes proving/disclosing your identity (which would be dangerous if you're speaking out against an authoritarian government), sometimes you legally have to be over 18 or 21 to enter into contracts (so if the service provider finds out you're underage they can shut down your account even if you otherwise pay the bill), and hosting anything controversial or that goes against the mainstream is unlikely to stay up for long if it gets popular.
hoyd 5y ago
That is such an amazing title
- dang 5y ago
  The submitted title was "Teens in '80s Czechoslovakia swapped tapes of text adventure protest games". We changed it that of the article. Not sure which one you mean :) The article title is obscure, but in the best way—the way that invites exactly the sort of interest this site exists for ("I wonder what that is"...)
gxqoz 5y ago
There are some good stories like this from other countries like Poland and Mexico in the book Video Games Around the World: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/video-games-around-world https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/video-games-around-world
inglor_cz 5y ago
There is a lot left of the 1980s spirit in Czechia. * Willingness to do things by hand (such as sewing improvised masks in spring of 2020 at home). * General distrust towards authorities. * Caustic, dark sense of humor. * Readiness to be cynical/heretical about every Sacred Cause pushed by the media or activists. Americans would probably be genuinely shocked at the reception of the BLM movement here. * Corruption, unfortunately. Or at least high perception of corruption. Reality may not be as bad anymore, but we refuse to believe that things have gotten better. * And, yes, the latent fear of Russian tanks rolling through the country again.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > Americans would probably be genuinely shocked at the reception of the BLM movement here It's not really surprising that a country that wasn't itself a colonizer nor exactly colonized (Hitler aside) and has few nonwhite immigrants wouldn't understand the American situation while also being naively racist.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "nor exactly colonized (Hitler aside)" You would have to put a lot more aside. Pretty much the only two eras of national self-determination since 1621 were 1918-1938 and 1989-today. This nation is located on a crossroads of powerful interests. We have two major non-white communities in CZ. One of them are the Vietnamese, who came as guest workers in the 1980s and are climbing rapidly on the societal ladder. Their kids are integrating into the elite of the nation very fast, universities are full of them. The second one is Roma (Gypsies), with whom the mutual relations are pretty bad. Welfare dependency, crime etc. Once Roma start moving into some neighbourhood, an exodus of everyone else follows. This is not unique for CZ, though, this pattern of failure is seen everywhere with sizable Roma communities, from France to Bulgaria and Russia. One of the reasons might be that successful Roma leave the community and intermarry with whites. That was case of my dear friend from the ground school. She is 100 per cent Roma, her kids are 50 per cent, but they no longer have any contact to the community. She says it would be too dangerous; too much of a drug habit there, kids not exempt.
  - 5y ago

207 points by aaronareed 5y ago

js8 5y ago

"Mrazik" was another text game in this genre - you were some kind of agent infiltrating a Soviet military base.

This isn't loading for me(mobile or wifi), which I find weird since it's hosted on substack. Edit: seems like all substack pages are down for me (except home). Not a good look for a service that hosts something so simple to get right. And too bad for this guy who is missing out on the HN subscriber wave.

peraspera 5y ago
Indeed. https://substack.statuspage.io/ https://substack.statuspage.io/
ddingus 5y ago
I must have got in early. Great read! Capable people enduring in and working against hard times and painful leadership.
neonate 5y ago
It's working for me now but https://archive.is/XnAFC https://archive.is/XnAFC also has it.

tyingq 5y ago

"Rylek dryly remembers a then-typical experience with magazine program listings" Ahh, yep. I remember the fun of typing lots of BASIC DATA line entries from a magazine into my C64, and getting something very unexpected, and no obvious way to find/fix the typo. Getting a VicModem was a godsend, so I could just download things and go.

cronix 5y ago
Same here. Compute!'s Gazette. There's an archive if you ever get the hankering for nostalgia lol. https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette I don't know how many times I spent many hours over several days typing pages of code from the magazines into the C64, have it be buggy, spend hours trying to fix the bugs only to have them release the code for their bug fixes the next issue, which took a month. It was very slow learning.
tut-urut-utut 5y ago
I remember buck in the time in Yugoslavia one of the federal radio stations broadcasted Spectrum computer games over the air (FM). You could record the game to the tape and actually play it later. Copying games was as simple as copying a music tape, you only needed a tape recorder with two heads, those were very popular at the time for the same reason.
jhgb 5y ago
You used VicModem from behind the Iron Curtain?
- gostsamo 5y ago
  Yugoslavia wasn't exactly part of the USSR block after 1956 and it actually was part of the group of independent nations.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    I didn't notice anything about Yugoslavia in the article...? I thought the comment referred to Czechoslovakia.
    - gostsamo 5y ago
      My bad, HN doesn't make obvious to screen readers who is answering to whom and I thought that you mean the comment with the Yugo radio programs.

peraspera 5y ago

Since Substack is currently down, the following Ars Technica article on the same subject (AFAIK) is a good alternative: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/how-indiana-jones-fought-the-communists-and-led-an-era-of-activist-video-games/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/how-indiana-jones-fou...

laviroman 5y ago

For non CZ/SK people reading this. This story is an extremely niche example of "anti" communist games. For example, transgoogle this article https://gaudeo.sk/jaro-filip-online/ https://gaudeo.sk/jaro-filip-online/ and watch the video posted there, which is from 1986 and it was airtimed in the state television as an 8-episode-long series. Jaro Filip, the guy from the '86 video is openly saying that he is playing Alien 8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv6yLoibUS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv6yLoibUS0 and he is joking about it quite casually. By the way, Fuxoft - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWfQH6o8T9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWfQH6o8T9I nowadays a crypto-millionaire (part of Golden Triangle, together with the guy mentioned in the OA, https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle ) did some nice text adventures like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1P56S5vdW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1P56S5vdW0. By the way, the first official games/programs distributor for CZ/SK and even UK/US titles was probably Ultrasoft. These games in the article were not official games, well, there wasn't a market for this thing in the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasoft Maybe you will know titles like Quadrax, Jet-Story or Tetris 2.

stephenhuey 5y ago
Pretty fascinating niche. On one of my trips over there a Czech cousin told me how they had to be careful even dubbing Michael Jackson tapes in the 80s since American media was not allowed at all. These games seem a lot riskier. Edit: Thanks to the comments on this it seems things weren't so dire in the 80s. My cousin was a kid then--perhaps he was recounting more 70s era stories from his older sister or something! In any case, it's fun hearing about all of your memories since my first visit over there was in 1990. :)
- Tade0 5y ago
  It wasn't banned per se - it was just that with a non-exchangable currency getting hold of a copy of anything was difficult. Some western productions would make it through the iron curtain, but they needed to be checked and usually censored beforehand. Politically correct (in the original meaning of the expression) poster art was a genre in and of itself: https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/collecting/star-wars-posters-soviet-europe/ https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/collecting/star-wars-poste...

protomyth 5y ago

That was the amazing thing about being a kid in the late 70's and early 80's. Cheap computers existed that had the tools to allow you to pass programs to others like a mix tape. Now with iDevices, you need permission from a corporation to pass programs to others. I would guess this might be problematic with protest games.

aero-glide2 5y ago
just use an android? Super easy to install.apk
tdrgabi 5y ago
You can make a small website. Even airdrop some html file with js included if you want it interactive and don't want to host it.
navanchauhan 5y ago
Wouldn’t you say it is easier now? Just create a web based adventure game (you can export HTML/CSS with Twine for text based adventure games), encode the URL as a QR code and simply swap those with people?
- protomyth 5y ago
  Easier to get an maintain a website versus handing someone a cassette with a program on it? No, I think the program was easier.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Fair point. It seems that the web doesn't forbid you to do your own stuff on the side, it's just that the mainstream has become a commercial enterprise with its (large) share of constraint. Probably nothing new under the sun.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  You'd still need to host it, which involves money, a way to pay for it (credit card), which includes proving/disclosing your identity (which would be dangerous if you're speaking out against an authoritarian government), sometimes you legally have to be over 18 or 21 to enter into contracts (so if the service provider finds out you're underage they can shut down your account even if you otherwise pay the bill), and hosting anything controversial or that goes against the mainstream is unlikely to stay up for long if it gets popular.

hoyd 5y ago

That is such an amazing title

dang 5y ago
The submitted title was "Teens in '80s Czechoslovakia swapped tapes of text adventure protest games". We changed it that of the article. Not sure which one you mean :) The article title is obscure, but in the best way—the way that invites exactly the sort of interest this site exists for ("I wonder what that is"...)

gxqoz 5y ago

There are some good stories like this from other countries like Poland and Mexico in the book Video Games Around the World: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/video-games-around-world https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/video-games-around-world

inglor_cz 5y ago

There is a lot left of the 1980s spirit in Czechia. * Willingness to do things by hand (such as sewing improvised masks in spring of 2020 at home). * General distrust towards authorities. * Caustic, dark sense of humor. * Readiness to be cynical/heretical about every Sacred Cause pushed by the media or activists. Americans would probably be genuinely shocked at the reception of the BLM movement here. * Corruption, unfortunately. Or at least high perception of corruption. Reality may not be as bad anymore, but we refuse to believe that things have gotten better. * And, yes, the latent fear of Russian tanks rolling through the country again.

pjc50 5y ago
> Americans would probably be genuinely shocked at the reception of the BLM movement here It's not really surprising that a country that wasn't itself a colonizer nor exactly colonized (Hitler aside) and has few nonwhite immigrants wouldn't understand the American situation while also being naively racist.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "nor exactly colonized (Hitler aside)" You would have to put a lot more aside. Pretty much the only two eras of national self-determination since 1621 were 1918-1938 and 1989-today. This nation is located on a crossroads of powerful interests. We have two major non-white communities in CZ. One of them are the Vietnamese, who came as guest workers in the 1980s and are climbing rapidly on the societal ladder. Their kids are integrating into the elite of the nation very fast, universities are full of them. The second one is Roma (Gypsies), with whom the mutual relations are pretty bad. Welfare dependency, crime etc. Once Roma start moving into some neighbourhood, an exodus of everyone else follows. This is not unique for CZ, though, this pattern of failure is seen everywhere with sizable Roma communities, from France to Bulgaria and Russia. One of the reasons might be that successful Roma leave the community and intermarry with whites. That was case of my dear friend from the ground school. She is 100 per cent Roma, her kids are 50 per cent, but they no longer have any contact to the community. She says it would be too dangerous; too much of a drug habit there, kids not exempt.
- 5y ago