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Video games made in the USSR (2020)
- asveikau 4y agoThis website gives strong Russian propaganda vibes. Apparently it is owned by the Russian state. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_Beyond https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_Beyond Given all that's going on, I found it jarring that it uses the Russian spellings of Kharkiv and Kyiv. I did find the content a little interesting. The other articles on that site seem rather strange, like they exist purely to give westerners more favorable views of the Russian state.
- Waterluvian 4y agoWritten years ago when, let’s admit it, most of us were still writing “Kiev” because we didn’t know better and were, of course, ignorant.
- asveikau 4y agoI didn't realize the article was from 2020. Anyway, it is true this website is state owned and the other articles have heavy propaganda vibes.
- Jensson 4y agoBut is there anything wrong with the linked article?
- shmerl 4y agoThe article looks neutral (besides for spelling of city names using Russian notation).
- rosnd 4y agoWhich, to be fair, is something that much of the Ukrainian population still does. It's mostly foreigners that see this as something important.
- asveikau 4y agoA lot of Ukrainians I know seem to be speaking much more Ukrainian than they did a few years ago. People from Russian speaking towns. There does seem to be a serious de-russification vibe, stronger than ever and definitely not just something foreigners are interested in. I'll give just one small example that I'm reminded of... There's been a lot of drama about signs when you enter a town. Russians will capture a town, paint the sign with their flag, change spellings to replace і with и, etc. Ukrainians will recapture, repaint, and switch to their spelling... It's a thing.
- int_19h 4y agoRussia focused so much on language issues to justify what it's doing that it backfired - in any discussion where Russian vs Ukrainian can be brought up, it will inevitably be symbolic now, regardless of what people speak.
- my_city 4y agoYou don't get heavy propaganda vibes when reading Times, The New York times or The Economist?
- actionfromafar 4y agoThere's nothing inherently wrong writing it Kiev in foreign languages. Of course, during todays Russian war of agression against Kiev and the Ukraine, it's a good show of support to write it Kyiv. But out of old habit I write Kiev most of the time.
- Georgelemental 4y agoMy understanding is that most residents of Kyiv/Kiev speak Russian day-to-day, and therefore are more likely to use "Kiev" themselves. Russian language ≠ Russian state
- int_19h 4y agoIt's a bit convoluted. Those people may speak Russian, but then "Kiev" is not a Russian spelling - it's a transliteration of one into other languages. And since those other languages are already foreign, they might as well prefer "Kyiv" for, basically, symbolic reasons.
- HideousKojima 4y agoI mean, I don't call Germany Deutschland either, so I don't really think it's ignorance. Nor do I call Prague "Praha" except when I'm actually speaking Czech. Kiev is much easier for native English speakers to pronounce, and I'm not going to switch to a more unwieldy pronunciation to make some sort of political point.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoDo you use a proper spelling of the of Paree?
- Bondi_Blue 4y agoSorry about that, I didn't realize this before I shared it. I had no agenda in sharing it, I did see that it had some Ukrainian contributions listed. I found it because I was trying to find the creator of Filler, when I stumbled upon this list. And not that anyone asked, but I am a Wisconsinite and I support Ukraine.
- asveikau 4y agoI don't think there's any need to apologize, I just wanted to highlight the source.
- my_city 4y agoThere is nothing wrong about Russia or sharing russian media. Demonization of Russia is crazy and hypocritical. We should start demonizing the USA more, for their wars of agression against Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, Panama and many more. Russia is unfairly demonized, and it is a vicious demonization that is not given to countries that have done far worse to the world, like as the USA.
- asveikau 4y agoThere is a difference. The website is government owned. Look at the front page. It's not journalism. It's promoting the image of a country. If they had something at the bottom saying "paid for by Russian tourism board" then it'd be fine. I just wouldn't call it journalism.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 4y agoBecause of the war against Ukraine, I’ve become more aware of Ukraine’s role in the USSR when reading up on history. One thing I’ve noticed is just how much of the most impressive technological feats came from Ukraine.
- anotherstalker 4y agoCare to highlight interesting examples and industries for us unlearned?
- qaq 4y agoMost high end Soviet Nuclear weapons were designed by KB Yuzhnoye and built by Yuzhmash in Dnepr(Dnepropetrovsk).
- shmerl 4y agoAs well as rocket engines like RD-8.
- nosianu 4y agoI just wanted to ask Google to find a more comprehensive list, but I was reminded of a serious search issue that I would like to see addressed at some point: Especially whenever there is a current event with lots of news it is nearly impossible to find anything that is too close to the subject. It would be great to be able to restrict search to older results, to avoid being in the shadow of more recent articles. Even adding "USSR" did not help at all, almost everything I got was related to recent events. I've had this problem sooo many times in the past already. Google is way too focused on the latest information. Just yesterday somebody also pointed this out in a comment, about that website link that made it to the HN homepage that help find the right glue for two different materials, which was an example for an old rarely changing but still relevant website. Anyway, on topic, here's a list that I found starting out from trying to widen the search from the starting point that I knew Antonov is Ukrainian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_design_bureaus_in_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_design_bureaus_in_Ukra... https://www.value.today/headquarters/ukraine https://www.value.today/headquarters/ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Ukraine "Donbas: What’s Ukraine Losing—Industrial Hub, Breadbasket or Both?" -- https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/donbas-whats-ukraine-losing-industrial-hub-breadbasket-or-both https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/donbas-whats-ukraine-losi... Here is a video showing a pretty cool - albeit pretty unreliable, according to what I read - 1960s motorbike that was made in Ukraine: https://youtu.be/DvxcK645HF0 https://youtu.be/DvxcK645HF0 -- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepr_(motorcycle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepr_(motorcycle). Dnepr (Ukrainian: Дніпро) is a motorcycle brand produced in Kyiv. I became interested in this bike while reading this RR story from a Ukrainian author - with lots of brilliant author-made painting-illustratiuons (if you open the inline images in a new tab you will find they are a much bigger resolution; It's worth scrolling through the chapters even without reading anything, just for those pictures): https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54085/the-armorer-and-the-infinite-dungeon-progression https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54085/the-armorer-and-the-...
- GuB-42 4y agoThere is a joke about how Tetris has been the most effective soviet weapon against the US, causing more damage in productivity losses than anything else the USSR did during the cold war.
- flandish 4y agoOne could say similar things about the differences between tiktok algorithms in the US vs China.
- fmajid 4y agoThe Information had an interview of the founders back when it was called Musical.ly. When asked why the service was not available in China itself, they responded "Oh no, Chinese kids must study".
- unmole 4y agoThat makes no sense. Musical.ly most definitely was available in China.
- fmajid 4y agoThe article is from 2016: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinese-startups-to-watch?rc=6k0bdw https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinese-startups-to-... Musical.ly Co-Founders and Co-CEOs: Alex Zhu and Louis Yang Money raised/valuation: Approximately $100 million in total/valuation unknown Investors: Greylock Partners, GGV Capital, Qiming Venture Partners Why they made the list: Most people using Musical.ly—many are American teens—don’t even know the app is built in China. The app allows users to create 15-second music videos of themselves lip syncing and dancing to pop songs. Musical.ly now has 85 million users worldwide, with 10 million daily active users, and has been consistently in the top ranks for photo and video apps in the U.S. and Europe. Greylock partner Josh Elman, a Musical.ly investor, called it “the next phenomenon in the media industry since Snapchat.” Musical.ly stands out as the first Chinese company that only targets customers who don’t live in China. The app does not even have a Chinese-language version. Over half of its users—called “musers”—are in the U.S., with another 35% from Europe, according to co-founder Alex Zhu, who is from China but has worked in Silicon Valley. Musical.ly is trying what Mr. Zhu calls “user-generated ads.” Last month, the company started an advertising campaign for Coca-Cola, where users film their own Coke-related videos. It is also experimenting with virtual gifts on its new product, the live stream app Live.ly. “Our vision for Musical.ly is to make it a YouTube on mobile,” Mr. Zhu said. The Shanghai-based company has no immediate plans to enter the Chinese market. Mr. Zhu points out that teens in China are usually too busy with academic work to have time to generate content.
- beebeepka 4y agoI remember some of these. Man, PC gaming was crap back then, wasn't it. Russian arcades I remember somewhat fondly, though. The mechanical *ball games, that space battle thing with its illuminator and mirrors. Not as good as the Japanese games at the time but still fun.
- yetanotherforg 4y ago[flagged]
- RugnirViking 4y agoThe soviets made a pretty good go of turning a theistic feudal monarchy largely with an economy focused on agriculture into the second biggest industrial power in the world for almost a hundred years. Certainly not perfect, and horrible to live in in many ways, but better at building an economy than a lot of other similarly sized places.
- lottin 4y agoAnd somehow they managed to starve millions of people in the process. If you call this a good job.... okay.
- RugnirViking 4y agoDid I ever say they were/are saints? The OP was commenting on their poor "country building" which I interpret largely as economy building. It was a horrible place to be
- cardanome 4y agoThere was not a single famine during the cold war era. Quoting the CIA factbook from 1983: > American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000... Yes hunger was problem in the civil war to world war 2 era with some really horrible famines but famine was also a regular occurrence in Tsarist Russia to begin with. Now there is the discussion to be had of whether they were "man-made" or not and that is indeed a important discussion but that also needs to be contextualized: Historically capitalist countries going through industrialization have also seen famines. In an alternative universe where the October Revolution did not succeed, can we honestly assume that there would have not been any famines? No, so there is not a direct causality. (Again, note that I purposefully not talking about specific events and responsibilities but instead showing that these question are not relevant for the big picture discussion.) It is a common mistake in the study of history to confuse structure and specific events. Was hunger a structural, common occurrence in socialist countries? Absolutely not.
- Dig1t 4y agoCompare what happened to the creators of these games with the creators of popular titles in the USA and Japan. Tetris is an especially interesting one; Tetris was a worldwide phenomenon, a huge hit in the US that sold a huge number of copies. The creators of Tetris saw none of the profits from their creation. Their game was seized by the state as soon as it became popular and they never really profited. Compare to similar Western or Japanese game developers who became rich and famous, started world-renowned companies, and generally had amazing careers that created an industry. Good example of why communism sucks, in my opinion.
- danielodievich 4y agoTetris creator Aleksey and few of his company were bought out and borught to Seattle in early oughts by Microsoft and they made a bunch of games for MSN Zone. There was one called Hexic that I remember him posting into a Russian email alias with an offer to take whoever got 5 black pearls first to dinner with him, which I think took out od a good portion of Russians on that channel out of circulation for a day or two (I got up to 3 of those pearls but could not make it past that). I had dinner with him at his house later via connections through my incredibly sociable and connected mother, he was a delight, very, very clever, and had lots of physical puzzles that he invented and made himself. I am glad he made money off it eventually.
- kemitchell 4y agoThank you for sharing this story!
- soco 4y agoI played in the (end of) 90s a funny asdf Russian PC game with frogs you should jump from ever-shrinking lotus leaves... anybody know what it was, and even better, find it again for a run down the memory lane?
- dmitry-vsl 4y agoThis one? https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika
- soco 4y agoYESSS thank you! But... Perestroika frogs??? Anyway I think I played the Toppler version (no Gorby I remember) and it was really fun. I'll start digging for it right now...
- NovaVeles 4y agoOnly question I would ask him is what he though of the love letter than is the 2018 game Tetris Effect?
- romanhn 4y agoNot exactly USSR, but I was a big fan of the very popular 1993 game based on the Russian "Wheel of Fortune" knock off show. The game participants were characters from classic Soviet cartoons. https://youtu.be/RlnsWw-YHlY https://youtu.be/RlnsWw-YHlY EDIT: Just read an interview with the author. Looks like he built the game in just one week. His email and personal phone number were included in the title screen, so he often got phone calls, including from mafia demanding he send them the prizes they won (hilarious things like "shoelaces from Procter & Gamble" and toilet seats). Even though the game was not officially sponsored, the actual show had two rooms filled with letters with similar demands.
- orthoxerox 4y agoThe same author also made a Battleship game featuring a Russo-Ukrainian War as its setting. The idea sounded completely ridiculous back in the 90's.
- indigodaddy 4y agoNot Russian, Polish I believe, but Soldat is one of the best games I’ve played..
- lvl102 4y ago
- xkcd1963 4y agoYou gotta google a bit more my friend
- FpUser 4y agoThe world is never short of ignorant idiots.
- lvl102 4y agoYou’re right but Russia is on the same level as North Korea at this point. They’re both toxic.
- augustuspolius 4y agoWhile I don’t necessarily agree with the commenter you are replying to - I can relate to how hard it is to separate Russia’s contributions from what is currently happening in Ukraine. Modern Russia is fascist in all meaningful ways. This—at least emotionally—overshadows the positive contributions the country made in the past.
- xkcd1963 4y agoNo facists are something entirely else. Facist Germany/Italy/Japan did worse things by multiple magnitutes
- joe__f 4y ago[1] is an excellent and fascinating documentary on the history of Tetris, how it came about and the different business struggles in the West to license the game, which was challenging given that it originated in the USSR [1] https://youtu.be/_fQtxKmgJC8 https://youtu.be/_fQtxKmgJC8
- awiesenhofer 4y agoThat Welltris screenshot reminds me of another, though younger, great 3D game from an ex-ussr country I played around the early 2000 iirc. It was a 3D version of snake, playing on a cube's surface, looked like something out of the demoscene and had an awesome selfcomposed soundtrack. I think the developer was from Ukraine or Belarus, not sure anymore. Never found it again unfortunately ...
- vbernat 4y agoThe Youtube video for Perestroika is missing the sound from the intro because the game was skipping it if the CPU was too fast. I remember hearing it on a "Victor" 286 (16 MHz, but I am not sure). This recording has the sound intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IpYuXJ6u6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IpYuXJ6u6A. This was quite amazing to get something like that out of a PC speaker. I don't think other games of this era was able to do that.
- darepublic 4y agoI remember playing welltris on my ibm 286. My dad must have gotten a copy from one of his coworkers. Good memory.
- Sujeto 4y agoI'm currently playing a King's Bounty game made by Katauri and 1C company. Russian companies.
- anthk 4y agoOn Tetris, everyone got the Brick Game Tetris handheld in Russia and Europe, because the Game Boy was expensive. The machine was composed of a 4 bit HT1130 CPU. IDK if the MAME programmers RE it yet. http://web.archive.org/web/20150417011515/http://brickgame.blog.com/informacoes-tecnicas-e-manutencao/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150417011515/http://brickgame.b... (Portuguese). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_electronic_game#Handhelds_today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_electronic_game#Handh... https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14115 https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14115 http://www.seanriddle.com/tms1100.html http://www.seanriddle.com/tms1100.html
- Solucity 4y agoHad no idea mine and my girlfriends favourite IPhone game to play(filler) was made 32 years ago in Moscow
- komali2 4y ago> For a Soviet citizen, not yet familiar with how the market economy worked, the game was a sort of guide to capitalism. It's not like people just didn't know how market economies worked, especially when this game was made. There were still individual and family enterprises in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprises_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprises_in_the_Soviet_Unio... And by the 90s "blue jeans" integration was to the point that we shouldn't pretend Soviet gamers would be agape at the intricacies of capitalism in the wee simulation in Kommersant lol.
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoI mean the West spent the entire cold war spreading propaganda. Russians knew what McDonald's was they just didn't have any. And the Russian state did employ economists.
- Klaster_1 4y agoThe dudes on the Perestroika screenshot looked eerily familiar. After checking MobyGames [1], it dawned on me that Nikita Skripkin, the author, later founded Nikita - the first video game company in Russia [2], the logo [3] of which used to feature a dude from Perestroika. The more you know! [1] https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,283171/# https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,2... [2] https://www.mobygames.com/company/nikita-online https://www.mobygames.com/company/nikita-online [3] https://www.mobygames.com/company/nikita-online/logos https://www.mobygames.com/company/nikita-online/logos
- marttt 4y agoLink didn't open; archive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20221212005820/https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/332384-video-games-soviet-russian-tetris https://web.archive.org/web/20221212005820/https://www.rbth.... Fun fact: Skype creators Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu also started as game devs in the late Soviet Estonia. A game from 1989, Kosmonaut, is still available on the company's old website, along with other stuff from that era: http://bluemoon.ee/history/index.html http://bluemoon.ee/history/index.html Keeping this old website online is a nice representation of humility and humbleness of the programmers -- and, it also adds a particular sort of quirkiness which is common for many Estonians (okay, I'm biased). Like, these hyper-successful startup founders still seem to be equally proud of those early creations, alongside Skype.
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoEastern Germany was very big in industrial espionage and they shared everything with their big brother. Ofcourse just having access to the latest chip designs doesn't mean you can mass produce them so it never amounted to anything even remotely challenging Western technological hegemony.
- flohofwoe 4y agoNot much industrial espionage needed if you can just buy a Z80 CPU in any electronics shop in the West, then decap and put it under a microscope ;) The bigger and more impressive challenge was "acquiring" the first batch of machinery required to build up the chip manufacturing industry despite the COCOM embargo, now this was apparently some James-Bond-like shit which involved 'proxy companies' in West Germany, which then conveniently went bancrupt to sell off their equipment, and 'somehow' this equipment ended up in East Germany a few months later.
- jdmoreira 4y agoOh wow... Perestroika does bring early memories. I must have been 6 or so? Living in Portugal, playing on my father's 286. Owned my own ZX Spectrum +2A at the time as well but was already graduating from it by this time it seems.